Productivity & Playtime: 5 Reasons to Incorporate Playtime into Work Schedule

Two deadlines at the end of the week, a meeting with your supervisor, an inbox overflowing with unchecked e-mails, and a client pitch looming overhead. Best course of action? Drop everything.

While a jam-packed schedule might make you feel pressured to power through your breaks, playtime and a brief separation from work can actually do more for your creativity, productivity, and overall success. Take a look at five advantages your professional life gains from a little unstructured frivolity:

1.De-stress: Playtime jumpstarts your brain to pump out a tidal wave of endorphins, your body’s natural pain relievers and calm inducers. With less stress and more feel-good sensations, you’re less prone to headaches, muscle tension, restlessness, and lack of focus that deters productivity. 

2.Increase Energy: Separating from your desk and surrounding yourself with new stimuli helps stir your brain back into action. Playing cards or taking a quick, chatty loop around the building with a coworker lets your mind breathe and gets the blood pumping, which gives you a boost in your focus and drive.

3.Improve Brain Function: Your brain needs exercise to stay sharp. A rigid routine juggling projects and brainstorming solutions, however, leads to mental exhaustion. Puzzles, strategic board games, and riddles help put your brain through its paces in a low-stress way, helping you Lock info into your memory and boost divergent problem solving skills, which allow you to dream up multiple fixes to an issue.

4.Boost Creativity: A kid can make a shoe and a plastic bag into a fighter jet without a second thought. Why? Because she doesn’t self-edit her ideas. Unstructured time to let your mind unwind helps you erase the limits that you often place on your brainstorming, teaching you to think around obstacles with a fresh perspective.

5.Strengthen Work Relationships: A quick round of ping pong doesn’t just break up the afternoon blues = it builds up a knowledge base of social cues, too. Body language, verbal communication, and cooperation are practiced and honed during low-stress interactions, building interpersonal skills that pay off big in the board room. Silly time with a coworker can also help break down walls as you see another side of their personality that cubicle life might not show. This trust and appreciation may lower inhibitions that prevent group projects from clicking.