Recovery Builds Performance. Leadership Makes It Stick.
It’s 3 pm and you’ve been in back-to-back meetings since 8:30 am, fired off countless emails, and skimmed more reports than you can count. Your eyes are glazing over, your back’s protesting, and you’re reaching for that third coffee of the day.
Sound familiar?
We tell ourselves we just need to push through. That’s what productive people do, isn’t it? They don’t stop until everything’s ticked off the list.
Except the data says otherwise.
What the Top Performers Actually Do
According to a 2025 study by DeskTime — which tracked 75,000 knowledge workers — the most productive employees weren’t powering through. They were working in rhythm: 75 minutes of focus, followed by 33 minutes away from their screens.
I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, that’s like taking three lunch breaks in a day!”
But those 33 minutes weren’t breaks in the “I’m outta here” sense.
They happened while people were still very much at work: walking between offices, having standing conversations, making coffee while brainstorming, taking calls on their feet. Different tasks that DeskTime’s CEO Artis Rozentals says are “vital for mental rejuvenation.”
In earlier studies, DeskTime uncovered similar patterns — 52/17, 90/20 — all pointing to the same thing: we do better work when we honour the cycle of effort and recovery.
And no one understands this better than elite athletes. As Venus Williams told me last year,
Pros take breaks. It’s the amateurs who don’t.
She spoke about regularly taking breaks from training and competing, even at the peak of her performance, to stay fresh and maintain her edge.
Rest Is a Strategy, Not a Perk
That mindset isn’t just for champions — it applies at your desk, too.
Slack’s Workforce Index found that while half of desk workers don’t take breaks during the day, the ones who do report higher productivity, better work-life balance, and significantly lower burnout.
To test the theory internally, Slack ran a two-week experiment: they added daily break prompts and got leaders to visibly model taking breaks. Real breaks jumped 65% and the results speak for themselves:
- Productivity up 21%
- Work-life balance up 73%
- Ability to manage stress increased 230%!!
- Focus up 92%
- Satisfaction up 63%
What I find interesting about this is that it wasn’t just about nudging people to take breaks — it was about leadership modelling recovery out loud. When managers took visible, unapologetic breaks, it gave everyone else permission to do the same.
What Leadership That Prioritises Recovery Looks Like
So if leadership is the lever, what does it look like to design for recovery — and lead by example?
Here are three ways leaders can move beyond talk and build breaks into the rhythm of work:
1) Fix calendar defaults: Most organisations schedule meetings in 30 or 60-minute blocks, which creates back-to-back marathons. Switch to 25 or 50-minute meetings as your new default. That built-in buffer gives people time to grab water, use the bathroom, or simply breathe before the next session.
2) Make movement normal: Open long meetings with 90 seconds to stand, stretch, or breathe. Encourage walking 1:1s, especially for coaching or creative sessions and where possible, design your space to encourage resets: water away from desks, easy outdoor access, desks near windows.
3) Model it publicly: When leaders take breaks visibly and unapologetically, it gives the whole team permission to do the same. Blocking focus or reset time in your calendar, or saying, “Taking a 20-minute reset, back at 2:40,” normalises what sustainable performance looks like.
So, if performance depends on recovery: How are you designing for it — and how are you modelling it?