Anyone ever hear of Frank Gilbreth? He was a brilliant engineer who devoted his life to increasing worker efficiency by the study of time and motion. One of his ideas was to add a surgical tech to the operating room. Prior to this docs had to waste valuable anethesia time by finding their own instruments. He was truly ahead of his time and the subject of a wonderful book, Cheaper By the Dozen. No, not the horrible Dennis Quaid movie. That movie is a crime against humanity.
Anyway, he invented therbligs, which is a system to increase efficiency by avoiding waste motion. The last therblig is call Rest to overcome Fatigue. According to Gilbreth breaks were essential and necessary for worker safety and efficiency, and five minute breaks every hour was the ideal.
I know it works for me. If I can just get a couple of minutes, it doesn't even need to be five, to kick back, I do so much better the next hour. I usually spend it checking CNN or something similar. It might look like I'm wasting time, but I'm recharging my physical and mental batteries. Hey, if it's evidenced based, they can't argue with that, can they?
You guys do the same? And if you do, how do you usually spend those couple of minutes?
