Office Survival Tip: Utilizing Lunch Breaks
The office lunch break is one of the most underutilized benefits an office worker has. Usually ranging in length from 30 minutes to an hour, it is the one part of your work day when you are legitimately allowed to not do cube-work.
Now, some of you may say that your miserable boss and/or work environment expects you to work through lunch. This may be true, but expectations don’t equal rules and regulations. However, if you want to travel down that logical rabbit hole, then OSHA doesn’t expect you to work through lunch. I believe in the world of corporate rock-paper-scissors, OSHA creams middle management.
Now that we’ve gotten past everyone’s reservations about not working through lunch, let’s return to the awesome opportunity that can be our daily lunch break. In order for a lunch break to be awesome it should provide an engaging mental, social, or physical escape from your office or cubicle. I’m actually a fan of those work/life improvement sites that encourage taking lunch breaks, I just think they give really crappy ideas for how to utilize your lunch break. So here are mine!
Some awesome examples of lunch break utilization may include: any impromptu team competition, any personal work you deem more important than cubicle work, any social get-together that results in laughter, or anything that could be paralleled to your childhood recess.
Some not-so-awesome examples of lunch break utilization include: Browsing any crappy news site (by crappy news site I mean something along the lines of Oprah or MensHealth.com), checking your Facebook, railing against the man, or staring longingly out the window.
Lately, when weather permits, I’ve been using my lunch breaks to throw a football with some co-workers in our parking lot. We go by the Honeybadgers, in lieu of the Cake Eaters (apparently YouTube jokes are more popular than Marie Antoinette jokes). So far there are only three of us, but I’m naively optimistic that soon our fellow cube-dwellers will notice our pint-sized football league and come traipsing out of their cubes to join us. In fact, my dream would be to provide a massive corporate playground for lunch-break enjoyment. I think it would improve a lot of issues revolving around tiredness, grumpiness, and sedentariness. Vote Sharkables for your local lunch break representative!
I like to use my lunch break to edit my blog posts on my iPhone. But in reality that isn’t any different from what I do the rest of the day.
lol – same.
The sports league lunch routine would also allow you to get involved with the age old recess practice of shunning the unfavored.
There are a few ladies who circle our little office complex at lunch and I have yet to be invited on this little trot and bitch session (sigh) But if I could instigate a cooler activity, say Frisbee, then I could have my own lunch crowd who are way cooler than walkers. (success difficulty:low as I am a poor Frisbee tosser)
Like the new look!
I’m sorry for your exclusion from the daily bitch fest…The frisbee tossing idea sounds promising, but if you’re going to instigate a lunch activity, I think you might as well instigate something you’re competent at.
I think lunch Four-Square would be amazing. Lunch Red Rover may be a little painful…
I love football! And it will help fight against a sedentary cubicle job. Hope you guys keep it up
Thanks! That’s the plan for now
I always go for a walk during my lunch break. It’s so easy to stay at your desk, but if you do, you never really stop working. And no one will ever thank you for it.
Exactly! It’s always nice to get outside for a break. It makes me secretly happy when I have a meeting in another office building that’s within walking distance too…
I dance around the office, and sometimes take a stroll outside! Sometimes others join in!
In the dancing or the strolling? I like to imagine your whole office breaking out into some kind of dancy flash mob everyday at 12:00, but maybe that’s just me.
I like that your whole office goes for lunch together.
I love leaving the office and reading a book in a park or do a little sketch.
Yeah, sketching and reading are also pretty prime lunch activities. I used to keep an emergency sketchbook in my desk at work that I would whip out when the spreadsheet monotony got too much to bear!
Rishabhcew on February 20, 2009 I really liked your chnanel and this video. If you need any help getting this video exposed I use a site called tubeviews.(net) It has really helped like 20 of my main videos get to the top in position. Its nice.I like what i watched.
Lunch is really an extension of what you spend most of the day doing anyway. Ditto, definitely with comments above. Too funny
Sometimes it does seem that way… I wish I spent most of my workday playing football and drawing though! Somehow I think my job would be 50x more awesome if it were!
I read this right before we went outside to throw the football during lunch today haha
That is awesome.
Reblogged this on c1330.
My day has been missing sharks. When will they be back?
This is SUCH an important post. I’m serious. You have one hour in which not to feel like a drone, and it’s important not to waste it stuffing a limp sandwich down your gullet in record time so you can get back to slowly dying/working. What helped in our office was the addition of a new team member who had lived in France for a while. By that, I mean she was obsessed with food which is very French and we had great fun making a big deal about what we would eat for lunch, going for fancy lunches together with the addition of some wine, and trying to be social and make conversation. Before we were all off on our little islands. It made working life so much less sucky. So my tip is: hire a French person! They will be horrified at your slack dining culture and immediately elevate lunch to a happy social art form.
Sorry I haven’t been around much lately, but my book, The Bellman Chronicles, will be FREE to download on Sept. 10 – 11! Check it out on my Amazon Kindle page.. You won’t be disappointed. And if you can slip me a review, I’d be forever grateful…