Member-only story

Andy’s Quick Hits (87): Microbreaks Improve Productivity

Andy Hab
2 min readSep 15, 2021

--

That just sounds like an excuse to have more breaks!
Could be, but you did read the term MICRObreaks didn’t you?

Ahh, so very short breaks are good for you then?
Yup, but this particularly study out of North Carolina State University by Sooyeol Kim et al. looked at what workers do when they’re tired at work. This followed 98 workers in the USA and 222 in South Korea.

And what did they find?
What they found is that workers who are tired tended to naturally have more microbreaks and this contributed to managing energy resources and productivity.

Just to be clear what are microbreaks?
They are those very short breaks, to get a drink, stretch yourself, have a brief chat with a colleague, etc.

Sounds like skiving off work to me!
The nature of a microbreak is they are short. As I said this enabled those workers to manage fatigue better and complete their daily tasks. So we naturally seem to select this. But it also depends on the employer.

How does the employer contribute to this?
Well, what they found is that those who worked in companies that workers felt cared more about them more, took more microbreaks, which contributed to…

--

--

Andy Hab
Andy Hab

Written by Andy Hab

Sharing fascinating, fun, and important knowledge on the brain and human behaviour - most days. And masters track athlete - still going strong!

No responses yet