“Go On, F*ck Around at Your Desk Job. You Deserve It.” That was the title of the article I am most proud of publishing last year. I’ll summarize it for you here.

“F*cking around” means taking small breaks throughout the day, and importantly, making those breaks enjoyable. The benefit of taking a lot of regular breaks is your mind and body have a chance to recuperate from the stress of working. If you try to work straight through the day—or even more than about an hour at a time—without a break, the quality of your work decreases. The easiest way to prevent it from decreasing is to take enjoyable breaks.

If your breaks are not enjoyable, you don’t reap the benefit because essentially, a non-enjoyable break is just more work.

Taking a break to watch a short video that makes you laugh is fun. Taking a break to call your medical insurance company to try and straighten out a problem is unenjoyable work. 

The amount of time spent on enjoyable breaks matters, too, with short but frequent breaks seeming to have the greatest benefits for most people who do seated knowledge work, i.e., office workers or knowledge workers. So if you pick up your phone and get sucked into a social media app or start reading online news and don’t lift your head for 30 minutes, that’s also not super valuable. Three or four minutes at a time is about right, though a few times a day, you should take a longer break that involves movement, like going for a 30-minute walk.

So the next time you feel yourself grinding the hours away at work, remember that it’s to your benefit to f*ck around for a few minutes every hour. You deserve it, and your productivity will be better sustained throughout the day.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.