Are You Taking Lunch?

Old office culture used to handle this for us.

Someone would lean over the cubicle wall at 12:05 and ask if you were in. Or maybe last night’s delicious leftovers were waiting in the break room fridge. On a good day, the whole team walked two blocks to the taco place and came back with something new to talk about.

Lunch happened because other people made sure it happened. Because we all knew we needed a break.

Now there are flex days, the coworker might only be a Slack status, or the break room is your home kitchen, twelve steps away but somehow out of reach. So we skip it. We eat over the keyboard. We tell ourselves we’re banking time, that we’ll log off early.

But your work doesn’t get better when you’re hungry. Skipped lunches get paid for later in the day. By 3 p.m., you’re rereading the same email three times, snapping at a simple question, and settling for the first idea instead of the best one.

If there’s no one to invite you or you don’t want to join others, make an appointment with yourself. Thirty minutes, scheduled in your calendar, recurring every day.

Consider it a check-in appointment with the person who does all your work.

A 2026 Morning Consult survey for Zoom found that three in four knowledge workers regularly eat lunch at their desks while working, and 35% skip lunch entirely at least once a week.