8 Reasons You Must Take Scheduled Breaks When Working From Home
Taking breaks at work isn’t a sign of laziness. It is a necessity intended to aid the emotional and mental well-being of employees. Scheduled breaks at work are essential in aiding the morale of employees, which in turn helps improve their performance.
Oftentimes, because you are working from home, you might assume that you are having the required ease of work; and as a result, you may not need to take a scheduled work break, but the truth is this, scheduled breaks even while working from home would aid in your effectiveness as an employee.
It is important to know that these scheduled breaks help to release the clog in the wheels of your mind and when you get to disengage yourself from your work thoughts within the period of the scheduled breaks, you allow your mind to refresh; you give your brain breathing room to think and process new thoughts and in the process.
Employees who do not take breaks from work tend to make more mistakes than employees who do, and this amounts only to inefficiency. Hence it becomes expedient for employees to always take scheduled breaks from work.
In the end, what one gets to realize is that the benefits of these scheduled breaks far outweigh the time an employer may assume to have lost to these scheduled beaks.
The challenge for the employee working from home may also be that such may assume that deadlines may not be met because of these scheduled breaks. What is important for employees to do is to have a carefully planned and well-thought-out “to-do-list”.
The employee should therefore plan scheduled breaks alongside the “to-do-list”. What this will do is that it will help the employee plan the needed time to finish up on expected tasks while creating time to take breaks.
Below are 8 reasons you must have scheduled breaks as an employee who works from home:
-
Strengthen your memory
With the pressure that may come with keeping details of work in the brain and recalling them upon demand, a scheduled break would help ease recapturing of details.
This strategically scheduled break would to a large extent aid strengthening of the memory to deliver effectively at work and in the process enhance efficiency and engender effectiveness while working from home.
2. Renew Your Motivation After Stress
Once an employee maximizes every scheduled break that work affords, the resultant effect is that the mind is renewed and the body is refreshed. Eventually, such an employee is reinvigorated and motivated to work again, optimally.
In the end, the possibility of generating negative stress reactions is eradicated.
3. Help You Accomplish More During Day
Scheduled breaks help clear the mind of the employee, especially from clogged thoughts. A clear mind can achieve more and carefully doctor his energy effectively to achieve scheduled tasks.
4. Lowers Stress and Anxiety
It is a natural law of life that once employees engage in work for some time, stress and anxiety would eventually set in. This is why the employee must see the scheduled break as a duty but not as an opportunity to waste away time. When he can recuperate, he can better function effectively while working from home.
5. Boost Energy Levels
By taking scheduled breaks from work, and office-related technology, energy levels can be increased. This scheduled break could be a 5 or 10 minutes break from work. Listening to meditative music within these 5 to 10 minutes can help relieve your mind and enhance your energy levels.
6. Increase Attention and Focus
One cannot understate how a scheduled break can help an employee increase attention span and focus. For any employee who has to reply to emails, pick up calls or keep the tiniest detail; having a good attention span is a prerogative, hence the need to prioritize scheduled breaks to enhance attention and focus that would engender effectiveness while working from home.
7. Become More Creative
Creativity is most times explored when the mind is allowed to relax and operate without stress. The genius needed in achieving masterpieces isn’t attained with a pressured mind but with a mind that is allowed to traverse without pressure and this would only happen when the mind is allowed to harness scheduled breaks amid the many rigors of work, and it is with this that creativity seamlessly exudes.
8. Enhances Mental Alertness
Once mental alertness dwindles, the best route to take is to detach from work, and this can only be done by detaching from work.
By taking these scheduled breaks, mental alertness is renewed and effectiveness is ascertained in a way that would expedite task delivery for the day.
Using social media to unwind isn’t an effective way of resting because the much information that comes from surfing the internet would not help in achieving the goal of clearing your mind.
The goal of scheduled breaks is to help you strategically detach from work so that you can recuperate from negative stress that might have been accrued in the process of working.