The Economics of the Break

Replying to emails at 9.40 pm makes you look hard-working, but it comes at the expense of your concentration the next day. We take a look at research into attention and creativity, an experiment carried out at the Boston Consulting Group, and the overall benefits of scheduling downtime.

It’s 9.40 pm. Your mobile vibrates on the sofa – an email from a client, nothing urgent. You reply anyway, just two short lines. It makes you feel like you’re working hard.

In many teams, being readily available is seen as a sign of commitment. Those who reply straight away come across as reliable. What gets overlooked is that each of these short replies comes at a cost. The company ends up paying for it, unnoticed, the very next morning: a lack of concentration; ideas that fail to materialise.

In the following article, we look at research into attention and creativity, and at why scheduled downtime delivers more benefits than it costs.

You can find out how to organise your own lunch break in our Article How to take meaningful and relaxing breaks. The question at the heart of this is: what is a break worth?

The cost of being constantly available

When you switch back and forth between tasks, you take a part of your attention with you. In 2009, organisational researcher Sophie Leroy coined a term for this: ‘attention residue’. In her experiments, participants’ thoughts often remained fixated on the previous task; their performance on the next one suffered as a result.

In everyday office life, it looks like this. You’re working on a proposal. A notification pops up; you reply. Afterwards, you’re back on the proposal, but part of you is still on the email. Dozens of times a day. Cognitive psychology has long been measuring such switching costs. Every switch takes time for the brain to fully refocus on the new task. Individually, it’s hardly noticeable. Over the course of a working day, it all adds up. By the end, everyone has been busy. Yet little has been completed.

What goes on in your head when nothing is happening

For a long time, it was thought that the brain switched off when at rest. In 2001, the neurologist Marcus Raichle and his team demonstrated that certain regions of the brain become active precisely when we are not engaged in any external task. This network is now known as the Default Mode Network.

In 2012, the educational researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang summarised what this network does. It helps us to make sense of our experiences. To consolidate memories. To establish connections. Her conclusion is already encapsulated in the title of her work: ‘Rest Is Not Idleness’ -> Rest does not mean being idle.

Anyone who constantly focuses their mind on the outside world deprives these processing mechanisms in the brain of the time they need.

For businesses, this becomes particularly interesting when it comes to ideas. In a 2009 meta-analysis, psychologists Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod evaluated numerous studies on the so-called incubation effect. If you set a problem aside and return to it later, you solve it better on average. The effect was strongest for tasks that allow for multiple solutions – precisely where creativity is required. It was less pronounced when the break was spent working on the same subject matter.

Scheduled downtime within a team: the BCG experiment

What is the situation like in an industry where being available is part of the business model? Harvard professor Leslie Perlow investigated this over several years at the management consultancy Boston Consulting Group. The findings from her survey of around 1,000 professionals showed that 94 per cent worked 50 hours a week or more, plus a further 20 to 25 hours during which they kept an eye on messages whilst away from the office.

They then made a small but significant change to the working conditions. One team was given one day off per person per week. Another was given one evening off from 6 pm; completely offline, with no emails. This was agreed at the start of the project and was binding for everyone in the team.

After five months, the teams with scheduled time off rated their work more highly than comparable teams. This applied to job satisfaction, learning and open communication. And it applied to the one thing that really counts in consultancy: the value they create for their clients. According to Perlow, this was also because the teams had to agree in advance who would cover for whom and when. Work was planned more effectively; knowledge was no longer concentrated in the hands of a single person.

There is one limitation, however. The study is a field study conducted within a single company, without randomly assigned control groups. It is nonetheless interesting because it proved successful precisely in a setting where constant availability was taken for granted.

Calculating ROI

There is no study that claims ‘taking a break yields an X per cent ROI’. Anyone who promises such a figure has simply made it up. What does exist are proven effects; these can be translated into the usual cost-benefit analysis. What do I put in, and what do I get back? The effort required is manageable: a few hours a week during which nobody replies, plus a bit of coordination within the team to agree who is available and when.

On the income side, there are four items:

Ultimately, you’ll have to work out the figures for your business using your own data. How much does a cancellation cost you? How many hours a week are spent on coordination and corrections? Even small improvements in these areas can quickly make up for a few hours of radio silence.

Downtime needs space

Planned breaks usually fall by the wayside because of the calendar. Or the location. Anyone sitting at a desk with a lit screen is still half-reachable even during a break. The mind needs a place where it realises: there’s nothing to do right now.

It starts with the team: fixed times when nobody expects a reply, arranged just like a meeting. And it continues in the office, with spaces that don’t look like work areas.

Ultimately, it comes down to what you measure. Replies at 9.40 pm look like hard work. Some ideas that end up on the table on a Thursday were conceived on a Wednesday afternoon – precisely when, for two hours, nobody wanted anything or made any demands.