Everyone has that person in the office. You know, the one who always seems to get way more done than everybody else, but who never seems stressed or frantically trying to finish an assignment. How does he or she get it done? And can you steal those secrets to improve your own productivity? 
 
 Yes. Yes you can. 
 
 Using time-tracking and productivity app DeskTime, we’ve been able to study the habits of the most productive employees—and pinpoint the working flow that leads to that incredible ability to get things done. 
 
 And the trick might surprise you. Turns out, what the most productive 10% of our users have in common is their ability to take effective breaks. Specifically, the most productive people work for 52 minutes at a time, then break for 17 minutes before getting back to it (similar to the Pomodoro Method—more on that here). 
 
 The employees with the highest productivity ratings, in fact, don't even work eight-hour days. Turns out, the secret to retaining the highest level of productivity over the span of a workday is not working longer—but working smarter with frequent breaks. 
 
 The reason the most productive 10% of our users are able to get the most done during the comparatively short periods of working time is that their working times are treated as sprints. They make the most of those 52 minutes by working with intense purpose, but then rest up to be ready for the next burst. In other words, they work with purpose. 
 
 Working with purpose can also be called the 100% dedication theory—the notion that whatever you do, you do it full-on. Therefore, during the 52 minutes of work, you’re dedicated to accomplishing tasks, getting things done, and making progress. Whereas, during the 17 minutes of break, you’re completely removed from the work you’re doing—you’re entirely resting, not peeking at your email every five minutes or just “quickly checking Facebook.” 
 
 There are a lot of surprising benefits to this rest time. First and foremost to your levels of productivity, working for long periods of time can be detrimental to your level of engagement with a certain task. Repeating tasks leads to cognitive boredom, which in turn halts your ability to thrive at whatever you’re doing. The human brain just wasn’t built to focus for eight hours at a time—the best way to refresh attention span is to take a break. 
 
 In addition, the human body has never been made to sit for eight hours straight, and research has shown that breaking up the all-day sit-a-thon can improve productivity. (Oh, it also makes you way healthier.) 
 
 This amount of off time may seem high, but if you take a look at world-class musicians, they become great by practicing in similar increments of time. Really—we’re reaching the level of the greats. We’re talking completely dedicating yourself to not working. 
 
 So, how can you make the most of your breaks in order to get the most out of your working sprints? First, step away from the computer (and the smartphone). Do some little exercises in your office, or step outside and take a walk around to clear your mind and get your body moving. Chat with some of your co-workers (not about work)—research shows that employees who socialize are both happier at work and are able to do as much as their non-socializing co-workers, who as a result spend more time working. Grab something healthy to eat to replenish your energy levels. Or, if you must stay on the computer for some reason, watch some funny animal videos—it's shown that looking at cute pictures of cats and dogs can actually lead to increased productivity. 
 
 A person can't be 100% productive all day. As much as you want to make the most of every minute, to get stuff done, to hustle, it's just not humanly possible. Concentration is like a muscle: It needs to rest to be able to function, and it shouldn't be overworked. Otherwise it'll simply burn out and take longer to get back into the swing of things. 
 
 So, make a commitment to take some serious breaks this week. If 17 minutes every hour feels like too much (to you—or your boss) consider just taking five or 10 every hour and seeing what effect it has. The results could surprise you. ||||| g-stockstudio via Getty Images A new study finds that efficient workday breaks can include simply doing something enjoyable. 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 Do you count walking to the office bathroom as taking a break? What about keeping one eye on your email while checking the News feed on your cell phone with the other? Or eating a sad-looking salad at your desk for lunch? 
 
 If you answered yes to any of those questions, your workday needs a serious upgrade. 
 
 Many of us don't take any breaks at work -- roughly 80 percent of U.S. employees don't even take a lunch break -- and when we do, we're often going about them the wrong way. 
 
 In a new study, researchers from Baylor University found, our health, productivity and job satisfaction can suffer when we don't make good use of the time we take to step away from work-related activities. 
 
 For the study, researchers asked 95 employees to record all the breaks they took over the course of a workweek, which added up to a total of 959 breaks, or an average of two breaks per person each day. 
 
 These breaks consisted of any period of time during which employees disengaged from work-related tasks, from an hour-long lunch with coworkers to a few minutes spent checking personal email -- they did not, however, include bathroom breaks. Afterwards, the employees were asked questions about their productivity and well-being. 
 
 "We took some of our layperson hypotheses about what we believed were helpful in a break and tested those empirically in the best way possible," Dr. Emily Hunter, one of the study's authors, said in a statement. "What we found was that a better workday break was not composed of many of the things we believed. " 
 
 Contrary to popular belief, you don't necessarily need to go outside or even leave your desk Hunter said. 
 
 Using the responses from the employees the researchers were able to identify which types of breaks tend to leave people feeling the most refreshed -- and it's not necessarily what you might think (or what you're already doing). 
 
 Here are the three best ways to maximize your workday break: 
 
 Take your first one in the morning. While most employees who were part of the study worked through the morning, pausing for breaks at lunch and maybe once again in the afternoon, the researchers found that the later in the day that people took breaks, the more likely they were to report poor focus, fatigue and headaches. 
 
 The best time to take a break is actually mid-morning, before feelings of depletion set in. These early breaks were more effective in replenishing cognitive resources like energy, focus and motivation. 
 
 "You should pace yourself, similar to how plants should be watered early in the day before getting distressed from a long day in the sun," Hunter told The Huffington Post in an email. 
 
 Keep them relatively short, and take them often. Taking more frequent, shorter breaks seemed to be more effective in boosting productivity and warding off fatigue than taking fewer, longer breaks. 
 
 While the researchers weren't able to determine the optimum length of time for a work break, other research has suggested that as little as five minutes can increase energy levels and productivity. 
 
 The idea here is that you're preventing yourself from getting too exhausted, instead of taking time to recover after you've already worn yourself out. 
 
 "Popular wisdom dictates that you should let your cell phone battery deplete to 0% before charging it, but you are not your phone," Hunter said. "Instead, our research finds you should charge yourself more frequently, taking a break from work before your energy depletes to 0%." 
 
 Do something that makes you happy. It doesn't really matter what you do as long as it's something that you truly enjoy doing -- even if it's a work-related passion project. What does that mean? No running errands or paying bills. 
 
 "Preferred activities are more refreshing because they provide a feeling of autonomy and control, they are enjoyable, and they don’t require additional resource expenditure," Hunter said. ||||| I work at home, which I much prefer to going into an office every day, for a whole host of reasons. There's the lack of a commute, which means that the hour and a half I used to spend every day in transit is now devoted to sleep, time with family, and even sometimes more work. There's money saved by not commuting. There's the ability to bathe at a time of your choosing. Most importantly, there's the feeling of autonomy you get from knowing that there isn't someone looking over your shoulder at all times, monitoring your movements. 
 
 But what are people who work at home actually doing with our time? The short answer is, goofing off. But that's only part of the story: 
 
 Based on a survey of 1,013 American office workers, conducted in June by Wakefield Research, 43 percent watch TV or a movie and 20 percent play video games while officially working from home. Parents are more likely than those without children to partake in these two activities, which aren’t work-related. Employees might not even be sober: 24 percent admit to having a drink. Twenty-six percent say they take naps. Others are distracted by housekeeping: 35 percent do household chores; 28 percent cook dinner. Yet despite all the distractions, telecommuters are actually more productive than their peers in the office, according to preliminary findings from Stanford University’s study of a Chinese travel agency. 
 
 I wouldn't necessarily take the results of a study of a Chinese travel agency to be easily extrapolated to the entire American economy, but it makes sense to me. The reason is that people who work in offices spend a great deal of their time doing things other than work. They just happen to be different non-work things than the people who work at home do. If you work in an office, there's a good chance you spend a good deal of time surfing the web, which looks a lot like working to an outside observer, because you're staring at your computer. You also may do things like take hour-long lunch breaks. But more than anything else, you probably spend a lot of time chatting with your co-workers, which is something you don't do if you work at home. 
 
 There's nothing wrong with that. It builds camaraderie and team spirit! But it's really just hanging out, and the fact that you do it in an office while wearing a tie doesn't mean it more closely resembles real work than watching last night's Colbert at noon. 
 
 But you know who doesn't get to do that? People who work on assembly lines. And cashiers. And almost anyone who works for an hourly wage. One of the privileges of being a 21st century knowledge worker is that even in an office your time has a certain flexibility to it, which can make an otherwise unpleasant job tolerable. And now, I'm off to take a nap. Which I used to do by accident pretty often when I worked in an office. The only difference is that after 20 minutes I don't have to jerk up and pretend that I was awake the whole time.
– To maximize your productivity, you should probably be spending a lot more time not working. At least, that is, according to a study that finds we should take 17-minute breaks after every 52 minutes of work. The idea, the Muse reports, is to treat those 52-minute work periods "as sprints," while during the breaks, "we’re talking completely dedicating yourself to not working," Julia Gifford writes. Her team used an app called DeskTime, which keeps track of what workers are doing, to determine the habits of the highest-achieving 10% of employees studied. Researchers have long said that the human brain isn't designed for eight straight hours of focusing, Fast Company reports. And sitting for eight hours isn't good for us either, the Muse notes. Instead, we should take breaks—and actually get away from our computers, perhaps taking a walk, talking with coworkers, or getting a healthy snack. If your boss isn't cool with 17-minute breaks, 5- or 10-minute breaks could be helpful, too, Gifford writes. (Speaking of all that sitting, here's how to walk back the damage it's doing.)