Gimme a BREAK (app)
Take a break without being judged by your coworkers
I started a new job as a Director of UX a few months back for a pretty large global corporation. I inherited a few designers, as well as a giant backlog of tasks. Needless to say my team was over capacity and crazy busy with tasks from day 1.
A few weeks into working there one of the designers on my UX team made a comment that I just couldn’t get out of my head. She said “I really wish I had time to read all of the articles you all post in slack, but I honestly am so busy that I never have 5 minutes to just sit there and take a break”. As her boss, this really upset me. 1 cause she’s being overworked and that’s just not how people can perform quality work and 2 everyone should have 5 minutes in their day to do whatever they want to do…read an article, watch a video, etc. (actually it’s kinda the law)
She explained, “it’s not that I’m not allowed to take a break, I just work with a lot of old school employees that basically make comments about how I’m slacking off at work if they see me watching a video or reading an article.”
Hearing her say this, got my blood boiling.
No one should be killing themselves at work, and then when they take a breather be made to feel like they are not doing their job.
Since my brain wouldn’t let this go, I started thinking through this from a product perspective. Basically I was determined to solve this problem for her. I realized that there’s not a lot of times where employees don’t see watching youtube videos at work as slacking off. Then I had a bit of a lightbulb.
There is one time when no one questions why you’re not working…and actually they sympathize that you’re having to deal with it.
When your computer is updating. You’re completely locked out, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Only thing you can do is wait. This is the one time at work where not only are you not seen as a slacker at work, but you’re completely open to do anything you want to do for a specified amount of time. Watch that youtube video, read that medium post, see what’s trending on twitter, or just get up and go for a walk. And yes…I do realize how strange it is for a manager to be figuring out a way for their employee to take a break and not work, but I’ve seen first hand how improved a person can be just by taking a mental break here and there.
This is your solid black get out of jail free card.
WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS STORY?!?!
I made an app to fix this problem for my designer, but you can use it too!
I launched the BREAK app today on Product Hunt, and it’s now available on the Mac App Store. It’s super simple, and I hope it’s super helpful to anyone who works with those “judgy folks”.
You just:
• Open the App
• Click the ghost in your menu bar
• Select your break time (5, 10, 15, 30 minutes)
• Click the start button
•TAKE YOUR BREAK
DOWNLOAD THE BREAK APP FOR MAC NOW!
Your brain will thank you.
LIL UPDATE: Apple rejected the app 4 times, since I was using their apple icon to make the loading screen look super legit…SOOOOOO…I just made it where you can add whatever icon you want for the loading screen (gifs as well)…and now it’s a lot more fun. So make it legit if you want, or get crazy with it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, and would love to hear from anyone who gets some value out of the BREAK app. I have some ideas for a V2, but obviously I want to build what you would want. So let me know what you think I should add.
