Why You Can’t Work More Than 90 Minutes Without a Break
We often discuss the importance of increasing the number of breaks to improve productivity, but PayScale has put together a great explanation of why you shouldn’t work more than 90 minutes at a time, and partly because of our core rest cycle.
The basic resting cycle of activity , also called BRAC, may be more familiar to most people as the term describing the normal human sleep cycle, which is (roughly) 90 minutes, when you are close to being awake, you go into REM sleep. , and then go back and start the process over again.
Granted, extrapolating this to waking activities like work is a bit tricky, but as PayScale points out, it’s not a bad excuse:
For over 50 years, we have known we sleep in 90 minute cycles . (If you have a sleep tracker, probably as a function of range of activity, you might notice this.) We transition from light sleep to deep (and restorative REM) sleep in roughly 90-minute waves. About ten years after we learned about this natural sleep cycle, researchers began to realize that we follow a similar pattern in our waking lives .
… In response to this information and in an effort to better understand productivity, Florida State University professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues studied “elite performers,” people who excel in their field, be they musicians, athletes or chess players. … Ericsson has found that continuous practice at intervals of 90 minutes or less with breaks in between sessions is best for increasing productivity. In addition, he noted that these people rarely worked more than four and a half hours a day.
“To get the most out of long-term practice,” Ericsson concluded , “people must avoid exhaustion and limit their practice to an amount from which they can fully recover on a daily or weekly basis.”
By focusing on reducing fatigue to a level from which we can fully recover in a timely manner, we can help make the most of our time and our productive efforts. It might be a good idea to start by thinking about work or projects in terms of how they can be broken down into 90-minute chunks. Who knows, maybe with practice we can even ensure that our active workdays do not exceed this maximum of four and a half hours recommended by Ericsson.
Of course the whole idea needs to be thoroughly tested and is by no means experimental fact or peer reviewed and published, but there are some interesting ideas here. This may be one of the reasons that productivity techniques like the Pomodoro Technique resonate so strongly with people, and why we always have to work a little to get into the “zone,” but usually we stay in it for a while. before we get out of it. this and I know that we have to take a break. For more information, click the link below.
This Is Why You Can’t Work More Than 90 Minutes At A Time | Salary scale