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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast. I'm Scott Barranato. If you love your coffee break as much as I do, I might have some bad news for you.

New research calls into question the effectiveness of taking such breaks during the work day.

The woman responsible for this depressing finding is Charlotte Fritz of Portland State University,

who joins us on the phone now to talk about her research and how the breaks we take during the day affect our work.

Charlotte, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. So I want to talk about this idea of microbreaks that you've been researching. First of all, what are microbreaks and what were you trying to discover when you did some research on them?

Well, microbreaks are a term that me and some colleagues came up with to describe all the little things

that we do during somewhat unofficial breaks during the work day.

So going to the water cooler, chatting with a colleague, checking in on your family along those lines.

And we were looking at these microbreaks, thinking about them in terms of recovery at work,

so the little things that keep us energized throughout the work day

that aren't bigger breaks and we were looking at things that we can do that are

related to our work tasks and then the things that are not related to work again

calling your spouse or you know surfing the web or something like that and to see

which ones actually play out in terms of their relationships with feeling energized throughout the work day.

And what you found was somewhat counterintuitive and I have to tell you from a work perspective,

maybe somewhat depressing, that when you took breaks that weren't work related there was either

no correlation or a negative correlation to feeling energized through the day is that correct?

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