You finish at twenty past eleven.
It is done, it is merged,
nobody is waiting on you.
So you open the next thing,
because it is twenty past eleven
and stopping now
would feel like stopping early.
Two hours later
you are tired in a way
that does not lift,
you are halfway inside something
with eleven tabs open,
and that is the moment
you finally get up
and make the coffee.
That break cost you the afternoon.
Here is the part
nobody says out loud.
A break has a price,
and the price is whatever
you are holding
when you put it down.
At the seam between two pieces of work
you are holding nothing.
The price is zero.
Twenty minutes into the next thing
the price is the twenty minutes.
An hour in, it is the hour,
plus the ten you will spend
finding your place again,
plus the quiet chance
that you come back
and start something else instead.
And the price keeps rising
right up to the moment
you feel entitled to stop,
which is the most expensive
minute of the day.
We choose breaks by feel.
Feeling is a terrible clock.
It reports fatigue late,
and it always reports it
from the middle of something.
So take them at the seams.
When a thing is finished,
stand up.
Not for an hour.
For the length of a kettle.
To the end of the building
and back.
Then start the next piece
from a standing start,
which is the only cheap start
there is.
The odd result
is that you take more breaks
and lose less of the day,
and you finish the week
with something left in you,
because you stopped paying
a re-entry charge
on every rest
you allowed yourself.
And if you look at a whole morning
and cannot find a seam in it,
that is not a scheduling problem.
That is the size of the thing
you took on,
telling you
it should have been three.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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