I'm a millennial manager who never takes lunch. I challenged myself to do it every day for a month and learned to be more like a boomer.

• As a millennial manager, I encourage taking breaks at work but I rarely follow my own advice.
• I'm particularly bad at taking lunch, so I tried to do it every day for a month like a boomer.
• I hoped it'd help me break the habit, but I still have work to do. Let's hope 2024 will be my year.

I don't usually bother with New Year's resolutions, but I have one for 2024: Take a lunch break more often.

It might sound like a simple goal, but I'm terrible at taking lunch. To prove my point, I am literally writing this on what should be my lunch break. Don't get me wrong, I'm eating — just not away from my desk, and usually with Slack and a gazillion tabs open in front of me.

I'm far from the only person who regularly eats sad desk lunches and struggles to pull themselves away from their laptop during the workday.

The era of hybrid work has made it harder for many people to step away and easier to log long hours. As the manager of a team that mostly works from home, I try to be aware of this and often encourage my reports to take breaks and eat lunch away from their screens.

The trouble is I'm bad at following my own advice.

Skipping lunch could be a generational thing

I've heard some millennial managers say that their Gen Z reports can be better about setting work-life boundaries and have been inspired by them to start enjoying their lives more outside of work.

But even Gen Z isn't taking lunch every day.

Seventy percent of Gen Z workers surveyed by the company ezCater this November said they don't take lunch once a week at a minimum. For millennial workers who participated in the survey of 5,000 full-time employees in the US, that figure dipped to 50%.

Gen X was slightly better off with around 40% of that generation saying they miss lunch at least once weekly. But boomers reigned supreme, with just around a third saying they ditch their lunch break once a week.

Wanting to break out of my millennial habits, squarely in the 50% of my generation who doesn't do lunch, I set out on a challenge to be more like a boomer and take lunch every day for a month.

My challenge to lunch like a boomer was no picnic in the park

It started out strong.

For the first few days, I found that carving out a half hour each day to take lunch and blocking the time on my work calendar helped me actually take a break. Like clockwork, I set my Slack emoji to a bowl of salad or a sandwich, then left my desk to sit at my kitchen island or dining table to eat, usually with a book in hand.

But by day four, I messed up. I got busy so I skipped a proper break and ate a sandwich at my desk between meetings. I felt like I'd failed and was annoyed it was so early into the challenge, but I told myself I'd be better the next day and had the rest of the month to break out of my bad habits.

Over the following weeks, I had mixed success.

Some days, I took a walk to pick up lunch and on one occasion I made myself proud by going to a café down the road and enjoying a sit-down lunch there — something I only ever occasionally do, and even then, only if I'm in the office and going out to lunch with a colleague.

Usually, I returned to my desk after lunch feeling refreshed and more energized, but I did notice that when I spent longer on my lunch break it usually correlated with me staying online later at the end of the workday. Whatever time I'd spent away from my desk earlier, I made up for later, it seemed.

Inevitably, on a few days, I missed lunch again. But instead of giving myself a hard time about it, I found ways to take other kinds of breaks. If it was busy around lunchtime, and I just couldn't find time to step away, I'd block time out in my calendar to take a walk later in the afternoon or have a coffee break, even if it was just 15 minutes.

I learned that a better work-life balance doesn't mean always taking lunch

I found it doesn't have to be all or nothing when it comes to work-life balance. Putting pressure on myself to step away from work around midday sometimes made me feel more stressed out than if I just finished whatever task I was working on at my desk while having a desk lunch. 

I've admittedly slipped back into not taking lunch most days since my month-long challenge. But in reality, taking a half-hour lunch break isn't always feasible every day. Instead, I'll try to celebrate other small work-life balance wins like logging off earlier now and then or taking a mid-afternoon walk. Or if I didn't take a break on a certain day, I'll acknowledge that and tell myself tomorrow to set aside time for some sort of break.

Thinking back on the challenge, I find it interesting that treating lunch as a "task" related to my work made me more likely to take a break. So next year, I'll be adding "take lunch" to my to-do list.

Even if I can't cross it off every day, I hope I'll take a page out of the boomer book and, at the very least, do it more often.