Chapter 12
Take a Break

We’ve learned a lot and come a long way in this book. In our work to commit constantly to small acts of intentional and incremental leadership behavior, we may overlook a seemingly small act that can reap huge benefits—taking a break.

Hitting the pause button can help us gain a new perspective, refresh our creative energy, relate better to our team members, and spur innovation. While this may be a small act, it’s not always easy. We get used to the paths we take day after day, which often lead to comfortable ruts in our personal and professional lives, and intentionally breaking that pattern can be difficult but rewarding.

Despite new technology intended to make our work easier, professionals around the world are working longer hours. The small steps toward changing dead-end and stressful behaviors made over time, such as intentionally taking breaks, can not only make us feel more energetic and optimistic but can also positively affect relationships with those around us.

As we explore in this final chapter, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. If we learn to take breaks, our lives are likely to be longer, healthier, and more productive. Taking breaks not only refreshes our thinking but also calms us, so that we can deal with difficult or unexpected circumstances, seeing such events as learning opportunities rather than potential disasters.

In our desire to step up to challenging tasks and complete them, we often trade rest for bingeing on work—staying up all night, whether to prove to our bosses or teams we can do it or because management demands it. Research shows that, far from being beneficial, pulling an all-nighter can be less fruitful than taking a break. Such all-nighters can even be dangerous, as when the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled oil off the coast of Alaska, after a sleep-deprived third mate was left at the helm.

Sometimes it’s not our bosses but our devices that seem to be ruling us, depriving us of the break we need to find an innovative approach to a thorny challenge, build better relationships, or just ponder the universe, which has led to some of the biggest innovations. Constant interruption can fragment our thoughts and our lives, and a steady flow of information from our computers, smart-phones, and other electronic devices just becomes noise from which it is hard to extract valuable input. Sometimes the most productive thing we can do is take a break from all our electronic devices— put them down, disconnect, walk away, and give ourselves time to think.

We may think we’re too busy to take a break, but research shows that temporarily walking away from difficult tasks or the daily grind is often more productive and can lead to better solutions more quickly. The busier we are, the more we need a break.

With all the stresses of modern life, we should mindfully choose not to succumb but instead choose to be happy, as we explore in the next section.

Choosing Happiness

Does the following sound like you?

You rush around in the morning, get yourself ready, get the kids off to school, and hustle through traffic to get to work on time. You commute twenty to forty minutes every day. You have your own cube, but it feels like assigned seating. There is stark fluorescent lighting overhead. You attend at least two meetings a day (sometimes more), neither of which you needed to attend, and during these meetings there is endless discussion of minute issues that could have been resolved in twenty minutes. But the meetings drone on for an hour, only because they were scheduled to.

Your boss is well-intentioned, but he is so busy appeasing his own boss that your ideas are ignored. There’s no clear guiding vision that you can fathom, other than to fix problems, put out fires, and figure out how to charge the customer more. Meanwhile, you watch your colleagues kiss your boss’s ass to get ahead and try to look more valuable.

Information comes late and loud. In other words, problems are presented long after they should have been acknowledged and addressed, and these issues are always presented as “urgent.” You frequently feel like you are the last person to learn about new initiatives.

You also feel like most of what you do is busy work. The e-mails keep piling up, and you keep hearing expressions such as “do more with less.” You get meeting invitations you feel you can’t decline, so you keep showing up at the meetings, and you keep working.

If you are among the majority of American workers, you work much more than forty hours per week—more hours than your counterparts in most other developed nations.¹ You are also working more hours in one of the wealthiest countries in the world that has no legal requirement to provide paid vacation. None. Canada, Japan, Germany, and the majority of Western European nations, by contrast, have a minimum of twenty (many have thirty or more) days of required paid vacation.²

The result is that you are stressed. And you feel guilty because you haven’t taken time to exercise and deal with your stress. So you go for a run, and then feel guilty about taking time to exercise while the dishes pile up and the kids sit on the couch and watch Netflix.

Or does the following sound like you?

You work from home, coffee shops, or wherever you happen to be at the moment. You often feel at your most productive when you’re not at the office. You go to the office when it matters to meet with colleagues, not to punch a clock. You are invited to conference calls and kept in the loop but attend only the ones relevant to your projects—the ones in which you are most interested and can make the biggest impact.

You take time to sleep and to exercise. Maybe you are the 5 a.m. boot-camp type, but you don’t have to be; you can go for a run at 11 a.m. if you want to. You just take that time. You also take time to volunteer at your child’s elementary school. You don’t hide the fact that you contribute to your community when it fits into your schedule. The idea never occurred to you.

You have a great relationship with your boss. You don’t dread interactions with her. Quite the opposite, you call her up any time you have an idea to share or need an opinion or support on a project. You always leave those interactions encouraged—even emboldened. She makes you feel like anything is possible. She generates energy in everyone around her.

Every time you sit in on a meeting with your boss, and your boss’s boss, she is constantly giving away the credit and the limelight, while accepting accountability for anything that goes wrong. The VP of sales asks, “We got a big customer win?” Your boss says, “Yes, but it wasn’t me. It was our team that made it happen.”

There’s no gossip, and no trash-talking about the management over beers on Friday. And no fear of your job getting “bangalored” (outsourced). You live in a culture that is focused on outputs, not inputs—a work culture that is focused on results, not the volume of e-mails exchanged.

You have friends at work. You do things with one another’s families for fun. You and your team create quality services and products, and you know it. You take pride in your work, and your colleagues do, too.

What’s the difference between these two stories?

The difference is a series of small, incremental choices, made over time—starting with our own personal attitudes and daily behaviors. Those personal methods and mindsets then ripple out and affect the relationships we have with the people around us. We should live each day as we want to live the rest of our lives.

Let’s start by exploring how practicing simple, intentional behaviors can lead to big impact—and how it’s possible to change course even in the middle of a potential disaster.

Learning from Disaster

A few years ago I was the invited keynote speaker for a private conference in Toronto. It was one of my first big events. I knew the event director and was deeply grateful for the invitation. I prepared diligently. The ballroom was packed to the walls. I had published my first book and was just starting my work to share ideas onstage. I was knowledgeable, rehearsed, confident, and relaxed.

Onstage just before me was a professional comedian. She was disarming and fun. She even sang. She was killing it. The crowd was totally enjoying her opening.

I was sitting near the stage next to the technician who was handling the audiovisual stuff. The comedian started to introduce me. She was warm, vibrant. She made a few jokes about my being American. Everyone laughed. She was just finishing my introduction when the tech guy next to me said, “Uh, hang on, your remote and the slides aren’t working. Mmm, just go. Go and I’ll fix it in a minute.”

Good lord. The room was clapping for me. I gulped. My opening set piece was an in-depth story choreographed with a cascade of photographs and rich imagery. I designed the first few minutes to immerse the audience in a tale that would be a metaphor for my key points. But now I had no visuals.

I smiled. I walked the length of the stage to burn a few seconds, and said some ridiculous comment about the wonderful comedian. I had no idea what I just said. My head was clamoring. I could feel my field of vision start to close. I glanced at the technician, who clearly did not have his act together yet. Or maybe that was me.

I took a deep breath, smiled, found some friendly eyes in the audience, and launched into my story anyway. It was probably only a few seconds of dead air but it felt like an eternity. It worked. As I built the story, I warmed to it. I opened up, revisiting and punctuating each step of the journey. I started to own it. People leaned in. I had just jumped off a cliff and somehow found the rip cord.

In May 2013 I interviewed the magnificent speaker, writer, and marketing guru Seth Godin, who said that, if he ever gets that feeling of rising panic, he takes it as a reminder that he’s in exactly the right place. He knows he is in a high-opportunity moment for learning and growth. What he means is that, when our palms get sweaty, our heart rate jumps, our hair stands on end, and we get nauseous, we are experiencing the symptoms of panic. They are also the conditions for challenging ourselves, seizing opportunity, and growing— if we choose to see it that way.

Simply focusing on our breathing can help get us through scary situations. It’s true. The first thing we can do to lower our heart rate, calm our nerves, and open our mind again is breathe. Breathing is the body’s built-in stress reliever. It’s foundational to rebuilding calm. Simply breathing deeply can do everything from resetting our heart rate to changing the chemical composition of our blood. In the practice of yoga, focused breathing is called “pranayama,” which literally means “control of the life force.”

In my speaking example, I was able to recover from a potentially catastrophic and terrifying position and succeed. As we have explored in this book, getting from a place of anxiety, stress, and overwhelming confusion to a place of confidence and high performance takes small, incremental changes in behavior practiced over time. Reaching that place can start with something as simple as getting adequate rest.

Respecting Sleep

Captain Joseph Hazelwood was the centerpiece of the Exxon Valdez spill. He was allegedly drunk and incapable of operating the oil tanker competently at the time of the accident. But evidence later revealed Hazelwood wasn’t even at the helm when the ship struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound. In fact, he was asleep in his bunk and had left the third mate, Gregory Cousins, at the helm. Cousins, along with most of the crew, was deeply sleep-deprived. Recent layoffs and overtime scheduling had left the crew exhausted.

Testimony before the National Transportation Safety Board revealed Cousins had been awake for “at least 18 hours” before the impact on Bligh Reef.³

Many experts believe Chernobyl to be the worst nuclear accident in history. Eighty-one miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine, the nuclear plant exploded on April 26, 1986, after workers spent the day attempting routine maintenance procedures to adhere to safety guidelines. Two explosions in quick succession blew the nuclear plant apart, killing two workers instantly. Over the following hours more died from acute radiation sickness.

While the official count is twenty-eight deaths due to the incident, experts believe thousands were affected. The site and surrounding area will likely be uninhabitable by humans for at least twenty thousand years. Reports show workers had been at their stations for thirteen hours or more before the explosion.⁴

Companies are recognizing the benefits of balance so much so that the latest sought-after company perk turns out to be the forty-hour workweek. Though it has been lost for the last few years in the always-on, digital-leash economy, the old-fashioned forty-hour workweek is returning in some companies. The latest change in company culture is a focus on limiting the number of hours people are expected to work. The Center for Creative Leadership recently did a study showing that professionals with smart-phones (which today is like, everyone) are connected to their work up to eighteen hours a day, often checking their e-mail during the night.⁵

Ryan Sanders cofounded a staffing company, BambooHR, about five years ago. Tired (literally) of the go-go workaholic mentality he saw in the 1990s, he now enforces a forty-hour workweek at his company, which has specific policies to keep its employees from working overtime. If you are a BambooHR employee at your desk at 5:30 p.m., Sanders will probably visit you and ask what’s up. But if your work problem persists, you could be fired. One of his software developers nearly lost her job after putting in a few sixty-to seventy-hour weeks.⁶

BambooHR understands what should be clear to all companies: when we are exhausted, our work quality deteriorates and our decision-making ability falls off a cliff. There’s a reason that sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. Psychological effects include hallucination, disorientation, recklessness, overoptimism, apathy, lethargy, and even social withdrawal. There is clear empirical data showing that health care professionals make a higher number of errors when sleep-deprived.⁷

The National Transportation Safety Board estimates up to one hundred thousand traffic accidents occur annually because of fatigue. We need to turn off our smartphones—shut them down— while we’re driving. Nothing is so urgent that we should risk lives, including our own. And sleep will be a better performance booster than another night spent poring over spreadsheets until 11 p.m.

In July 2015, I interviewed Russ Cohn, CEO of Pantry Retail, a fast-growing company with the novel idea of providing high-quality, organic, perishable snacks in vending machines. The company manages its delicate inventory with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which monitor and track sales of all items.⁸ As an entrepreneur with a history of successful start-up companies, Cohn knows the stress of long days and urgent deadlines. And even he knows it doesn’t make sense to push too hard. “ All-nighters don’t scale,” he says. “Just because you’ve done two or ten all-nighters, it doesn’t make it a sustainable strategy for growth.”

Taking a Break from Technology

According to Wikipedia, “nomophobia” is the irrational fear (phobia) of “being without your mobile phone or being unable to use your phone for some reason.”⁹

A recent study from the University of British Columbia by Kostadin Kushlev, a PhD candidate, with Elizabeth Dunn, concluded that, to reduce stress and increase overall productivity, the optimal number of times to check e-mail daily is three.¹⁰ Ninety-two percent of Americans use e-mail, checking it up to fifteen times per day. Ironically, as Kushlev writes, “People find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress.”

In the study, researchers asked 142 participants to limit their e-mail as much as possible for a week. During the following week, participants were invited to check their e-mail as often as they wanted. Eighteen people dropped out of the study almost as soon as it began, evidently unwilling to limit their e-mail intake.

During the course of the study, each day the 124 participants filled out a brief questionnaire about their stress levels, their sleep habits, and their subjective sense of well-being. They were asked questions such as the following:

• Today, how often have you felt nervous and stressed?
• Today, how often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do?
• Overall today, did you feel you got done the things at work that were most important to you?
• Overall today, how satisfied were you with what you accomplished at work?
• Overall, how would you rate the quality of your sleep last night?

During the phase in which they were asked to limit their e-mail activity as much as possible, participants reported significantly lower stress levels while engaged in activities that required sustained attention. In other words, when they had to persist at a particular activity with focus and energy, they were less distracted by the fact that they were not checking their e-mail.

The study concluded that our optimal sense of well-being, rest, and productivity comes from checking e-mail only three times per day—morning, midday, and late afternoon.

But of course it’s not just e-mail; it’s social media, texting, and other connective technologies that lead to a general sense of FOMO—fear of missing out. That fear of missing out becomes a consuming distraction in our lives, particularly when digital devices are nearby.

Putting Down Smartphones for Smarter Conversations

American adults are consuming more than eleven hours of digital media daily.¹¹ Keep in mind we are only awake sixteen to seventeen hours a day.

The consumption of digital media has been steadily increasing over the years for American kids, too. Today, on average, kids are spending more than seven hours immersed in “entertainment” screen time.¹² And that’s outside of the screen time they may have at school, doing homework, or doing school-related activities on a computer.

It’s true that sometimes it’s nice to sit together at a coffee shop and absently chitchat about nothing important while we scroll through our devices. Together, yet apart. But more often, we all want our conversations to be meaningful, connected, deep, expressive, honest, intentional, substantial, and empathetic.

New research demonstrates that even the mere presence of a smartphone, in our hands or just sitting on the table between us, detracts from the quality of the conversation. That’s right— even if we don’t actively look at it, the simple presence of a smartphone detracts from the quality of the conversation. Simply the anticipation of a text or alert distracts us from meaningful interaction.

In that recent study, researchers Shalini Misra and her colleagues asked one hundred pairs of students to spend just ten minutes talking about either a casual, light topic or a deeper, more meaningful topic.¹³ Meanwhile, an observing researcher nearby noted the amount of nonverbal behavior and the amount of eye contact. After the conversation took place, the observer asked questions related to the quality of the conversation itself. Participants were asked to qualify the “feelings of interpersonal connectedness” and “empathic concern” they experienced during the conversation. They were asked if they felt they could “really trust” their conversation partner and to what extent their conversation partner made an effort to understand the participant’s thoughts and feelings.

The results were clear: “If either participant placed a mobile communication device on the table, or held it in their hand, during the course of the ten-minute conversation, the quality of the conversation was rated to be less fulfilling.”

“Mobile phones hold symbolic meaning in advanced technological societies,” the researchers concluded. “In their presence, people have the constant urge to seek out information, check for communication, and direct their thoughts to other people and worlds.”

While the use of devices and technology that enable people to communicate digitally increases, face-to-face interaction decreases. According to Misra, “People who had conversations in the absence of mobile devices reported higher levels of empathetic concern.”

Reclaiming Our Lives

How do we reclaim our lives from our devices? Meet William Powers.¹⁴ Back in 2008, a digital lifetime ago, he, his wife, and his son were increasingly spending their evenings and weekends facing away from one another and spending hours deeply entranced by their screens, instead of talking to each other. Rather than simply interacting with one another, they were texting and e-mailing each other from across the house. They were also spending less and less time taking walks, enjoying the outdoors, and enjoying meaningful time with one another. As Powers describes in his book, “The goal is no longer to be ‘in touch’ but to erase the possibility of ever being out of touch.”

The family decided to reclaim their lives from their devices. Ever since that decision almost ten years ago, they have been practicing something they call “selected disconnection.” Each weekend they have an “Internet Sabbath.” Starting late Friday evening and going through Sunday evening, they turn off the Wi-Fi, their smartphones, and their computers— they digitally disconnect.

They are certainly no Luddites. Powers is a researcher and journalist, and his wife is a novelist, so they both spend long hours at their computers, researching and writing. They are also both keenly aware that their ability to connect digitally gives them the freedom to work at home and make a living.

When they first started the experiment, Powers said, “It almost had an existential feeling of, ‘I don’t know who I am with the Internet gone.’ But after a few months it hardened into a habit and we all began to realize we were gaining a lot from it.”

Okay, so maybe the thought of totally disconnecting for two days is terrifying or unrealistic. But we can start with just an hour or two. Then, if we think it’s a meaningful exercise for ourselves or our family, we can turn it into a whole evening. The worst-case scenario is we all learn something.

Taking Breaks When We're Busy

In 2014, when I was working at Skillsoft, a global online learning company, we did a survey in collaboration with Scott Eblin, leadership expert and author of Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative.

In this short study, we asked busy professionals working in organizations larger than one thousand people how they spend their days—what time they wake up, how long their commute is, how many texts and e-mails they receive each day, how many meetings they sit through, how much exercise they get, and even how many cups of coffee they drink.

And then we asked a few questions about their sense of happiness, contentment, and productivity, and how much of the time they feel “at their best.” The objective of the study was to understand how our daily behaviors affect our sense of well-being, productivity, and happiness—in our work, in our communities, and with our families.

Some of what we discovered may not surprise you, but one insight might: the busier we are in our work, the more we need to schedule, and take, regular breaks in our day in order to sustain high levels of happiness and productivity. The happiest and most productive professionals take regular mini-breaks throughout the day. And the more responsibility they have, the more important this practice becomes.

Digging into the survey data, we found that individual contributors— that is, professionals who are not bosses, with no direct reports— suffer through the fewest meetings, received the lowest number of e-mails and texts (although 24 percent stated they receive more than fifty per day), had the shortest commute to work, and, for the most part, were good at leaving work at work. Only a third of this group spent more than forty hours a week in the office. These individual contributors also reported the fewest number of hours working outside of work— at home, in coffee shops, etc.

The majority of managers surveyed, in contrast, stated they had about two to six members on their team, received slightly higher volumes of e-mail and text messages regarding work than individual contributors, and, unsurprisingly, had to sit through a few more meetings each day. Managers also described slightly higher commuting distances, presumably because they were willing to travel farther for their position. This group is getting about the same amount of sleep as their individual-contributor counterparts, but dedicating a little more time each week to exercise.

Apparently gone are the days of executives having martini lunches and golfing twice a week, because in our survey the executive group overwhelmingly reported the highest volume of e-mails (31 percent say they receive more than a hundred), nearly twice as many meetings (many had up to six meetings per day!), and up to eighty hours of being connected to work each week, at the office and elsewhere. This group also travels the farthest to work, and, unsurprisingly, spends the greatest amount of time on airplanes. However, the executive group also reported the most hours dedicated to sleep and exercise.

Here’s the piece of data that really surprised us: contributors and managers reported comparable levels of happiness and productivity, and comparable numbers of mini-breaks in their workday to refresh and recharge.

Meanwhile, we found that the greater the responsibility and obligations those surveyed have—in terms of meetings, direct reports, e-mail correspondence, travel, and other distractions—the more important the mental breaks become. In other words, those with the highest volume of distractions reported a much greater drop in productivity at work, and in satisfaction in all aspects of their lives, when they did not take mindful, intentional breaks during their day.

We should do our work, our family, and ourselves a favor: take a break. It’s the first step toward finding the intentional time needed to begin more focused activities that will advance our goals of being more attuned to ourselves and those around us.

In this book, I’m suggesting that we can create more positive futures for ourselves, and for those around us, through small, incremental steps taken each day. You may think to yourself, “But I don’t live in that world. I live in the world of rushing to meetings, and oceans of e-mails and stress!”

We can all move into a calmer, more fulfilling, and more impactful life. And the path to getting there is filled with small but highly intentional choices made consistently over time.

Here’s the big idea in this book: we can’t wait for seismic change to come from above. We can’t wait for the phone to ring with the next big break, and we can’t wait for someone else to elevate our “engagement.” It’s up to us. We lead by example. Along the way, we’ve explored how to take control of our lives and lead rather than waiting for our bosses—or for external circumstances—to direct us. It starts with each one of us and with the attitude and actions we take every day. You might think, “But my boss, but my deadlines . . .” No, it starts with each one of us, and the attitude and action we take every day.

It is not intermittent, extraordinary actions that separate great leaders from everyone else; rather mindful leaders consistently do the simple things—like knowing when to take a break— extraordinarily well. When we start by doing the small things well, big things can happen.