I know people who can work for hours without seemingly needing to take a break, eat or even drink something. They can stay long hours working on a task or several tasks. That is not my case
In my case I learned or understood I work best in bursts. A cycle of actions, achieve something or several things and then rest for a while while thinking about the work done, the next priorities and preparations for next cycle
Another way to see it is thinking about mana. Assuming we all have a limited quantity as a personal reserve and the actions we execute consume it. The good news is it automatically replenished over time. The not so good news at least in my case is that it usually takes more time to replendish as the day advances. In any case and in that context the most important trick here seems to be in the selection of the actions. To take the most of the following full mana cycle
I’m definitely a morning person, these cycles are more effective very early in the morning, less time to recover and also my actions seem to be more effective. Reducing their effect and extending time to replendish in the afternoon and night where is more wiser to change to other types of tasks, less intellectual and more physical or with routinary steps to complete
A break could be a coffee break (mate in my case), make simple exercises, a walk in the room, or even a more monotone task like switch to a personal backlog and do phone call to make a doctor appointment or online procedure for example
In my case the more effective breaks are the ones that frees the mind to think about the results of the last action stage and prioritize next actions where our mana is again fully replenished
If needed you can force it to a more relentless way of working, extending the cycles. But that definitely seems to hurt the replendish cycle and effectiveness of the following actions
The goal here is to finish the day maximizing the effectiveness and count of the action stages
This was a great personal discovery to me that allows me to work with it and not against it. Also allowed me to understand situations where I forced myself to work for long hours without any type of break and later usually got frustrated because I didn’t get a result in line with the time invested. Because I was basically fighting in a situation of ‘not enough mana’