In the four software organizations I’ve worked for over the years, I’ve found that very few programmers ever take breaks. Some reasons to explain this:
- Programmers don’t feel the need to take breaks
- Managers don’t encourage breaks
- Limited number of suitable break areas
- Not taking breaks is socially normative amongst programmers
Why take a break? The most obvious reason is to rest one’s eyes and one’s mind. A deeper reason is to get recalibrated with what matters most in life, so that work doesn’t take control of you.
It is my experience that when I get to programming for a couple hours straight, I tend to lock into a state of mind whose primary goal is to produce the technical solution I am working on. The intensity of this state is magnified by a number of factors, including social pressures to produce working code, pride, and the comfort of a familiar means of escaping other pressing responsibilities, such as family and personal development.
When “producing a technical solution” substitutes as the dominant focus of one’s consciousness - when a mere technical task takes on greater importance than the pulse of core responsibilities that issue out of one’s humanity - one becomes more robot-like than human. Depth suffers as a result.
Perhaps work breaks can be utilized to maintain that link with the core of our humanity.
Muslims take breaks five times a day for prayer. Proper Muslim prayer, as I understand it, is primarily concerned with submission, as symbolized by the trademark Muslim prostration before Allah. This is most interesting to me. If the purpose of proper prayer is to re-align oneself with the subject of one’s ultimate concern, and if writing software is not the subject of one’s ultimate concern (yet threatens to be), then perhaps this mode of taking a break could prove beneficial.
But first we have to learn to take breaks to begin with.
