What’s the fuss about essential breaks?
For a long time, people have scheduled their meetings to start and end on the hour, or occasionally at half-past the hour. This practice is advantageous and easy to remember, and our traditional calendars and planners are set up to support scheduling meetings in this way. While it's convenient and standardizing meeting durations allows us to fit a lot into our calendars, it also leads to back-to-back meetings.
In the pre-COVID era, you may remember rushing across the office to change meeting rooms because it was impossible to hold all meetings in a single room. With remote and hybrid work, this problem occurs less frequently. However, the shift in the work paradigm created another issue. It's no longer possible to casually run into people in the office to discuss various important but not urgent topics that don't warrant a full 30-minute meeting. As this is no longer possible, we've reverted to what we knew and started booking meetings to discuss topics that used to only require a few minutes.
Both trends made us busier than ever. So, can we afford to schedule essential breaks?
Well, the real question is, how can we afford not to have essential breaks?
The lack of essential breaks can seriously hinder your overall performance, as revealed by research. Researchers found that the absence of breaks negatively impacts creativity, focus, and job satisfaction, which in turn affects the overall employee experience. It turns out that short breaks for peace and quiet or casual watercooler conversations play a significant role in restoring our energy. Without them, you may have even experienced confusion for the first few minutes when changing between meetings, as our brains need a moment of peace to switch focus. Constantly having back-to-back meetings is not sustainable in the long run and can lead to burnout.
How can you make the essential breaks work?
Many calendar tools now support the idea of "shorter meetings," with 30-minute meetings ending 5 minutes early and longer meetings ending 10 minutes early. While this may seem like a perfect solution, in reality, it's not that great. Imagine being in the middle of a discussion, and then at the 25-minute mark, you have to abruptly end the meeting and say, "Okay, that's all the time we have for this meeting today. See you next time." It takes a lot of willpower and experience to do this, especially when you theoretically have a few minutes to spare and could use them to conclude the meeting.
The key to making essential breaks effective is not to end meetings 5 or 10 minutes early, but to schedule them to start "fashionably" late - which we call "preparation time". It's worth noting that the name itself sounds much more positive and professional than "speedy/shorter" meetings or essential breaks, putting a positive spin on the concept.
Configure your essential breaks now
You may be concerned about how the other meeting attendees will react if you invite them to a meeting five minutes past ten, which may be unconventional in your office culture. There's no need to worry - although they may be surprised at first, the preparation time at exec.ninja is one of the most popular and appreciated features we offer. Many consider it groundbreaking :) Give it a try and forget about rushing from one meeting to another.