Rest, Take a Break Singaporeans, Seriously
There’s a nonsensical, ridiculous stigma against taking breaks in our fast-paced modern society, especially in Singapore. Why? You literally accomplish far more in less time, if you take a break.
It’s a scientific fact that the most productive students and workers work in an intense burst, followed by a short break, and they repeat that all throughout the day. The general principle for breaks: you should study or work until you start losing focus, and then you break for as long as you need to regain that focus, repeat. How long you can work or rest depends on the task. Some administrative task like filing or accounting you can work for 90 minutes before taking a break. But something like studying or reading you might only be able to do it for 20 minutes before you start losing focus. In which case, take a fucking break. Generally the break should be about one-third of the time you work (so if you worked for 90 minutes, you break for 30 minutes; if you studied for 20 minutes, you break for 7 minutes), but it could be shorter or longer, depending on your attention span. Your rest should be something that calms your mind and makes you not think of work, like walking around, or literally just zoning out and not doing anything (scrolling through social media is not really a ‘break’ and may cause fatigue).
Rest is even more important, if you want to accomplish what Cal Newport calls ‘Deep Work’. ‘Deep Work’ is defined as learning or doing work that pushes your cognitive abilities to the limit, which develops new skills, creates new values and is difficult to replicate. It’s the difference between playing a music piece you’ve already mastered, hundreds of times, versus learning a new and challenging music score. It’s the difference between doing easy, repetitive administrative tasks, versus studying new topics, or writing, or coding a difficult project. It’s the acquisition and expression of new, difficult skills, that makes you more economically valuable, and therefore gets you a better (probably higher-paying) job.
And so to achieve deep work, you must first work in an environment that’s distraction free, and you also of course must be focused. And yet, there are many people who once they’ve worked for hours straight and have lost focus on the task, instead of just taking a break and continuing later, they continue working in a dazed state. Societally, the problem is exacerbated because of annoying tiger moms who keep pushing their children to continue studying when they’re already tired, or authoritarian, exploitative bosses who tell their office workers to stop napping or standing around, and to get back to work because they’re paid hourly.
In your mind, you are trying to be ‘hardworking’ and ‘not lasy’ by refusing to take breaks, but this just causes you to be more mentally stressed, more likely to burnout, and for working the same amount of hours (not counting the time you took a break), you accomplish less than the person who do take breaks! So you work ‘harder’, yet you are more mentally stressed and accomplish less. It’s fucking insane.
It’s also in Christian tradition to have a ‘Sabbath’ on Sunday, a day of complete rest from work. But you don’t have to be anal about the day of the week, you can have your 1 day (or 2 days of rest if you want), on Saturday, Wednesday, it doesn’t matter. The general principle is that you should unwind from work, and spend time on other interests or developing relationships, or just daydreaming and ideating. It obviously reduces stress so you’ll be happier and more productive for the next week of work, but also the break in routine allows you to reflect and perhaps even think of new plans and ideas for your life that might become transformative.
Bosses who refuse to let workers take breaks, or parents who constantly force their tired children to continue studying, it’s a typical Kiasu Singaporean mindset, and you should with all due respect, tell such people to go fuck themselves. This is exploitation, and if you’re in a workforce or school that doesn’t allow sufficient breaks, I highly recommend working somewhere else. No amount of salary is worth this kind of mistreatment. But even without people coercing you, you are more insane than ‘hardworking’ if you try to eke out an extra 20-30 minutes of studying when you’re already panting and on the verge of a panic attack. Take a fucking break. To quote Chuang Tzu: ‘You know it, still you toil and toil,—what for?’