Importance of Taking Time Off Work
Dale Carnegie states, “So to prevent and worry, the first rule is: Rest often. Rest before you get tired.”
In school, teachers would often burden us with homework on weekends. This not only eliminated the whole concept of a weekend but also is slightly responsible for the workaholic habits that hard working(not really since too much work makes jack a dull boy) employees develop. Taking off from work is seen as a trait of for losers. Some even put forward the question, “Why do you need to take off from work when you truly love your job and life?”. Some view it as a form escapism. There is a lot of taboo on taking time off.
Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist, who also co-authored two books with Stephen Hawking, demonstrates that taking time off work improves our well-being: “Though some may consider “doing nothing” unproductive, a lack of downtime is bad for our well-being, because idle time allows our default network to make sense of what we’ve recently experienced or learned.” If you are feeling burnt out or if you feel tired and overwhelmed, here are a few reasons why you must take a break instead of working yourself through the pain.
I Would Prefer Long-Term Thinking over Tunnel Vision
As Darius Foroux explained in his book, Do It Today, there are two modes while you are working:
- Execution
- Thinking
People can work in the execution mode for hours or weeks, even months. But the result is either a mid-life crisis or quarter-life crisis. It is because when one is working in execution mode, one executes his tasks without giving it enough thought. He just wants to get the tasks done one after the other. There is not much reflection or contemplation. The result is that the person works with a narrow-minded thinking. That is, to check the to-do lists of tasks one after the other.
When you take time off, you get to have a lot of inner conversations. You get to contemplate over whether you did the things right. You get to know more about yourself. When you come back to work, you feel energised. You feel refreshed. With a fresh mind and probably new ideas you can be more productive at what you do.
One might say, “If I take breaks, I will fall behind my co-workers.” Yes, you will but who cares. I would rather come back refreshed and energised so that I can be more productive instead of working with a tunnel vision.
Focus on things other than work
Look. You are not a robot. “I work at company X”, is the reply I might get If I ask you to tell me more about yourself. The modern life almost forces us to identify ourselves with our work. You are not your work. You have a family, friends, health, passion, hobbies and most of all you are a human being with feelings. You need to focus on other things aside from work.
This is the reason you must take breaks. I am not talking about the weekends in which you try to crank up some extra work. Rather, I mean proper vacation. Instead, you can and should utilise your weekends as a proper mini-vacations. Forget about your work and spend time with your family and friends. Be present with your family, give your relatives, whom you haven’t talked for a long time, a call and ask them about their life, picnic an evening with your close friends, go out cycling, enjoy a day hiking, read books, or poetry, visit a museum and lose yourself in the mesmerizing historical past. Although it can be as simple as cleaning and organizing your house with your spouse and kids.
The bullet point is, you need to have a good work life balance. Cultivating healthy relations with your family and friends is as important as your work.
Don’t Overdo It
There’s always a threshold point after which more of something doesn’t return positive results. This is what we call ‘Point of Diminishing Returns’. This can be easily understood from a situation we all or most of us have gone through. If we watch a Netflix episode for 1 hour that feels good or refreshing. But binging a series for hours doesn’t bring more joy. Rather, one starts to feel guilty because one could have spent that time doing something meaningful.
We need to apply this same philosophy when we are taking off from work and remember that after rest comes work and after work comes rest. It is a continuous cycle one should not break.