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In professional careers we tend to focus a lot on what we’re do at work – but what we do *outside* of work can be just as important. This is a well known phenomenon in other endeavours in life – for example in athletic endeavours it’s not just the training, but the quality and quantity of recovery and sleep you get that’s just as important.

Taking breaks, both short and long, is a key component of a maintaining a healthy and sustainable work life balance. Perhaps counter-intuitively, breaks can also help directly with your work as well, in multiple ways.

But the huge benefits of taking a break is wasted if you don’t think about and plan for how you take a break.

In my latest Hacking Academia video and podcast, I delve into the why and how of taking breaks from your professional career.

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🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Introduction to Taking Breaks
📌 (0:34) Taking Effective Breaks is a Skill
📌 (1:30) Breaks Are Vital Even if You Don’t Think You Need Them
📌 (1:51) The Obvious Personal Benefits of Taking Breaks
📌 (2:13) Taking Breaks Benefits Your Work
📌 (2:34) Distance From Work Generates New Insights
📌 (3:07) Breaks Give You a Better Work Reset Opportunity
📌 (3:32) Good Break Planning and Execution is Vital
📌 (3:48) Taking Good Breaks Means Letting Go
📌 (4:12) Focus on the Bigger Picture Benefits of a Break
📌 (4:45) Thinking About Good Work News is Still Thinking About Work!
📌 (5:53) Provide Alternative (Agreed Upon) Points of Contact
📌 (6:13) Alert People Before Your Break
📌 (6:26) Alternative Points of Contact Reduce But Don’t Remove Missed Opportunities
📌 (6:37) Example: Dealing with a Speaking Opportunity Invitation
📌 (7:18) Nominate Multiple Appropriate Points of Contact
📌 (7:21) Delegation Can Provide Others with Development Opportunities
📌 (7:31) Confirm Points of Contact Are Willing to Do So and Give Them Clear Instructions
📌 (7:38) Points of Contact Are Not Full Replacements For You
📌 (7:56) Approaches to Managing Crises While You’re Away
📌 (8:30) Make Sure People Know You’re Away
📌 (8:37) Notify All Communication Channels
📌 (8:55) Disconnecting Fully From Work
📌 (9:07) Fully Quarantining Your Work Communications
📌 (9:57) Choosing Between Zero and Highly Limited Work Check Ins
📌 (10:15) Objectively Assessing the Actual Need for Check Ins
📌 (10:48) Minimizing the Intrusion of Work Check Ins
📌 (11:21) Be Aware Of and Minimize Work Check In Creep
📌 (11:51) Work-Disconnected Mechanisms For Noting Ideas
📌 (12:31) Short Versus Long Breaks
📌 (13:20) Develop Your Own Break Taking Philosophy

Full Video Notes

• If you are training for a running race, to climb a mountain, or trying to hit a weight lifting personal best, you quickly learn that your progress isn’t just affected by what you do during training that’s important, but what you do the rest of the time – like the quantity and quality of sleep you get. Taking breaks from your work is the same. In this video, I’m going to cover some key concepts around the importance of taking breaks from work, tips and tricks for how to take good breaks, and pitfalls to avoid.
• For many people early in their career, breaks from work often become somewhat of an afterthought – they’re excited about the career they’re forging – and work is a big priority. In these situations the art of taking a break often takes a back seat, something that is done as an afterthought, without a lot of planning or strategizing around how they take breaks. 
• Later in their career, when the stress builds, or their responsibilities and interests outside of work take an increased focus, breaks become more of a focus for many, but because they’ve not developed the skill of taking a good break, they don’t get the best benefits from them. This video will provide some common insights from my own career, but mostly from the collective experiences of hundreds of colleagues across many different careers, all with different personal circumstances and goals.
• Early in your career, especially if you have lots of energy, and minimal additional responsibilities, you can feel invincible in your work career – able to work long hours, for long periods of time, seemingly without any ill effect. Even at this stage of your career breaks are vitally important. Some of the benefits of breaks are obvious – spending more time with your family or friends, your hobbies, or exploring new ones, your health, physical exercise, recreational travel, or simply settling down with a tea or coffee and catching up on some books you’ve been meaning to read or shows you’ve been meaning to watch. 
• But taking breaks also, somewhat counter-intuitively perhaps, help you with your work. There’s the obvious benefit – coming back refreshed at the end of a holiday. But taking a break also gives your mind a chance to reset, and gives you a chance to step away from the day to day of what you do for a career. That distance from work can be a wonderful thing – it can generate, often unexpectedly, new insights or perspectives on what you are doing in your career. You will think about your career in ways that simply aren’t possible when you are deeply immersed in the day to day hustle of it.
• Particularly if you work in an intellectually or creatively-focused field, your mind can, sometimes at the most unexpected times, generate new insights or breakthroughs when on a break. There’s a complementary set of benefits at work here too – the break can generate new perspectives and ideas for your career, but also provides the tangible “reset” opportunity; you can come back after some time away from a role and immediately start doing things differently – this is often easier than trying to switch from one day to the next.
• Now, all of these benefits of breaks assume you are taking them properly – a badly planned or executed break is far less effective, and so the second part of this video covers the tips and tricks for how to take effective, fulfilling breaks.
• There’s one key concept that is particularly important to keep in mind. It’s the concept of “letting go” and accepting that going on a break can have some negative work consequences – and getting into a mindset where you expect, assess and are at least reasonably content with these consequences, given all the positive aspects of taking a break. For example, on a long break, you may miss the opportunity to apply for a certain funding opportunity or award, or to respond to a prestigious invitation – it’s important here not to fall into the trap of “not being able to see the forest for the trees” – not seeing the big picture. By taking a break, you’re increasing your capacity and enthusiasm in the medium term to apply for future similar opportunities in a sustained manner, which generally outweighs the downside of missing a specific one.
• Another common scenario relevant to the “letting go” situation is if you are expecting critical news – like the outcome of a grant funding application – to be announced while you’re on holiday. I strongly advocate for people to wait until they’re back at work to get the news, for a few reasons. The first is that these announcements are often not on time – and so you’ll spend a lot of time on your holiday wondering whether you’ve been unsuccessful or simply the notification has been delayed – and this often involves curiosity-driven communications with people at work, which exacerbates the problem of thinking about work. If you get bad news, this is obviously a bit of a downer for your break. But, and this is particularly important and often overlooked, even if you get good news, whilst it may seem good to celebrate it on holidays, it means you’re thinking about work, rather than really making the most of your break. Instead, you can consider waiting until you’re back online so to speak, and if the news is good, you can celebrate then!
• To mitigate concerns and anxiety about missing potential opportunities, you can also organise with colleagues to have one or more of them be a point of contact for you when you are away. 
• How do people who are trying to get in touch with you know that you are away? For those who work in a job where e-mail is major mode of communication, the standard approach is an out-of-office e-mail reply that is automatically sent to people who e-mail you. It’s in this message that details about alternative people to talk to can be contained.
• They will not be able to do everything that you could do in terms of fielding enquiries – but will be able to help minimize missed opportunities. For example, if someone contacts your work e-mail while you’re away about a speaking opportunity, your auto-responder could direct all such enquiries to a particular colleague. That colleague, knowing you and what you’re interested in, might be able to reply something along the lines of, “X is away right now but from checking their calendar they look available on that date, and I know they are interested in that speaking about that topic.” Such a response won’t guarantee you’ll get the speaking gig, but might increase the chances the person waits until you get back to talk to you.
• Delegation can be to one person or many – if you’ve got a few distinct roles to your job – in academia this might be teaching versus research – you can nominate a different point of contact for each of these. Again, make sure these people are willing to serve as a point of contact, and give them clear instructions.
• Where people are serving as points of contact while you’re away, it’s important to note they’re not a replacement for you. They are going to be able to help resolve some situations, but otherwise much of the response will be a “wait until they’re back” type reply.
• Things can also go wrong, sometimes badly, when you’re away. One of the advantages of relying on colleagues is that they can exercise some judgement in terms of deciding whether to interrupt your holiday. If they do need to get in contact with you, it can be useful to have that communication channel be different – perhaps your mobile phone number – so you don’t need to check your work e-mail regularly. You can then relax on your break, knowing that someone will call you if something really, really needs your attention.
• Not being at work is OK – but people not knowing that you’re away is not good. E-mail autoresponders are one way to do this, but nowadays for those in digital domain jobs, there’s lots of other channels you may want to to let people know you’re away on – for example chat channels like slack or teams can have out of office indicators.
• A break isn’t really a break if you’re checking your work e-mail and work social media channels every few minutes. Disconnecting properly is key to a good break. There are two key aspects here – the first being simply making the resolve to not check these channels. This is easier said than done however – with much of these comms so intricately linked into our devices like smartphones or smart watches. So the second aspect of disconnecting is quarantining your work comms. A first step is to disable alerts and  notifications. This isn’t foolproof however – software updates, reboots and other factors can result in you still getting pesky work notifications. If you’re going on a longer break or really want to make sure you’re not interrupted, you can temporarily delete any work accounts on your phone, making sure everything is in the cloud, and you’re not losing any locally cached data.
• Another key aspect of taking breaks is whether to completely disconnect, or have some very limited and pre-arranged check ins. Early in your career it’s logistically more feasible to completely disconnect from work for the weekend, week, or month that you’re on holidays. Later in your career, especially if you’re more senior and managing a lot of people, you may get to the point where completely disconnecting for the entire duration of your break is not as feasible – you can still do it, but the amount of “damage” it does may not be something you’re willing to accept. In making this assessment it’s important you don’t fall into the trap of thinking the world will fall apart without you around – make sure your evaluation of your importance is actually connected to reality!
• If you choose to check in, there are a few things you can do to avoid it intruding too heavily on your away-from-work time. The first is to make sure that check in doesn’t involve you needing to wade through thousands of e-mails or other communications – there’s nothing like bringing all the issues and events of the time you’ve been away into your consciousness to ruin a break. Again, if you can talk to a close colleague, using a different communication channel, you can avoid some of this. The second is to avoid sliding down the slippery slope. For example, you don’t want a single check in halfway through a month long overseas holiday to degenerate into daily check ins  – something that can all so easily happen. Again, this requires the ability to acknowledge and be somewhat comfortable with finding out about issues that need resolution, and to not try and resolve them until you return to work.
• I mentioned earlier on that breaks can spontaneously generate all sorts of breakthrough ideas and insights about what you’re working on, or your career in general. You don’t want to lose those thoughts, but you also don’t want to have to wade back into your full work documentation processes to write them down. Whilst on break you can consider maintaining a separate physical or digital notepad or document where you can quickly jot down ideas that come up – and then forget about them, secure in the knowledge that you’ve got a record of them and can revisit them later when you return to work.
• When choosing your breaks, the length is important. Short breaks can help you step back a little from a particularly stressful or intense period at work, but typically don’t snap your mind out of your work mindset. Longer breaks enable you to actually pull yourself out of your work persona and sit back and reflect – and this is often where the most valuable insights occur. How long a break needs to be to get into this state of mind varies for people – but typically it can take a few days to a week or two to really get out of that work mindset. So, while short breaks are often logistically more feasible and can occur more frequently, it’s important to make sure those critical long breaks happen too.
• In any professional career, it’s easy to focus on what you’re doing during that career. But what you do in the downtime can be just as important. Through experimentation and practice, you can cultivate your own philosophy of taking breaks.