The Arts of taking a break

Charlotte Bian

Published in

HabitClub

7 min readJul 24, 2021

1 book and 3 principles to take better break

Opening

1 year ago…

With the pandemic hit, the lines between work and life have been totally messed up, well, to be more accurate, work has become the whole life and I know I am not the only one feel this way.

In the past year, I worked average around 100–120 hours per week(and 80% was in a zoom calls). I was so busy and plus the covid concerns, I didn’t have time to visit a GP when I am under weather, don’t visit a physio when my back was completely in pain for 6 months. I didn’t visit a therapist even when I was depressed and crying to sleep every single day..

I burnt out, big time … as expected.

Today

I am running 2 side hustles (a podcast and jewellery brand, writing blogs, regularly speak on community events and about to start an exciting full time job… I am doing more, but I am feeling much calmer and have a better sense of flow for everything I do!

Well, I definitely not trying to say I figure everything out or has reached the sweet spot of work life balance, I can still occasionally feel overwhelmed and unproductive, but overall I feel I have much more control of my own life compare to 1 year ago.

I believe most of this contribute to my awareness of the importance to take breaks.

My journey of mastering the arts of taking breaks really start with 1 book and 3 principles.

1 book

The special book that triggered the whole discovery journey for me is called << I like my job, but can I do a job without working>>. It’s writtern by a Chinese writer — Yangming Liu (unfortunatetly they don’t have an English version, you can buy the chinese version on Amazon)

The reason this book caught my eyes initially was because its lengthy title. The story in the 1st chapter also drawn me in straight away — the write is a popular professional writer for over 9 years. But he experienced a heart broken experience when he “broke up” with his dream job as a magazine editor. He quited is not because he doesn’t like his job any more. He has to quit because he didn’t approach his dream job strategically and sustainable. The work consumed him.

He ended up with a fraigle body( for example: he blackout in his own balcony during work) , tons of self-doubt and uncertainty with his career… The rest of the book documented his learnings from this experience and how he evetually create his unique path to today.

I felt so resonate with the opening story of his book, because there is so much resemble of my personal situation. So I brought the book and started reading it straight away.

One of the biggest regrets the author has and he kept calling out throughout the book is the importance of taking a break!

He believes if he has mastered the arts of taking a break earlier, he probably didn’t have to go through this painful experience to get to where he is now.

One of my favourite quote in the book is:

“Take a break needs more courage than just carry on”

The biggest realisation this book provide me is that

I don’t know how to take a break !

I have so many techniques and framework to be more productive (get more done) but no one has ever teach me how to take a break.

3 Principles

That was the 1 book that got me thinking. From all the experiments I also concluded 3 key principles that really help me during this journey:

Principle 1. Break over work

Principle 2. Schedule break time

Principle 3. Take them out

Principle 1: Break over Work

Start with a mindset shift

How many times have you sacrificed your lunch break for a work meeting?
How many times do you use your weekend to catch up on work?
When was the last time you took a real holiday without checking work email?

When you answered these questions… Most of you will likely come to the same conclusion as I do: we allow work to take up our break time.

Yes, every single time when we do this there is always a valid reason, but this also reflect our internal priority — Work over Break.

To live a more sustainable and balanced life, I find it really helpful to shift the mindset to prioritise Break over Work.

I know you may be worried about will these breaks make me a lazy person…

If you are reading this blog, that means you are likely to be someone who strive for productivity and improvement.

So I am confortable to make this Statement:

Reasonable breaks don’t make us lazy and less productive!

Instead, it makes everything better! Everything! — for you, your workplace and Society.

There is so much scientific research and real life stories support the above points. I put a list of them at the end of this blog for your reading.

So start now to consider how we make sure we are taking enough break!

*Spoil alert — the next point might give away some hints.

Principle 2: Schedule break time

The best way to prioritise break is to schedule in ahead!

I am someone who live my life base on my Calendar. I always plan ahead and put all the key events on it to make sure I don’t miss them.

To make sure I am treating breaks seriously, I schedule them in my calendar just like everything else — my client meetings, team stand up, blog writing etc .

I believe this is the best way to make sure they got executed.

Here are all the breaks I added to my calendar ahead:

Daily Breaks

Lunch break (45 mins)
Afternoon coffee break (15 mins)
After work walk ( 6 pm)
Sleep (11 pm) — yes , I scheduled my sleep time on the calendar too! This is to make sure I actually get a reminder to stop scrolling through my phone and go to bed by 11 pm

Weekly Breaks

Do nothing time on (Sunday mornings)
Date night (Wednesday nights, no work)

Quarterly Breaks

Short weekend getaway ( normally 3 rd week of the month, that include visited my partner’s parents)

The lockdown edition is to watch travel shows and cook multinational cuisine with my partner

Yearly Breaks

Longer getaway (2~3 weeks to go aboard)

Take them out

it’s not about prioritization, it’s about taking things out!

As a product manager, I love to prioritise and come up with a prioritisation framework.But I have a realisation: prioritisation is not enough for making space in our modern busy life!

So, stop prioritising and take things out!

If you haven’t read the book <<The One Thing>> by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan, I strongly recommend you to do so.

Sometimes, we just have too many in our life and even the efforts for prioritising can be overwhelming… So our goal should be to have fewer things in our life.

And the <<The One thing>> book teaches us the best way to use our time and energy is to have a single focus and finish one thing one time.

Therefore, when I set up weekly goal, instead to have 3 goals, I only have 1 at the moment.

When I am working, for example, writing this blog, I will only leave 1 window open and ignore any phone calls/messages or any other disruption during the process.

Similarly. When I am taking a break, I will fully enjoy doing this one thing — that is doing nothing.

Well I have to confess that I am still not be able to achieve this state ALL THE TIME, but since I started to try my best to apply this principle , I feel much calmer, more relax and also more likely to reach a state of flow during work.

Above are the 1 book and 3 key principles I learnt to take an effective break.

Finishing Story

I would like to finish this blog with my favourite story from <<Alchemist>>:

When the boy finally meets the famous Alchemist and asks for his wisdom on getting to the pyramid.

This is the advice he got from the Alchemist:

“Tomorrow, sell our camel and buy a horse. Camels are traitorous: they walk thousands of paces and never seem to tire. Then suddenly, they kneel and die. But horses tire bit by bit. You always know how much you know you can ask of them, and when it is that they are about to die.”

While this is a smart hiring advice for any leaders but also an important piece wisdom for everyone who is on the journey to pursue their goal s— be a horse and know when to take a break.

Researches for the benefits for taking breaks