How long do you work continuously? Do you just go until you actually start to feel fatigue? If you're like most, you just go without thinking much about stopping until the end of the workday. Without much thought, we're setting ourselves up for underperformance...imagine that! And...its become a well ingrained habit. Every 16 words on average we reach for a metaphor so let's use one now!
Race cars are built to go fast for a long time but they take pit stops to go faster for longer. We're a lot like race cars. We can just go a long time. But (you knew it was coming) what if you took regular breaks? How would your effectiveness increase? We're not talking about activity we're talking about achievement!
52 MINUTE RULE
It's been found that musicians can only practice for about 24 minutes at a time to maintain the focus needed to have great progress. Nothing engages our entire brains like playing an instrument! Our day to day knowledge work is a bit less intense. In his book "High Performance Habits", Brendon Burchard discovered that one of the habits of high achievers was to take breaks every hour...every 52 minutes on average!
Set your alarm, unplug & do something meaningful to hit the reset button. Close your eyes to help with screen fatigue. Do some yoga. Take a short walk. Do some push-ups. Pick something and start doing this today so you can sustain the best you've got for longer!
“Excellence is an art won by training & habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
—Aristotle
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