Habits – Part II (the 11am morning tea)

 

Key takeaways:
– Morning tea time is such a luxury in our busy lives;
– Morning tea is when I relax so to boost my work productivity;
– Good habits help our lives but takes time (and efforts) to form;
– Spend time to relax and boost your productivity and life quality.

One thing I learned from my time spent in the UK doing my PhD was the morning/afternoon tea culture. Colleagues would sent a round of email reminders at 10.30 and 3.30 each day to let each other know that it’s tea time. I followed the culture and enjoyed my tea while networking with other professors and research students. Brits are so serious about their tea and milk. When I was in the UK between 1998 and 2001, there were milkman delivering fresh milk from dairy farms in every morning to our office! I was impressed.

After starting my career in a university, I still had tea but the habit of morning tea was quickly replaced by works. Most of the time, I only went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea (or coffee) and then quickly return to work. This new morning tea habit replaced my old habit.

Whenever I’m on holiday and get to visit my parents in a country cottage, I always have morning tea with my parents at 11am. We enjoy Chinese tea and also chat about everything. It’s such a relaxing half-an-hour morning tea that I decided to make it my new habit a few years ago after I returned to work.

Trying to have a 30-mins morning/afternoon tea is such a luxury in my busy schedule that I struggled so hard to ‘squeeze’ that tea session into my calendar. I thought that it would waste my working hours. After trying very hard to form the new habit for a few weeks, I finally found a way to adopt this new habit into my daily working life without lowing my productivity. The secret lies in relaxation.

Studies found that people perform better when they are relaxed. This is why we see top athletes trying to relax before a big game starts; the same for us. Through experiments on myself, I found that my work productivity is elevated after a relaxing tea session on my working day. Even better is that if I enjoy a tea session with others, then I would be happy afterwards. Now I have an 11am morning tea habit.

During my pursue of life quality, happiness and work productivity, the ’11am morning tea’ changes how I see my life. We only have that much time to work in a day, so what matters is not how long you work, but how good your productivity is. Any means to boost productivity is good for our lives, including spending time on morning tea.

Dr. C. Richard Wu @ REEAConsulting.com

NB. You don’t need to be a tea person. The point is not what you drink but how you relax.