[magsafe]

Am I the only one that considers lunch to be a sacred, personal time that I don't want to spend on small talk with coworkers? I need my lunch break to recover from the day's stress and pace, so I can come back refreshed and ready to code for 4-5 more hours. As an introvert, I find the team lunches to be waay more stressful than actual work, and that eliminates any benefits of a nicely cooked meal. If I end up in a team lunch situation, I find it hard to be productive for the rest of the day (unless I take a separate mini-lunch break by myself later).

The situation was especially bad at one recent job where the lunch conversations always revolved around local sports, which I had no interest in, or this guy remodeling his house, which was only interesting the first 3 times he gave us an update. So I started bringing sandwiches to work, parking in the garage beneath the building, and eating lunch all alone in my car in the dark, listening to NPR or just enjoying the silence. It was the most refreshing hour of my workday and I felt 200% more productive after that break than I would after 30 minutes of small talk about sports.

I just want to point this out to people who think team lunches should be mandatory. Not everyone enjoys them equally, and it's not always just about the food.

[bane]

I used to scarf down lunch as fast as possible and get back to work. Then I met my wife (who's South Korean). Koreans, despite being workaholics (in a grossly simplified general sense) have a cultural predisposition to drop everything and savor their meals. It drove me absolutely up-the-wall when we first met. Meals were something to get through as quickly as possible and then back to work.

But over time, as my work responsibilities have increased (and my work stress), I've learned to value meal time as a moment of peace in a stressful day -- an island of solitude. I take meals now with purpose, savoring every bite, spending the time to enjoy the food and simply enjoy the act of eating. I seek out places with nice atmospheres and good quality food.

As a result my health is better, my stress is better managed, and I find the pacing aspect of it keeps my head in the game when I return to work.

It's been an important lesson I've continued to enjoy.

I know other people who don't like this, maybe it's an introvert/extrovert thing. But the 30min-1hr lunch where I really just enjoy my own thoughts really gives me a second wind...especially late in the week.

[jimbokun]

My work environment has a high concentration of nerdy people with similar interests to mine, so I look forward to our lunchtime conversations, even though I'm also pretty strongly introverted.

[jc4p]

I'm really really glad you mentioned this, it's something I wanted to touch on in the blog post but it was getting too side-tracked. I'm definitely in the same boat as you, my previous job used to be in an open office environment (at two different co-working places so it was LOTS of different teams worth of open office environments) and my lunch hour would be the only alone time I got.

Everything changed when I started at Stack though. As an introverted person I don't always want to be alone, but being alone is what makes me "recharge" so to speak. What's nice about having a private office all the time is I can choose to communicate with other people or not, there's always long-running Google Hangouts I can drop into if I just want to talk to another human being, or I can choose to be alone by myself for the entire day. Lunch though, is the only time I get face to face with my coworkers and it turns out I kind of miss that from being in an open office environment.

There's lots of people here that work on different teams and do drastically different things than me which would make it so I wouldn't communicate with them at all if I didn't simply grab lunch at the office and sit down at a random table.

I definitely agree with you that lunch as a team should never be mandatory though, it's asinine to steal an extra hour or whatever from everyone at your company with the goal of "morale" or whatever they want to say behind it. I'm super happy with the setup at Stack though, it works pretty well.

[df07]

I wrote the article and I probably end up working through lunch (or most of lunch) at least 2-3 days a week. It's definitely optional.

[drinchev]

> ... to code for 4-5 more hours

Are you really doing this? My personal record ( when I was a full time employee ) was 4 hours of summed coding time ( I track my time with RescueTime [1] ).

I was usually finding myself to code ( commit actual features and finding cause of bugs ) 2 hours before noon and 2 hours after lunch.

The other time I was usually in meetings / discussing issues / planning / writing documentation / improving dev environment / e-mail / communication with team.

[1] http://www.rescuetime.com

[aalear]

It's definitely very optional here (at SE). Some people just grab a plate of food and go back to their office/desk/secluded corner to enjoy it by themselves or with a smaller group.

[iolothebard]

When I graduate college I was going to be frugal.

Working as a consultant, we always went out for lunch. After getting used to it (as a hard defined break from work), I can't imagine just staying at work all day without giving my mind a break.

If I don't leave work now, my productivity is shit in the afternoon. Well shittier than normal. As a morning person, I get 90% of my work done before lunch and tie up loose ends after lunch and plan the next days/weeks. Flex time is nice too, coming in to work at 5-6am then lunch at 11, home at 3 rocks.

[j-b]

No, you're not alone. For lunch I drive to the park, eat my sandwich while listening to NPR, then get out and go for a solitary walk in nature. It's a lot more refreshing than sitting and talking with the same co-workers I share the rest of the day with.

[sjs382]

This. I use lunchtime as more of a time to break away from the office and reset, rather than to eat (though, I eat too).

In situations where I had a private office, I was more receptive to socializing with my coworkers.

[serve_yay]

I've spent almost all of the preceding workweek partying and spending time with coworkers who are remote but currently in town. I feel like an empty shell of a human.