![]() Heather and I, along with Quartz At Work contributing editor Khe Hy, took a 25-minute fika break in the mid-afternoon. The self-consciousness vanishesīy day four, we fell into a groove. ![]() Two breaks per day was already feeling like overkill for the team. And on one day, a company-wide meeting conflicted with our morning fika, so we canceled the session, which was fine. A last-minute trip overseas meant our senior reporter in California, Corinne Purtill, couldn’t join the experiment. Sadly, Sarah, who had been the one most looking forward to having these pauses imposed on her (“I forget to socialize when I’m working, but I want to,” she told me), got sick, and missed most of the week. We knew our laptops and phones were filling up with messages, but we tried not to care.ĭuring the rest of the week, fika attendance was spotty. Her recounting prompted musings on wedding and marital traditions, like the taking of a spouse’s last name. Oliver joined again, and so did our colleague Leah Fessler, who shared details from her weekend bachelorette trip to Miami. The second fika that day was more festive, with Heather Landy, our section editor, assembling a plate of dried persimmons, cheese slices, apples, and chocolate graham crackers from Trader Joe’s. Indeed, people are more creative when their thoughts are roaming. Though we got off on the wrong foot by discussing work, it at least led to the kind of free-ranging conversation that supposedly makes fika-ing a verified source of the best ideas at Swedish companies. Quartz At Work senior reporter Oliver Staley, the only other team member in the building that morning, eventually wandered over after a phone call, asking, “So what do we do?” The awkwardness wore off when we allowed ourselves to briefly talk about work, which somehow segued to an incredible episode of the This American Life podcast, about a man trying to figure out whether his biological father was actually his uncle. (“Fika” is “ back slang” for the older Swedish word for coffee, kaffi, which is now kaffe-but even coffee is optional when you fika.) I consulted Anna Brones, the co-author of Fika: The Art of The Swedish Coffee Break (Penguin Random House 2015), on this point, and learned that there are no fika police, that substitutions are fine, and that not only do you not have to eat a sweet treat to fika, food doesn’t need to be involved in it at all. After all, many of us eat enough sugary and processed foods as it is, inviting health consequences like memory loss and tooth erosion we don’t need to turn coworkers’ birthdays into occasions to indulge in even more of it. ![]() And indeed, there are good reasons to eschew cake at the office. In our team of six, a few people had no response at all, which I took as a “meh.” The one main concern of the group was the idea of eating cake every day for the duration of the experiment, since we’re all fairly health conscious here. When I proposed we test it out, the reaction from my peers was mixed. So how would a team of American workers react to a full week of fika? A resistance to change (and sugar) “In the UK, there’s afternoon tea, and merienda in Spain, South America, and the Philippines, but few cultures practice the midday psychic recharge as intentionally and regularly as the Swedish,” she wrote. If you feel like you can wrestle 10 minutes from your laptop’s claim on your time, you probably have a doctor’s appointment to schedule, or a friend or loved one needing to hear from you-there isn’t idle time to sit and be, well, idle. Nor does US law guarantee maternity or paternity leave, whereas parents in Canada have the right to up to 18 paid months away.īy now I’ve adapted to New York expectations, which means I’ve also come to understand that breaks are rare here, not only because of the relentless drive to achieve and compete, but because that ethos pushes the rest of your life to the margins. The Canadian government also mandates 10 paid days of vacation per year (about half of what’s guaranteed in most of Europe and in Australia), while the US doesn’t guarantee any time off. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Canadians work fewer hours per week than Americans. Though we don’t have European-style eight-week holidays, or seven-hour days, we still like to feel we have a healthy attitude about work that’s lacking in the US. This is one of the few ways that Canadians, the least exotic of foreigners in the US, differ from their neighbors to the south-or at least it’s a broad generalization Canadians like to believe.
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