Time Management Tips You Didn’t See Coming: Take a Break and Walk Away!

Learning to keep your body and your mind functioning at peak capacity requires knowing how to divide your project into a series of manageable tasks and proactively scheduling rest time at the appropriate intervals.

Serious People Take Breaks

When it comes to time management tips and making the most of them, not everything qualifies as intuitive, and this is one of those areas. It’s surprising, at first, but breaks really do increase productivity, our NYC professional organizer recommends taking breaks at regular intervals. It’s a bit of a hot topic of late, as this recent story in Entrepreneur makes clear.

It may seem like working without a respite is the best, or even the only way to get through that intimidating project in front of you, but that is only a perception. What is actually the best, and sometimes the only, way to get that particularly challenging project completed is to walk away.

If you haven’t taken a break of any kind after many hours of work, then, on some basic level you are possibly spinning your wheels. It can be humbling to admit this. Another humbling thing to admit: not everyone really knows how to take a break.

Walk Away

For some, the best way to take a break is literally to walk away, walk away from the computer, walk away from the desk, just walk.

Not for a long time, mind you. The objective is to clear your mind so that you can promptly resume work and not get distracted or suffer from a bout of procrastination.   Our NYC professional organizer focused on this previously and shared some strategies for combating procrastination.

But we all have to learn to strike that balance between doing just the right amount and not too much, in order to work at peak capacity and achieve the most. And part of that is the art of the carefully chosen moment of rest.

So, no, you’re not going to walk away from that project for a week, a month, or a year. You might not even walk away from it for an hour, or even half an hour. But you still might need to walk away for, say, three minutes, or five.

The point is that the mind and the body both require breaks to perform at peak capacity. Burnout isn’t just an idea, it’s a clinically documented fact. And if you want to remain part of the happily working segment of the population rather than the part of the population that gets studied for the next research paper about burnout, learning how to follow these time management tips, allowing yourself to rest and takes breaks, strategically, is a great place to start.