Clockflux

Take your breaks, even at home: what the research says, and a new way to track them

Mental healthApp feature5 min readBy

At the office, breaks happen almost by themselves. A colleague asks if you're coming for a coffee, someone knocks on the door at noon, the meeting room is booked by the next team. At home, nobody comes. You make a coffee, carry it back to the desk, and drink it while answering an email. By four o'clock you realise you haven't stood up since lunch, and lunch was eaten in front of the screen.

Most contracts give you a morning and an afternoon break, often fifteen minutes each. When you work remotely, they're the first thing to go, and nobody notices, you included. We looked at why your evenings matter last week. This week it's the pauses inside the working day: what the research says about them, and a new feature in Clockflux to help you take them.

You're entitled to a break

In the EU, the Working Time Directive gives every worker a rest break when they're on duty for more than six hours. Each country sets the details. In the UK, it's one uninterrupted 20-minute break for anyone working more than six hours a day, and whether it's paid depends on your contract. Many employers go further and grant short paid breaks in the morning and the afternoon.

That's the legal floor. The research is about what those minutes do for you.

A few minutes already help

A 2022 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE pooled 22 samples with 2,335 people. It looked at micro-breaks, pauses of up to ten minutes between tasks. Compared with working straight through:

  • micro-breaks made people feel more energetic and less tired, by a small but significant amount
  • they didn't reliably improve performance overall, only on less demanding tasks
  • longer breaks did more for performance

The authors suggest that after draining work you may need more than ten minutes to recover. A quick stretch is good for your mood, and a hard morning deserves a longer pause.

Back-to-back calls take a toll

Remote days often mean one video call after another. In 2021, Microsoft's Human Factors Lab measured the brain activity of 14 people with EEG caps while they sat through four half-hour meetings. One week the meetings ran back to back, the other week they were separated by ten-minute breaks spent meditating.

Without breaks, activity linked to stress kept climbing over the two hours and spiked at each switch from one meeting to the next. With breaks, it dropped during each pause and stayed level across all four meetings, and people looked more engaged. It's a small study run by a company that sells calendar software, so read it as a hint rather than proof, but it matches what many people feel at the end of a day of calls.

What you do at lunch matters

A Finnish study in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology asked employees to spend 15 minutes of their lunch break either walking in a park or doing relaxation exercises, on ten working days in a row. On park-walk days, people concentrated better and felt less tired in the afternoon, mostly because they enjoyed the walk. Relaxation helped their concentration by letting them stop thinking about work, and they felt less strained and tired.

Fifteen minutes is about the length of the coffee break in a lot of contracts.

A break you choose works better

Another study, in the Academy of Management Journal, followed employees' lunch breaks and asked co-workers how tired they looked at the end of the day. The key was autonomy, how freely people chose what to do with the break. Social lunches and doing some work over lunch made people more tired when they had little say in it, and less tired when they had chosen it themselves. For relaxing breaks, choice mattered less.

So the odd lunch spent finishing something you care about is fine. The breaks that wear you down are the ones that get taken from you, by a meeting someone else booked or by a habit of eating at the keyboard.

How to take your breaks at home

  1. Put them in your calendar. Block a morning and an afternoon break the way you'd block a meeting, so calls don't fill them.
  2. Leave the desk. Make the coffee and drink it somewhere else: the balcony, the kitchen window, a short walk round the block.
  3. Leave the screen too. Scrolling through your inbox on your phone doesn't count.
  4. Pause between calls. Even five minutes between two meetings gives your head a chance to reset. If you can, end meetings a few minutes early.
  5. Take a longer break after hard work. After a long, demanding stretch, give yourself more than ten minutes.
  6. Choose it. Lunch with someone, a walk or a task you enjoy are all good, as long as you decided.

Where Clockflux fits in

Clockflux now has break tracking, free on every plan.

Under the check-in toggle on the Track tab there's a ☕ Take a break button. Press it when you step away and again when you're back. While the break runs, the button shows how long it has lasted, and below it Clockflux shows the day's breaks against your allowance, for example "Breaks 10 / 30 min · 20 min left". You can't check out during a break, so it always gets ended properly.

Breaks are paid time inside your session, so taking one never lowers your hours. In Settings → Breaks you set the break time your contract gives you each day, from 0 to 30 minutes (it starts at 30, and 0 hides the button). You then decide what happens to the breaks you don't take:

  • Off, the default: untaken breaks are lost, as with many employers. Your breaks are shown, and your hours don't change.
  • On: at the end of each workday, the break time you didn't take is added to your hours, and break time over your allowance is taken off. It only applies from the day you turn it on, and the adjustment shows up in your history, your week and your overtime balance.

Either way, seeing "0 / 30 min" at three in the afternoon is a decent nudge to get up and make a coffee you actually drink away from the desk.

If you find you can't step away from work even for a few minutes, or breaks leave you more anxious rather than less, please talk to someone: your doctor, a mental health professional or an employee assistance programme if your employer offers one. Tracking your breaks can show you a pattern. It is not a substitute for support.