Glucose breaks and focus work.
More evidence on how and why breaks can improve your focus work.
In the early days of work-from-home norm(COVID-19 times of 2020), when we had the only option to work from our own places of comfort. Me, our team and many other folks in and the world who enjoyed the office place for work couldn't do as much productive work as we did earlier. To put in numbers, while in office, we start work from 9 AM to 10 AM and sometimes even 11 AM when Bangalore traffic is laughing at us. We finish work from 5 PM to 7 PM. In WFH days, I used to start at 9 to 9:30 AM and finish at 7 8 PM. It around similar long long hours for many others we know too. But the work is not much progressing. We felt less productive though more time is put into work.
Contrastingly, during office times we go for few tea breaks 🍵, lunch break 🍗 and one more mandatory snack break 😋 together with almost all of them in the office. Each break will easily consume 30mins to 1 full hour.
I particularly am an introvert and my energy will deplete after a few hours of social interaction. This happens even if I'm with the best of the people I like to be with. So, ideally, I should have less energy to do the work after each break. But how did office times were more productive?
Let me get to the actual point. Recently reading the book "Thinking fast and show! "by "Daniel Kahneman" I realised something more scientific about the above question.
tl;dr: The glucose we consumed while the breaks made the difference.
Like physical work, mental work and focus work also consumes energy. Actually, not just the normal energy we consume for sitting in a chair and typing on keyboards but more. The energy equivalent of doing short sprints. That's why we intentionally call it sprints in software terminology may be. 😜
We all know our brain is the highest consumer of glucose in our body. While we do focus work, our brain uses lots of glucose and we will be glucose depleted after a while. Having a Short break brings and eating/drinking something brings back the levels of glucose in the blood to normal.
Many experiments were made and proved that we make good decisions after a meal and poor decisions or no decisions go back to our normal comfort zone when we are hungry. We humans feel good and do better after a good dose of glucose into our bloodstream. This could well be one reason why Coca-cola and Pepsi have becoming world dominant brands.
So what's the takeaway?