The Productive Power Of A Proper Tea Break

How often do you take a mid-morning tea break? I mean a proper break, where you stop work for fifteen minutes or so mid-morning?

It turns out very few people do this these days. And if they do get themselves a cup of tea or coffee, it’s done on the go or at their desks while continuing to work.

Complete madness. Is it any wonder why so many people feel burnt out, exhausted and unable to spend any quality time with their nearest and dearest?

This week, we’re looking at why bringing back your mid-morning and afternoon breaks might be the most productive thing you could do.

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Script | 433

Hello, and welcome to episode 432 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Back in the day, in traditional knowledge work jobs, most people had to be at their workplace by 9 AM. You would get a tea break mid-morning, usually around 11 or 11:15, then you would get a lunch break, probably 12:30 or 1 PM, then in the afternoon there'd be another tea break around 3:00 pm, and finally you would finish work, perhaps at 5:30 PM

Our days were structured. Time anchors marked our day: start times, mid-morning breaks, lunchtimes, afternoon breaks, and when we finished work.

Over the last few years or so, and certainly since the pandemic, these natural time anchors have been disappearing. Working from home, having more flexible working times, and working across multiple different time zones have all accelerated the erosion of these natural breaks.

But these time anchors mattered. They told your brain to take a rest. Today, because those time anchors have practically disappeared, we end up switching our attention from one problem to the next. To an email or a message, back to the report we’re supposed to finish today, then to the presentation due next week, a quick check of a project that we're working on to answer a question. It's just non-stop.

No time for a tea break or sometimes even a lunch break.

Now, because there are no natural rhythms in our days, and no time anchors to give us a break, we end up feeling completely exhausted at the end of them.

But it didn't just happen at work. We also had time anchors at home too. We would wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and sit down to watch our favourite TV shows at the same time.

We'd also eat our lunch, breakfast, and dinner at the same time. These were mini time anchors that told our brain to rest. When you remove those anchors, your brain doesn't know when to rest, and it just gets completely worn out.

This week’s question is about why you feel so exhausted and tired, with no energy left to even decide what to have for dinner and what to do about it to bring some sense of calm back into your days

So, without further ado. I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s Question, but she’s once again on one of her little holidays. So, I’m afraid you’re stuck with my voice this week.

This week’s question comes from Paul. Paul asks, hi Carl, I was recently promoted, and now my days just feel like a blur, and I struggle to see if I have done anything important or not. It just feels like I spend all day putting out other people’s fires. I rarely get time for a proper lunch break, and I feel completely worn out by the time I get home. What can I do to bring some focus back to my days?

Hi Paul, thank you for your question.

To get us started, let’s step back in time a little.

Office work in the 1950s and 60s in the UK was pretty structured for most people. You were expected to arrive at your desk on time every day. Habitual lateness was a serious disciplinary offence.

Then there were recognised mid-morning and afternoon breaks, where we’d meet colleagues from other departments and talk football, cricket or what was on the TV last night. We rarely talked about work during those 15 minutes or so.

Those anchors were like shared signals. You started together, breaked together, and finished together. Now, everything is blurred. Remote work, flexible hours, global teams, all great in theory. But in practice, it means people are never really off.

And never really on either. It's just a permanent in-between. That mushiness can really wear you down.

We’ve lost that daily rhythm. Even if it felt rigid, there was a kind of contained calm. A boundary around tasks. Now we just dip in and out all day. Messages, calls, emails all blending together. And this isn’t just nostalgia.

In many ways, I was lucky to be a smoker in my early days of work. My breaks were a chance to grab a crafty cigarette, meet other smokers, and talk about our weekends and the crazy things we did.

I remember, as a salesperson, always heading out back for a cigarette after each appointment. It was a chance to reset after a meeting with a customer and prepare myself for the next appointment.

And while the phenomenon called “attention residue” wasn’t recognised in the early 90s, we now know that our brains don’t simply turn off from one context to the next; we tend to think through what happened, perhaps plan out when we will do what we committed to, and process our emotions.

And as a salesperson, there were often a lot of emotions, usually around frustration and disappointment—I wasn’t a great salesperson.

Our new way of working carries a real cognitive cost with all that context switching. There’s no time to reset or deal with that inevitable attention residue.

Without natural breaks in the day, your brain never gets to rest or reset. You might think, “Oh, I'm being flexible”, but what your nervous system feels is a constant low-level of anxiety.

It's like eating all day but never having a proper meal. You're full, but unsatisfied and somehow exhausted.

So, Paul, to get things back under control, recognise that you do need to give your brain a chance to catch up. It needs a break and time to reset so you can start the next task or meeting prepared.

Now, we’re not talking about a lot of time. Ten to fifteen minutes; that’s all you need.

I was recently working with a new client, and she shared her calendar with me. From the moment she began work on Monday morning, she was in back-to-back meetings.

There was no break or buffer time between meetings.

We discovered that all these meetings had consequences. There was no time to prepare for future meetings, and because she never got a break, by the time the meetings were over, usually around 3:30 pm, she was so exhausted that all she did was read through her emails and messages.

She just didn’t have the energy to think about replying to any of them.

The solution was to enforce a ten-minute break between meetings, a 30-minute mid-morning buffer break and a proper lunch break.

While this ultimately reduced the number of meetings she attended each day, it also reduced her exhaustion and gave her energy later in the day to think and respond to emails and messages.

When I spoke to her last week, I asked her if she felt she needed to add more meetings back into her day, and she laughed before replying, “Not a chance!”

She is getting more work done, feeling less tired, and has time to read through the next day’s meeting agendas.

It is often a case of taking one step back to move two steps forward. Remove one meeting a day to free up time and allow your brain to catch up with everything coming at you.

A lot of this comes back to the principles I teach in my Quiet Productivity Method programme. Slowing down produces better results, allows for better thinking, and that leads to fewer mistakes.

If you watch interviews with CEOs of large companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Google, they all seem so relaxed and laid-back.

These people run huge companies, yet you sense that if a catastrophe were to occur at any of them, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, or, until recently, Tim Cook would calmly assess what happened before offering a calm, well-thought-out response.

And yet, if you were to search for the daily routine of these CEOs, you’d find a well-structured day with plenty of breaks, including lunch breaks that avoid talking shop and plenty of quiet thinking time.

Another tip I can give you here is to use pen and paper to map out your day.

You don’t need anything as sophisticated as a Franklin Planner or Bullet Journal, a simple A5 notebook would do.

Before you end the day, give yourself 5 to 10 minutes to draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left, write out your appointments for tomorrow, and on the right, list out the tasks you need to or should do.

By writing your appointments first, you can see how much time you have available for doing tasks.

If you had six hours of meetings, took a 1-hour lunch break, and had at least 10 minutes between meetings, you would likely have only 30 minutes for tasks.

You’d see that and would design a day that reflects that.

That’s often the problem with a 100% digital system. You get lulled into believing you can do more than is possible, and you end up frustrated and disappointed by what you can actually do.

There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just the way digital systems are designed. You can throw 1000s of tasks in there without any problems at all.

Your problems start when you decide you need to do those tasks and you realise there’s no time to do them.

This is why, in my recent YouTube video, I talked about why I keep coming back to a Franklin Planner. It stops me from being overly ambitious, and I have a simple record of what I got done each day.

I jokingly tell people who ask why I use such an antiquated planner—the Franklin Planner’s nearly 50 years old now—that my planner keeps me sane. And it does.

It alerts me very quickly if I am trying to do too much in one day.

One final bit of advice I can give you, Paul, is something that recently worked well with a client of mine who had a similar problem with fire-fighting all day.

He was very sceptical about time blocking, believing he had to be available for his team in case they needed him urgently.

The truth was he’d accidentally trained his team to come to him with all sorts of problems that didn’t need his input. So, we tested blocking 9:30 to 11:00 am each morning to do his most important work of the day.

The caveat here was that he told his team that if they needed him, they had to come to him before 9:30; otherwise, it would have to wait until after 11:00.

The first week was challenging, and people tried to interrupt. But the second week he began to see some serious results.

He began getting his work done; backlogs disappeared, and his team began respecting his time. Fewer fires, fewer interruptions and a lot less stress.

Often, the fix for our time management problems is a lot simpler than we may imagine.

Give your brain a chance to rest and reset between meetings and sessions of work (you only need 10 to 15 minutes), protect time for your most important work, and ensure you have a 10- to 15-minute buffer between meetings.

And remember, you may be able to rush from one problem to the next. But your brain is not quite as fast. It needs time to process your thoughts and emotions. Give it a chance.

And take a tea break and your lunch break. Not doing so will leave you exhausted and worn out at the end of the day.

By the way, I can recommend a nice cup of Yorkshire Tea mid-morning and in the afternoon. It’ll leave you feeling refreshed and ready for anything.

Thank you, Paul, for your question and thank you to you too for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.