How do you spend your work breaks? Scrolling through your phone in the pause area? Eating mindlessly at your desk? Or do you push on without taking any breaks? How we spend our work breaks, is as important, if not more important, than how we work.
In our screen-based and virtual workplaces, mindful and deliberate ‘work break crafting’ represents the difference between being resilient, healthy and productive, or burnt out, overloaded and ineffective.
Mindful and deliberate work break crafting involves three key elements:
First and foremost – Awareness. We cannot afford to be uninformed and passive regarding sensory overload, in particular visual and auditory system overload.
Second – Identify through simple check-ins where you are on the sensory activation curve. Are you too stressed or too bored? Unable to focus because of too much stimulation, or unable to focus because of too little stimulation.
Third – Design work breaks that truly energizes, and truly calms our unique sensory systems, according to unique sensory threshold scores.
The moment we gain awareness around Sensory Workstyles, we can scientifically and with true autonomy craft meaningful workbreaks, for sustained resilience, wellbeing and performance.
We have to develop the know-how to rather be equipped and enhanced, than overwhelmed and burnt out, by what the age of AI has to offer.
