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2012-09-07 03:59:20
People are always being told that lunch is under threat from workaholism, but
would a compulsory long break actually mean we achieved more. Former Wall
Street trader Frank Partnoy thinks so.
Most of us rush through lunch. We might have a sandwich at our desk or grab a
quick salad with a colleague. Or perhaps we skip lunch altogether. After all,
breakfast is widely regarded as the most important meal of the day. Dinner is
often the most enjoyable. Lunch gets short shrift.
Lunch also has suffered from the crush of technology. Email, social media, and
24-hour news all eat away at lunch. Even when we have lunch alone, we rarely
spend the whole time quietly reading or thinking. We are more connected to our
hand-held electronic devices than our own thoughts.
Given the fast pace of modern life, it is worth considering whether employers
should require a substantial lunch break.
Or, if a mandatory lunch seems too draconian, perhaps employers could give
workers incentives to take time off for lunch, just as in some countries they
subsidise or reward regular visits to the gym or a physician. Would we benefit
from a long intraday pause?
About the author
Frank Partnoy
Former Wall Street trader Frank Partnoy is a professor of law and finance at
the University of San Diego and author of WAIT: The Useful Art of
Procrastination
One obvious reason to do lunch is to slow down and gain some perspective. If we
burrow into work, and don't come up for air during the day, we will have a hard
time thinking strategically or putting our daily tasks into broader context.
By taking a lunch break, we can think outside the box. In the interviews I
conducted for my book, I was struck by how many senior leaders stressed the
importance of strategic "downtime" - lunch or some other block of an hour or
more per day - to break up their thinking and spur them to be more strategic.
Where we have lunch can be almost as important as whether we have it. If we sit
down at a real restaurant and take time to chat leisurely with colleagues, we
are more likely to slow down than if we dash to a fast food chain. In fact, a
fast food lunch can be more harmful than no lunch at all.
The dangers of fast food are deeper than caloric ingredients and unhealthy food
preparation. Recent studies have shown that fast food also has pernicious
effects on how we think. For example, Sanford DeVoe, a psychologist at the
University of Toronto, has shown that merely being exposed to a fast food logo
speeds up our already-fast snap reactions.
Defining terms
The Oxford English Dictionary records lunch to mean midday meal as first
appearing in about 1829, from "when it was regarded either as a vulgarism or as
a fashionable affectation"
But "lunch" was first recorded at end of the 16th Century to denote a piece or
hunk of food
And as an abbreviation of "luncheon", "lunch" was recorded from 1786, according
to Online Etymology Dictionary
Urban fast food locations are packed at lunchtime. In the suburbs, the
drive-thrus are lined with cars. People who eat at fast food restaurants might
think, as the old McDonald's slogan suggested, that they deserve a break.
However, they aren't getting one.
When people do lunch quickly, they often feel forced to choose fast food. But
that kind of lunch experience doesn't slow us down. Instead, it speeds us up.
A mandatory break would be especially helpful for people who trade stocks
during their lunch break. When I worked in Morgan Stanley's derivatives group
in Tokyo during the 1990s, there was a mandatory halt to trading every day for
90 minutes during lunch.
I was struck by the positive impact of the break on the tempo of trading. The
pause led to more rational thinking about the trading day and often helped
cooler heads prevail during times of stress. We read. We contemplated strategy.
Sometimes we even ate.
Today, many individuals trade too much. A mandatory break might help wean day
traders off the addiction of constant trading. Unfortunately, the trend is
toward more trading, not less.
Woman eating food at her desk Crying inside?
Historically, stock exchanges in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Singapore recognised
the benefits of a lunch break. But now the Asian markets are moving toward the
Western model of continuous trading, and shortening their lunch breaks.
A long, mandatory lunch would also benefit another important group - single
people. It would free up time for them to do something people don't do nearly
as well during the evening - go on a date.
Dinner is a risky proposition for a date, especially a first one. It almost
always lasts too long. If the date goes poorly, both people want to leave after
an hour, but find it awkward to do so. And even dinner dates that go well
probably should end sooner than they do. There is plenty of time for a second
date.
The two factors that matter most at the early stages of a relationship are
chemistry and compatibility. You can get a sense of those during an hour-long
lunch, but not based on a glance. Also, there's a hard stop so both people know
the date is going to end.
Although a mandatory lunch could generate substantial benefits, we are unlikely
to do it on our own. When we have the choice, many of us see the salient costs
of a leisurely lunch, but not the benefits.
To encourage people to enjoy the benefits of lunch, we need to change the lunch
default rule with the kind of "libertarian paternalism" advocated by Richard
Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book Nudge. Just as they would impose a
default rule requiring people to save money, while permitting them to "opt
out," employers could do the same for lunch. People could skip lunch if they
wanted, but they would have to take some action - fill out a form, or log on to
a website.
Lunch box
A number of high-profile names have mused about the midday meal...
"Lunch is for wimps" - Gordon Gekko, character in 1987 film Wall Street
"There's no such thing as a free lunch" - popularised by Milton Friedman,
economist
"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch" - Orson
Welles, actor and director
"A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer
in the will's freedom after it" - Aldous Huxley, author
"I haven't trusted polls since I read that 62% of women had affairs during
their lunch hour. I've never met a woman in my life who would give up lunch for
sex" - Erma Bombeck, journalist
"Office hours are from 12 to 1, with an hour off for lunch" - George S Kaufman,
playwright
Economic growth was supposed to make us better off by creating more
opportunities for leisure. Yet people feel they are working harder than ever. A
mandatory break might help reverse this trend.
And it wouldn't necessarily create an unproductive 90-minute block. Employers
could ensure someone is on staff at all times by staggering lunch periods
(11:30-13:00; 1200-13:30 and 12:30-14:00), like schools do.
Finally, lunch breaks could create new opportunities for part-time work by
institutionalising two half-time shifts - one in the morning and one in the
afternoon. Parents with newborns might choose to work just one of those times.
It might become easier and more acceptable to become a halftime employee if
there were a clean, natural split between morning and afternoon.
If our leaders want to improve economic growth and productivity, they could
start by experimenting with a policy tool that is simpler than fiscal spending
and less risky than monetary stimulus. How about lunch?