Productivity – The perfect length for a break: work for 52 minutes, break for 17

What’s the perfect length for a break? Seventeen minutes, according to an experiment released this week.

Rather than set your stop-watch for 17 minutes when you get up from your desk, the more important reminder might be to get up, at all.

DeskTime, a productivity app that tracks employees’ computer use, peeked into its data to study the behavior of its most productive workers. The highest-performing 10 percent tended to work for 52 consecutive minutes followed by a 17-minute break. Those 17 minutes were often spent away from the computer, said Julia Gifford at The Muse, by talking a walk, doing exercises, or talking to coworkers.

Telling people to focus for 52 consecutive minutes and then to immediately abandon their desks for exactly 1,020 seconds might strike you as goofy advice. But this isn’t the first observational study to show that short breaks correlate with higher productivity. In 1999, Cornell University’s Ergonomics Research Laboratory used a computer program to remind workers to take short breaks. The project concluded that “workers receiving the alerts [reminding them to stop working] were 13 percent more accurate on average in their work than coworkers who were not reminded.”

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at A Formula for Perfect Productivity: Work for 52 Minutes, Break for 17 – The Atlantic.