经济学人｜如何在工作之余好好休息？

Business  Bartleby
商业版块  巴托比专栏
The matinee test
午后场测试
How to take proper breaks from work.
如何在工作之余好好休息

The year 1843 was a tremendous one for humanity. The Economist was founded. Almost as importantly, the modern weekend started to take shape. A campaign was launched in Manchester to give industrial workers half a day off on Saturdays, designed to ensure that more of them turned up ready to work on Monday morning. It succeeded, and the practice was eventually adopted into law; over time, a five-day week has become the norm in most countries.
1843年对人类来说是意义非凡的一年。即经济学家》创刊。同样重要的是，现代周末开始形成。曼彻斯特发起了一场运动，让产业工人在周六休息半天，以确保更多工人在周一早上做好工作准备。这场运动取了成功，这一做法最终被法律采纳；随着时间的推移，每周五天工作制在大多数国家已经成为常态。

Whether it is the weekend, the summer holidays that many people in the northern hemisphere are currently taking or the daily rest periods that companies give to their employees, the right for people to take breaks is uncontested. But for white-collar workers in particular, the boundaries between working time and non-working time have become very blurry. It is standard practice to eat lunch hunched over your desk: look down at your keyboard and you will see far more crumbs than characters. It is normal to look at emails in the evening, at weekends and on holiday.
无论是周末，还是北半球许多人正在享受的暑假，抑或是公司给予员工的每日休息时间，人们休息的权利都是无可争议的。但对于白领来说，工作时间和非工作时间的界限已经变得非常模糊。伏案吃饭是标准的做法：低头看看你的键盘，你会看到碎屑比字符多得多。晚上、周末、节假日看邮件很正常。

Deploring this development is too simple: the ability to choose when and where you work suits lots of people. But it has also created the impression that you are always contactable. As long ago as 2013, Melissa Mazmanian of the University of California, Irvine and Wanda Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates of the MIT Sloan School of Management coined the term "the autonomy paradox" to describe how greater flexibility for individuals has led to diminished freedom for everyone to switch off.
对这一发展表示哀叹太简单了：能选择工作时间和地点符合很多人的需要。但这也给人造成了一种印象：你总是可以随时联系到别人。早在2013年，加州大学欧文分校的梅丽莎·马兹马尼安·和麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院的万达·奥利科夫斯基和乔安妮·耶茨就创造了“自主悖论”一词，用来描述个人灵活性的提高如何导致每个人的自由度降低。

Breaking out of this trap is hard. As a little experiment to assess your own degree of freedom, try to follow a recommendation from Cal Newport, a thoughtful writer on how the performative busyness of modern work impedes the ability to get important stuff done. In his latest book, "Slow Productivity", Mr Newport advocates deliberately varying the intensity of work. Among other things, he suggests setting aside a weekday afternoon once a month to see a film.


Taking three hours off every so often ought not to feel outlandish if you catch up on your work later. But few employers would react well to an out-of-office message that reads "I am watching Deadpool & Wolverine and will be slower to respond than normal." So an uncomfortable degree of subterfuge is required.


First, following Mr Newport's advice, you label the time as a "personal appointment"; never has a calendar entry looked more suspicious. Before you enter the cinema you check around for colleagues. A handful of single people are in there: you wonder how many of them are also at a "personal appointment". You are told to turn off your phone, the ultimate working-hours transgression. The moment you leave you check it to make sure all hell has not broken loose in your absence. During the film you feel guilty that you have been munching popcorn while everyone else has been working. The whole experience is sufficiently draining that you need another rest.

Managers may well feel that their workforce shouldn't be heading off to the cinema whenever it feels like it. But organisations should ensure that their employees do not mistake exhaustion for accomplishment or breaks for laziness. Mr Newport cites the example of 37signals, a software firm that works in six-week cycles. At the end of each cycle, developers take one or two weeks off scheduled projects to slow the pace.

Slack, another software firm, ran a survey in which they found that only two in five of their employees felt comfortable taking breaks. It then conducted an experiment in which it prompted some of its workers to take time off during the day, and found that this led to marked improvements in their productivity and job satisfaction. If the encouragement of your employer is not forthcoming, some simple habits can still make for better breaks. If you decide to work at weekends or on holidays, only do so during set periods so that you get at least some extended time off the treadmill.


During the workday, one tip stands out. A recent review of the research on work breaks by Zhanna Lyubykh of Simon Fraser University and her colleagues concluded that being outside was a better way to recharge. A study of nurses by Makayla Cordoza, now of Vanderbilt University School of Nursing, and her co-authors found that breaks in the hospital garden mitigated the risk of burnout more than staying indoors. Switching off is hard enough. Staying in the office makes it tougher still.


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