Do not take the initiative to rest, sooner or later passive rest

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Editor’s note: We all have experience of working long hours, whether it is active or forced. But in any case, you must know that rest is actually a very useful way to improve efficiency. After all, work does have ingredients for life, but life is definitely not just work. Take more rest, use these time to spend time with your family, relax and do something you like. If you are not sure to return to work, you will find yourself more able to cope with the challenges at work. The author of this article Aytekin Tank, original title How resting more can boost your and your team’s productivity.

The best way to improve team efficiency is to have more rest for employees

Image source: JETFORM.COM

We are going to talk about improving efficiency today, and most of these top media writers and famous entrepreneurs will not tell you.

You won’t read this article on Lifehacker’s latest headlines, nor will you see it in Lifehacks’ popular tweets.

And what I want to tell you today, when you incorporate it into your company culture, efficiency will multiply and make you stunned.

This little trick is rest.

Researcher and Silicon Valley consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang wrote a book on the importance of balancing work and rest – “Rest: Why You Get MoRe Done When You Work Less (rest: the less you do, the more you do).

In the book, he explained that in order for the work to continue, it is necessary to recognize the importance of rest:

A break is not a work done and nothing to do.

Work and rest are actually complementary. They are like different parts of the waves. Where are the peaks of the trough? .

The better you rest, the better you will work.

Of course, if you work longer, you will definitely produce more results. But “work” is not always the same as “efficiency,” especially the sustainable, repeatable model you’ve developed in your company.

My personal experience and 13 years of JotForm entrepreneurial experience tell me that once you learn to balance work and restorative rest, your productivity will grow by leaps and bounds.

Or you think about it: If you drive on the road for a few hours without rest, you will definitely feel tired, your upper and lower eyelids will fight, and your mind will not concentrate.

You have already threatened society at this time.

Although in the real world of work, life-threatening in most cases is small, but not taking a break can lead you to make many unnecessary mistakes.

As a result, productivity will naturally decline.

Even the most efficient brain takes time to recover.

In the book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work”, talented thinker and writer Maya Angelou tells himself to set aside a certain amount of time each day to write. After that, she put the work aside and enjoyed the “normal life on the surface” with her family until the next day.

I tried to get to the studio at around 7:00 and worked until 2 pm.

If the work doesn’t go well, I will stay until 12:30.

If all goes well, I will stay until I feel bad.

But rest is not just the privilege of a writer or other “creative person.”

The founder of Virgin Group, billionaire Richard Branson, gets up early and enjoys spending time with his family.

Bill Gates is widely regarded as one of the richest people in the world today, and he averages time to read a book every week.

Reading is still my favorite way to learn new topics. When I was a child, I read an average book a week. Even my dayWhen the schedule is full, I will also take a lot of time to read.

A whole month, a week, or even a day of focused work, without any restorative rest, it’s hard to come up with any new ideas.

If you have to force an idea out in a weary state, it is likely to be a great delay. Your brain is exhausted and overworked, so that your ability to find or correct mistakes is insufficient.

I have seen a lot of smart people who have dealt with a chaotic and complicated plan in a time-critical and stressful situation. This is because – as Steve Jobs makes the public aware – simplicity is often harder to achieve than complexity.

Simple may be harder than complexity: because before that, you must work hard to make your mind clear.

Simple requires a lot of clever and hard thinking.

But if your brain doesn’t get enough rest, then it can’t be smart and hard to think about.

It’s not easy to make restorative rest

It’s easy to watch TV every night after work, and it makes my brain and body a mess.

You need to develop self-discipline to avoid having to unconsciously check emails and texts, because they will take up your rest time unconsciously and make your mind nervous.

This is why I have developed some simple habits that have changed my brain from a tense “work” state to a state of “entertainment”, “relaxation”, and “rest”.

I will train in the gym, I will study to get a new perspective, I will go out with my wife and children.

In short, you must gradually develop this awareness.

In this way, in my own case, I always find that after a weekend, a holiday or even a night’s rest is enough for me to challenge the upcoming challenge of the new day.

You need to fully grasp the time away from work and make your mind clear. By using these hours, you can develop morally, physically, and beautifully, and the style will blossom.

I don’t think that rest is a luxury, but that it is a necessity to stay innovative in a highly competitive market.

Working is for life, but life is not for work

The best way to improve team efficiency is to have more rest for employees

The above sentence is the beginning of my listening to a startup company.People say, I feel good, just use it to make a subtitle, you may be shocked, but you have to admit that he is right, work is not everything.

If you want to live a happy, fulfilling, balanced life, you must understand that work should only occupy a small part of your attention.

I love my family, I love my friends, I like outdoor activities, I like to read books that will make me perfect myself.

spending time on these people and things has rejuvenated me. Communicate with them to give me energy and inspire my creativity – even when work is stressful, especially when work is stressful

I can’t waste on work that doesn’t improve efficiency and doesn’t require brains.

I don’t want to go back to the past, regretting the days when I stared at the computer screen for 12 hours in the office every day.

Because I have the following three methods to maximize efficiency through restorative rest, I don’t have to worry about it at all.

First, let it go, cycle up and down

In the field of fitness, this is called “cyclical thinking.”

In the agricultural sector, farmers call it a rotation.

In the legend Basecamp, they complete the current work in a cycle every 6 weeks.

From agriculture to technology, leaders in all walks of life understand that “resources” will gradually dry up over a certain period of time, so specific actions must be taken to update these resources if they want to be sustainable.

No matter what industry you are in, you need to be sensitive to the moment of crisis.

What is a critical moment?

It’s just a week before you have to hand over the house, but you haven’t finished the renovation work yet.

In the last few days, you tried your best to complete a big deal.

For me, it’s a few weeks before we post a great new product or feature on our website.

When our hard work is rewarded and the world can enjoy it, let’s take a break.

Not physical, but spiritual.

We invest our time in short, easy projects where we can explore new features and ideas, or develop new features.

We also take the time to do small projects like clearing vulnerabilities and making sure all systems are working. But before dealing with another heavy job, we set aside time for rest and recovery.

We found that when in-depth, focused work and restorative rest alternate, efficiency is effectively improved:

We can focus on the work at hand, because in the subconscious we know that the spiritual rest is coming.

On the other hand, we won’t let ourselves be trickyIt’s bothering because we know that when we don’t focus on solving the problems we’re facing in time, it’s likely to be tricky and harder to solve.

Limited time pressures allow us to do as much quality work as possible until we have time to rest.

After I observed the “negative effects” in the JotForm team because of the lack of rest, I built a system of rest and work.

After spending too much time on the same puzzle, programmers began to notice more vulnerabilities in their code, making the code that designers have been staring at on the screen for a long time both boring and unfriendly.

The best way to improve team efficiency is to have more rest for employees

Our time we try to solve a problem—no matter how long it takes—but often find the results counterproductive.

We spent twice as much time doing the same amount of work because our thinking process was lagging behind, and finally we had to go back and do it again.

Our brain and our organization work like muscles.

Working on the same muscle every day without resting is likely to hurt your muscles. As a result, your fitness process will not only stagnate, but may even cause you to go backwards after stopping training.

The one who often squats more than 200 pounds in the gym is not the same every day. It took them months, even years, to alternate training and rest to make the muscles grow to the level of today.

A break is not lazy, it is not the result of lack of perseverance.

In fact, rest is really hard work, because you want to keep yourself at work.

When you really focus on achieving a goal, you can easily lose your mind and go all the way to it. This is the reason for exhaustion.

When your brain and body need restorative rest, the real difficulty is spending time listening and responding to this appeal.

A purposeful break is a stunt that allows you to attack better when faced with difficulties.

Second, if you don’t take the initiative to rest, you have to take a passive break

The best way to improve team efficiency is to have more rest for employees

Email sent at 3 am.

Specify a task for the weekend.

You may think that I like my team to do this because it must mean that the players are very committed to their work, indicating that they really love their work.

Although these two things may be true, it may mean that they will collapse soon.

This is not only bad for them personally. For companies like ours, the cost of finding the right people, interviews, onboarding, and training new employees to take over from them is also very expensive.

When your employees fall into this state, they are hard to stop, and know that our team is spread all over the world!

Although it sounds crazy, I not only encourage employees to keep their working hours sustainable, but sometimes I have to enforce the rest system in JotForm.

When I see signs of someone working outside of what I think is “normal” working hours, I will remind them to take a break. The problem will still exist tomorrow, but tomorrow you may have a new idea and the solution will be better.

As with sustainable growth, reasonable working hours have organically become part of JotForm’s core culture from the start, ensuring that we are as focused and productive as possible during our work hours.

When we are more efficient at work, when we are at night or on weekends, we won’t feel guilty because the work has not yet been done.

This creates a positive cycle, and everyone has more restorative breaks and a sober, excited brain on Monday morning.

Third, make sure the rest is defined correctly

Many modern technology companies have an unlimited PTO (Personal Vacation) policy, not the JotForm family.

Experienced me on such a long story and said, now you should know how important I think rest is to improve work efficiency?

Because I understand that only a better definition of rest, rest can make the most of its potential, just like creativity.

For some people, the unlimited number of paid vacation policies puts pressure on them because they try to understand how long they should “resture” with their colleagues.

This is especially true in fast-paced environments, including almost all startups and most technology companies.

The best way to improve team efficiency is to have more rest for employees

In 2014, a Glassdoor survey found that American employees only took half of their due holidays. To make matters worse, more than half of people are still working on “rest days”.

I don’t know your situation, but I bet these numbers will only rise in the future and will not fall.

At JotForm, we put some pressure on our employees to make the most of their annual vacation.

Because the company’s definition of rest is clear, we believe and encourage employees to take advantage of these days to rest, recharge, and then return with more than one hundred times, to continue working more efficiently than ever before.

Remember that you have an all night in college? Beat the keyboard until your research paper meets the minimum required word count? This is certainly not the best work you can write, but it has passed.

When do you spend 80 hours a week completing a design project in the office? This is certainly not your most creative design, but you are ready before the deadline.

You work hard and work for a long time. But how much work do you think is effective?

Is there only a small part?

I bet you could have done better.

Not through the development of new skills, but not through more work, but through less work.

At the end of the day, I hope that everyone understands that restorative rest is not an option, but an inevitable requirement for any person who wants to be more efficient in their lives and work.

Translator: Xitang