Desk lunch vs a real lunch break: why 20 minutes away helps

Eating lunch at your desk is not bad for you in itself. Food is food, and a sandwich next to the keyboard beats no lunch at all. What a desk lunch loses is the break that should come with it. Your eyes stay on the screen, your body stays in the chair, your head stays in the inbox, and you often finish the meal without quite noticing you ate it.

If you can get away from the desk for even 20 minutes, the afternoon usually goes better for it. If you genuinely can't, a few small changes make a desk lunch much closer to a real one. Both are below.

What a desk lunch misses

You eat without noticing

Eating while you read, type or watch something is the textbook case of distracted eating. A number of lab studies, pulled together in reviews, suggest that people who eat while distracted remember the meal less clearly and tend to eat a bit more later in the day. The effect is modest, but it matches what most people know from experience: the lunch eaten over email is the one you can't remember at 3, when you go looking for a snack.

There is also the simple matter of speed. At the desk, food goes down between replies, often in a few minutes, and the feeling of being full takes a while to arrive. A slower meal gives it time to catch up.

Your eyes never get a rest

A morning at the screen is hours of close focus. Lunch is the natural moment for your eyes to look at something far away, a window, a street, the other side of a room. Eat at the desk and the screen stays at arm's length for the whole day. Short eye breaks help, as the 20-20-20 rule explains, but a lunch away from the screen gives your eyes the longest rest they will get before evening.

Your body stays in one shape

You have probably been sitting since the morning. A desk lunch adds another half hour in the same chair, with the same shoulders and the same neck. Walking to the kitchen, down the stairs or to a bench outside is movement that comes with the meal, and lunch is often the only time of day it happens.

Your head stays at work

The most important part of a break may be the part you can't see. Research on work breaks is mostly small studies, but it generally suggests that breaks where you step away mentally, not just physically, leave people feeling less drained later in the day. Reading work messages while you chew is not that kind of break. Your attention never leaves the job.

The case for 20 minutes away

A real lunch break doesn't have to be an hour. Twenty minutes is enough to eat at a normal pace, look at something other than a screen and walk a little on the way there and back. It is short enough to fit around most meetings and long enough to feel like you stopped.

A few ways to make those 20 minutes count:

• Leave the room if you can. A kitchen, a break room, a bench, a cafe, a park. The change of place does a lot of the work.
• Get some daylight. Even a cloudy day outdoors is far brighter than an office. If there is a window seat, take it.
• Leave the phone in your pocket for the first ten minutes. Scrolling at lunch is the desk lunch again, just on a smaller screen.
• Eat with someone now and then. Lunch with a colleague or a friend is a break that is hard to cut short by checking email.
• Add a short walk at the end. A few minutes of walking after you eat is a good way to start the afternoon, and there is more on that in walk after lunch.

If even 20 minutes feels impossible, look at the reasons. Often it is a meeting placed at 12:30, a lunch that wasn't planned or a habit of saying "after this". Those are fixable, and skipping lunch at work covers how to protect the window.

How to make a desk lunch better when you can't leave

Some days you really can't step away: a deadline, a shift you can't leave, a desk that doubles as your only table at home. On those days, aim for a lunch that is at least a break from the work, even if it isn't a break from the desk.

1. Close the laptop or lock the screen. On a Mac, Control, Command and Q locks the screen at once. With the work out of sight, it is far easier to stop thinking about it.
2. Use a plate. Eating out of a packet or a box while you type is how lunches disappear unnoticed. Put the food on a plate, even at the desk.
3. Give the first five minutes to the food. Nothing on screen, nothing in your hand but the fork. After that, if you want to read or watch something, at least you have tasted the meal.
4. Turn your chair or move. Swivel to face the window, or sit at another spot in the room. A different view tells your brain that this is a different part of the day.
5. Keep food and drinks to the side. Crumbs and keyboards don't mix, and a drink right in front of the keyboard is one elbow away from a spill. Put the plate and the glass to one side, not between you and the keys.
6. Stand up when you finish. Take the plate back to the kitchen, refill your water, look out of a window for a minute. Two minutes away from the chair is better than none.

When the culture is the problem

In some workplaces nobody takes lunch, and the first person to leave feels like they are slacking. If that is your office, you are not going to fix it alone, but small things spread. Block lunch on your calendar so it looks like what it is, a commitment. Ask a colleague to come with you once a week. If you run a team, take your own lunch where people can see you do it, and avoid booking meetings over midday. People copy what they see more than what they are told.

At home the problem is different: there is no culture at all, just you and a laptop on the kitchen table. Moving to another room to eat, or even to the other end of the same table with the laptop shut, makes the same point.

A reminder that waits for a good moment

The hardest part of a lunch break is often just noticing that it is lunchtime before the window has gone. Notchpals has a Meals character for that: Mirchi, a chili with a temper, which you can pick when you first set up your crew. Give it your usual lunch time during setup and it comes by once a day, within an hour either side of that time, while you are at the Mac.

MirchiLUNCH! Now! Whatever you're doing can wait! Your stomach can't!

Done means you are getting up. If you are mid-sentence, Later buys 20 minutes before Mirchi asks once more. Letting the bubble time out counts as Later too, so if you ignore Mirchi twice, that was your lunch reminder for the day. If your crew also has a Movement character, its Short walk visit turns up once in the early afternoon, between 1:30 and 3:30 PM, a natural follow-on to the 20 minutes away.

Notchpals can't make you leave the desk. What it can do is tap you on the shoulder before lunchtime slips past, and then the 20 minutes are yours.