How can you make your work breaks more productive?
- Connect with your co-workers
- Meditate
- Walk away from your desk
- Take a nap
In this age of technology, work breaks are commonly thought of like time to check social media. Being up to date with events and people is now a popular way of relaxing during these moments. Different aspects of life involve being social, even the popular co-working trend at virtual offices in the Philippines involves connecting with people through online means while doing your job.
While it may seem relaxing to scroll down your feed, using your phone during all your breaks can make you feel even more stressed out. It worsens the way you feel by isolating you from your surroundings because you spend all your time on the phone. It also makes you compare your circumstances with the circumstances of others, thus, increasing your insecurity.
All this stress will obviously drain your energy and make you less productive. Instead of using social media during your breaks, these are a few activities you can try:
Connect with your co-workers
Conversing and socializing with people online just does not feel the same as conversing with people face to face. When you talk to people face to face, you tend to feel more excitement and happiness. This is because having connections makes you feel less lonely by making you feel like you belong in a place. It makes you feel more positive about the environment you are in.
At work, you experience different types of stressful situations because of your responsibilities. It can become really difficult for you to keep those negative feelings every day, and there will be times when talking about those stresses are the best way to solve them. Your coworkers are the perfect people to converse with about those problems because they usually face the same issues since all of your share the office space for lease in Paranaque.
Meditate
One of the most stressful things that a lot of employees do is multi-task. Multi-tasking at a virtual office in the Philippines seems good in concept, but actual implementation usually falls flat because doing many things at the same time tends to lead to us not finishing anything in the end due to lack of focus. Multi-tasking also makes your attention span shorter in the long run since you are used to moving from topic to topic.
Social media encourages us to have a short attention span because we can quickly move from a post or page to another one.
Meditating counteracts that effect on our attention span by:
Calming our mind – When we make peace with our negative feelings, we can move on and completely focus on our work.
Make us think more critically – When your mind is calm, you become more aware of what you are doing. You start to see what is inefficient in your movements and actions.
Walk away from your desk
Sitting down for long periods of time can have a serious impact on your brain health. Staying on your chair can make it harder for you to remember short-term memories because it can thin out the medial temporal lobe. You need good short-term-memory at work because it makes you alert to changes in the office.
A good way to prevent is by actually moving away from your desk and to start moving. Walking is an easy exercise to do outside any workspace, such as an office space for lease in Paranaque. Exercise makes you remember better because it keeps all of the parts of the brain fit, including the medial temporal lobe, just like the rest of your body parts.
Besides making you remember, walking also gives you these benefits:
- Feel more positive about work
- Make you more creative
- Make you focus better
Take a nap
Every employee wants to get enough sleep, but most of them don’t attempt to get enough sleep. The act of slumbering makes up for lost energy. When you don’t recharge your energy, you become less productive at work. A lack of sleep makes you less aware of your surroundings, thus making it harder to finish tasks and you more prone to error. It also makes you too tired to think and be creative.
People find it hard to sleep enough hours at work. If you constantly complain about being tired because of lack of sleep, a good way to make up for that is by taking naps at work during your lunch.
A 30-minute nap on your desk is enough to make improve your alertness and performance without disturbing your night sleep.
Key Takeaway
It has become a habit for many employees to use social media as a way of relaxing during their breaks. While social media makes it easy for us to connect and gain friends, it makes us less productive because of different reasons. Instead of gaining energy during our breaks, we lose energy over feelings of isolation and insecurity. We become less productive. Instead of using social media, you can try the ways discussed above to make the most out of your breaks.