 Hello everyone, my name is Matthew Gatti and I'm your Engineering Productivity Coach. Taking breaks is an effective strategy for increasing workplace productivity. We have a misconception that where we think that only time when we're actively working on something is time that counts as productive. All non-active working times is seen as unproductive. I'm gonna share with you today why this is not the case. A lot of these principles that we're gonna talk about are built upon a book called The Power of Full Engagement. It's a great book if you want to learn more about breaks and energy management and how to stay more focused and fully engaged in your work. What we're gonna be focusing on is Principle Two in that book which states, because energy capacity diminishes with overuse and underuse, we must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal. What we're gonna focus on that is the last part. We must balance energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal. So energy expenditure is your work time and energy renewal is your break time and they have to exist in a balance. They can't act, they exist in a fully times of expenditure and fully times of recovery because in one, you're gonna burn yourself out in the other, you're not gonna get anything done. So when you're working, remember, as hard as you want to work, it is equally important for you to take a break that is just as effective. Our energy throughout the day is not linear. It does not just decline throughout the day. There's peaks and there's valleys and throughout the day, we need to make sure that we're taking time to make our peaks higher, which is increasing performance in those particular high energy days with the use of time blocks and other productivity strategies. When we hit those lows, allow ourselves time to recover so that we can hit our peaks and go higher and higher in our productivity. So remember, there needs to be two states that you need to consistently be in while you're at work, if you truly want to be a high performer and truly want to be productive. They are periods of full engagement, which are high engagement and high attention, so high energy and high engagement. So these are your times when you're actively working on a project where you're focusing on one particular thing for a definite amount of time and you are fully engrossed in whatever's going on and then you need to have your strategic recovery, which is your break time. And these are times of low energy but still high engagement. You need to have high engagement in your recovery periods because a lackluster recovery period will carry over into your high intensity energy engagement areas and it will diminish those because if you're not recovering properly, you can't perform properly. Think about it in a strictly physical sense. If you are working out in the gym every day but you are not taking any time to recover, over time you'll damage your body and as your body's damage continues to accrue, your performance overall will begin to decline because you're no longer taking rest. And while you might think I'm continually to produce weights, I'm continually to show up in the gym and continually lifting, your performance over time will go down because you're not taking any time away from the gym for your body to rest and the same principle applies when you're in the workplace. So my encouragement for you guys today is to incorporate breaks into your work day. When you have your time block make sure there's at least 20 minutes breaks after your time block one, so you can restore, refresh and renew your four energy centers. You'll be able to synthesize your information a little bit easier. It's gonna be easier to think about something and come up with answers when we're not actively engaged in the problem. Lie yourself the time, the space to think about what's going on and you won't feel rushed during it. So make sure you have your active work times plan and also your rest times plan. Whenever you're resting, make sure you're focusing on your resting. When you're resting, when you're taking your break, do your best to leave your phone away. That causes active brain stimulation. We want to let our brain time to recover. Another tip is to go outside. If you're in a place where it's conducive for you to go for a walk, one thing I do is to go walk around the downtown area where my office is. Give me a great source of renewal, having fresh air, feeling the sun, seeing other people. Just being in a new environment can help you to restore yourself and also trigger new ideas that might be helpful for you during your next intensive work period. So that's my encouragement for you guys. Make sure you are intentional about doing breaks, having breaks and make sure they are quality breaks. If you guys have any more questions about breaks or productivity in the general, please leave them in the comments below. I would love to help you guys and I will see you all in the next video.