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coco
coco

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If you want to be successful, you should stop for lunch!

I mean it!

Everybody knows nap’s benefits. It relaxes your brain, reduces fatigue, increases alertness, and makes your day. Therefore, your performance is improved by one hundred percent.
However, nowadays, the truth is that we can’t take any naps at all. Not in our lives!
I live in Buenos Aires, a big city where everybody goes to work every day in the morning and comes back home in the evening. Nobody has a place to sleep in their offices. Although, I do home office, I can’t take a nap either. That’s why I have only one hour for lunchtime, and that is not enough. It is very difficult to cook, eat, and have time for sleeping as well. If I try to do everything, I will finish doing nothing at all.
Nevertheless, we can stop for lunch. We must do it. Because lunchtime is the new naptime.

In the Agency where I work, everybody does home office. Our time for lunch is only 1 hour, between 12 pm to 3 pm. However, I see many people are not taking advantage of this hour. Perhaps, they eat something while working; they eat sitting at the computer while surfing the web, or -the worst-, they eat something precooked in 5 minutes. I’m pretty sure everybody is having a date with their cell phones instead of having lunch.

As a result, having lunch like this isn’t worthwhile.

What is the alternative?

Lunch is one or of (or even) the most important meals of the day. In Argentina we are used to have bad breakfasts: we don’t eat eggs, vegetables, or meat as in other countries. For this reason, lunch is an opportunity to provide our bodies with the nutritious they require.

Moreover, having lunch is to have a break. You need to stop and relax. Do nothing for a moment or do something completely different from work. Only in those cases, your brain will be free, rested, and ready for the next hours. Otherwise, if you need to cook lunch, it will be ok as well. Because the brain will need to be focusing on cooking, and this is a completely different activity unless you were a chef. It may sound silly, but this rest period for the brain is critical. Reset!

If you can’t take a nap, you must stop for lunch. Therefore, you will feel de-stressed day by day, your brain will improve focus, and your health will be better. This is the first step to be successful.

Top comments (1)

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jgmluiz profile image
José Guilherme Maragno Luiz

Great point, Coco! I think we often underestimate the power of a break, like lunch, to recharge and improve our focus. As developers, it’s easy to get lost in the flow and forget that self-care is an essential part of long-term success.

This is something I’ve been advocating through the CORE Framework (an agile software development methodology that focuses on both efficiency and the well-being of developers). In CORE, we encourage practices that keep teams engaged and healthy because we know that when teams feel good, they deliver the best results. If you or anyone else is curious to learn more about CORE, feel free to check out my profile!