Lunch Hour Love: Workers of the World, Grab a Bite!

July 1, 2010— -- For most Americans, the lunch hour has become a laughable exaggeration.

According to recent polls, the average worker takes less than 20 minutes away from his or her desk each day for lunch. Many never leave the desk at all and end up wolfing down their meal by the glow of their computer screens.

Tony Schwartz, author of "The Way We're Working Isn't Working," wants to change all that.

Schwartz in a new initiative called "Take Back Your Lunch" is inviting workers the world over to reclaim that elusive mid-day break every Wednesday at noon this summer -- for the sake of their health, their sanity, and their productivity.

"The demand in people's lives overwhelms their capacity. We need to stop operating as if we were computers -- we operate better when we pulse between spending and recovering energy," Schwartz says.

"The most logical time to take a break is in the middle of the day. I think of lunch as the centerpiece for building rhythm back into your life."

The initiative opened last Wednesday with events at Madison Square Park in New York City as well as other outdoor locations across the country. Workers from 85 cities are currently organizing Wednesday meet-ups in an effort to reclaim not only time to eat, but time to recharge, socialize, and better equip themselves for the workload of the afternoon.

Take Back Your Lunch is part of the work done by the Energy Project, a company Schwartz founded in 2003 to address flaws in the modern work schedule that impact not only productivity but happiness.

"Lunch is going the way of breakfast," says David Dinges, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. "It's become part of the rat race."

"Eating, like sleep, is seen as eating up time, and time is more valuable than money in our world. People will trade that eating and sleep time in a heartbeat for time to run one more errand, do more work," he says.