Written by Marinja Principe

The Value of Breaks

As knowledge workers, we often need to juggle numerous tasks and responsibilities, which is sometimes resulting in us feeling drained and overwhelmed. Our personal resources, including energy, attention, and physical capacity, can dwindle, leaving us stressed and emotionally exhausted. The key to recharging these resources lies in one simple solution: breaks. Whether it’s a holiday, end-of-day break, or a quick in-between-tasks break, breaks are a powerful tool to recharge our personal resources and well-being.

Unleashing the Magic of tiny habits through Regular Breaks and Break Activities

As knowledge workers often spend a large part of their day at work, it can be helpful to use this time to establish tiny positive habits, which help to recharge personal resources. Recent studies have shown that regular breaks can significantly reduce stress and physical discomfort. But here’s the secret: it’s not just about taking breaks, it’s about what we do during those breaks that matter. That’s where the Break Scheduler comes in!

While many studies focus on identifying opportune moments to suggest breaks, the Break Scheduler not only reminds the user to take breaks but also helps them identify beneficial break activities. As beneficial break activities strongly depend on personal preferences, Break Scheduler helps users to increase their awareness about beneficial and non-beneficial break activities to help establish more effective break habits.

Self-Experimenting with the Break Scheduler

While existing approaches only suggest monotonous breaks, the Break Scheduler approach is all about self-experimentation and personalization to fit users’ varying needs. In addition, self-reporting helps raise users’ awareness of personal resources, as well as their break habits, while at the same time helping the Break Scheduler to suggest better activities depending on user preferences. At the end of every workday, Break Scheduler suggests a personalized break schedule for the next day, including break activities. However, you as the user stay in control and can adjust the timing, duration and break activity anytime.

The Results are In!

To learn more about the usefulness and impact of Break Scheduler, we ran a preliminary evaluation with 13 participants who used the approach for one to two weeks and provided us with valuable insights into their break habits. Participants took a total of 150 breaks and shared their feedback through a survey.

Overall, the findings of the investigation suggested that self-reporting and suggesting tot ake breaks can improve users’ awareness of their personal resources and break habits. Scheduling breaks in advance and receiving notifications to take the break throughout the day helped participants to apply their personalized break habit plan. Participants perceived the suggested, personalized break activities as helpful and they motivated them to be more intentional with their breaks and how they spend their breaks:

“My breaks got more intentional with the Break Scheduler, and I actually took some time to do something beneficial and was then more concentrated again afterwards, so I did not have to take a mini-break sooner again.”- [S06]

Therefore, the results of this thesis offer insights into the potential of the Break Scheduler approach in supporting knowledge workers to increase their awareness by self-reporting and nudging and in helping them find beneficial activities to improve their personal resources.

What’s Next?

While the Break Scheduler has shown potential, there’s more to explore. Future studies can address limitations, such as the small sample size and potential bias in participant selection.

Plus, there’s room for further research on the long-term impact of using the Break Scheduler approach on overall well-being and productivity. It’s an exciting field with endless possibilities, and there is still a lot to discover. For example, improving the personalization of the Break Scheduler or incorporating more quantitative data as sleep or step data, are potential extensions of this approach to better adjust to the user’s current needs.