Office Survival Tip: Utilizing Lunch Breaks

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!