The direct answer
Study for 20 minutes in the middle of a 30-minute lunch break: eat for five minutes, test yourself from memory on one small topic for 20 minutes, then check your answers in the last five minutes. Prepare the questions before the break starts, put your phone away, and stop on time. That is the whole system: prepare before, test in the middle, check at the end, and never study through the whole break.
Your lunch break is the only study time you have at work. It is short, it is in the middle of the day, and it is the only gap between your morning shift and your afternoon shift. The temptation is to study through all of it, or to skip lunch and study instead. Both are mistakes. A lunch break spent entirely on study is a break you did not take, and an afternoon worked on an empty stomach is an afternoon that goes badly.
Twenty minutes of testing, five days a week, is 100 minutes of testing a week. That is enough to keep a topic warm and to find out what you have forgotten. It is not enough to learn a new chapter. That is not its job. Its job is the test. The two-hour study system for working students is the parent system; this article takes one small piece of it — the daily test — and fits it into a lunch break. The one-hour study system for working students is the fuller version for students who have a whole hour at home.
The system in short
- Know your real break length, and plan for 20 minutes of study inside it.
- Prepare the questions before the break starts, the day before or that morning.
- Eat for five minutes, then test yourself from memory for 20 minutes.
- Check your answers in the last five minutes, and write down what you got wrong.
- Put your phone away for the whole break, and stop studying on time.
- Keep a wrong-answer list, and test those questions again the next day.
If your break is shorter than 30 minutes, use How to study in short bursts instead — the same test, fitted into 10 or 15 minutes.
Step 1: Know your real break, and prepare before it
Time your break for one week before you plan anything. How long is it, really? When does it start, and when does someone need you back? A break that is 30 minutes on paper is often 25 minutes in practice, once you have walked to the canteen and back. Plan for the real break, not the paper one.
Prepare the study the day before, or in the morning before your shift. Write the questions on cards, or on one page in a small notebook. Five questions is enough. Ten is the most. Put the cards in your pocket or your bag, ready to go. If you have to choose what to study during the break, the break is already half gone.
Use an if-then plan: “When I sit down with my lunch, I will eat for five minutes, then open my cards.” If-then plans raised goal attainment by a medium-to-large amount (d = 0.65) across 94 studies (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006), because the cue and the action are decided in advance. At work, that matters: the break is short, and a break that starts with a decision is a break that ends before you start.
Step 2: Eat first, then test for 20 minutes
Eat first. Five minutes, properly, without your notes open. Then put the food away and open the cards. Close the book, close the notes, and answer the questions from memory. Work the problems. Write down what you remember. Do not read the answers first. Reading the answers first turns a test into a read, and a read is not a test.
In a 2013 review, Dunlosky and colleagues rated ten common study techniques, and only two received a high utility rating: practice testing and distributed practice. Re-reading was rated low. A later meta-analysis found testing yourself beat restudying by a medium amount (g = 0.50), and the advantage was larger with feedback (g = 0.73 with feedback, against g = 0.39 without it) (Rowland, 2014). The checking step is the feedback, and it happens in the last five minutes of the break.
Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found students who recalled a passage remembered more a week later than students who restudied it, even though the restudiers felt more confident straight after studying. Feeling fluent right after re-reading is not the same as remembering a week later. A 20-minute test that feels hard is doing more work than 20 minutes of re-reading that feels easy.
Step 3: Check your answers, then stop on time
Use the last five minutes to check. Open your notes, mark what you got wrong, and add those questions to your wrong-answer list. Then pack up. Stop when the break ends, even if you are in the middle of a question. A break that runs over is a break that makes your afternoon late, and a late afternoon is a cost the system cannot pay.
Put your phone away for the whole break. Not on silent on the table. Away: in your bag, in your pocket, face down. One study found a phone on the desk cost focus even when it was off — but a later replication did not find the effect, so the evidence is mixed (Ward et al., 2017). Treat “phone away” as a practical system, not a proven fact. At work, the practical reason is enough: a phone on the table during a 20-minute test is a phone that eats the test.
Step 4: Use the evening for the rest, and review on Sunday
The evening, or the morning, or the weekend, does the rest: new material, longer sessions, and the weekly review. The lunch test keeps yesterday’s topic warm so the evening session starts from a better place. Without the evening, the lunch test alone is not enough. With it, the lunch test is the difference between a topic you remember and a topic you have to relearn.
Review the week on Sunday, in 15 minutes. Count the lunch tests you completed. Look at the wrong-answer list: which questions are still wrong after three tests? Those are next week’s first tests. Then write next week’s cards, five questions per day, and put them in your bag on Sunday night. A week of lunch tests prepared on Sunday is a week that happens. A week prepared during the break is a week that does not.
Use a practical starting schedule for review: a topic the next day, then after three days, then after seven days. Spaced practice beats massed practice, and the right gap grows with how long you need to remember the material (Cepeda et al., 2006). This 1–3–7 schedule is a practical starting point, not a research rule.
A worked example: a 30-minute break, five days a week
You work 9am to 5pm. Your lunch break is 12:30 to 1:00. You prepared five question cards the night before.
| Part of the break | Time | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Eat and settle | 12:30–12:35 | Eat lunch, phone in your bag |
| Test from memory | 12:35–12:55 | Answer the five cards, no notes open |
| Check and pack up | 12:55–1:00 | Check answers, note wrong ones, pack up |
That is 20 minutes of testing a day, 100 minutes a week. The numbers are the plan’s own totals, not a research finding. The shape is what matters: eat, test, check, stop on time.
If your break is 45 minutes, study for 25 minutes and take a real 20-minute break around it: 10 minutes to eat and rest, 25 to test, 10 to check and rest again. If your break is 20 minutes, study for 10: eat in five, test for 10, check in five. The pattern stays the same. Only the minutes change.
The system in a diagram
When it goes wrong
You study through the whole break and skip lunch. Stop. A break with no food and no rest is not a study session. It is a debt, and the afternoon pays it. Eat first, every day, even if it means studying for 15 minutes instead of 20. Fifteen minutes after food beats 25 minutes on an empty stomach.
You spend the break choosing what to study. Prepare the cards before the break. If you arrive at lunch with no cards, do not study that day. Eat, rest, and prepare the cards that evening for tomorrow. A missed day is a missed day. A break spent choosing is a break spent on nothing.
Work runs over and your break shrinks to 10 minutes. Do a 5-minute test: three questions, from memory, checked in one minute. Or skip the day. A 10-minute break is for eating. Do not try to fit a 20-minute test into it. The system survives a missed day. It does not survive a lunch break that never happens.
You test every day but never check your answers. The check is the feedback, and without feedback the test is only half the method. If the last five minutes keep disappearing, check the answers at the start of the next day’s test instead: five minutes checking yesterday, then 20 minutes testing today. The feedback still happens. It just moves.
Weekly review checklist
Copy this list and use it every Sunday:
- How many lunch tests did I complete this week, and which did I miss?
- Which questions are still on my wrong-answer list after three tests?
- Did I eat first every day, or did study eat my lunch?
- Are my cards ready for next week: five questions per day, in my bag?
- What one change will I make next week: different time, different place, or shorter test?
Downloadable infographic spec: one vertical image, title “The 5–20–5 lunch break”, with the eat–test–check pattern, the memory-first rule, and the five-question weekly review, in Thynq cream, Cloud Purple, Dark Purple and pink, with the cloud mascot. Text taken word-for-word from this article.
What this system is not
It is not a promise of a grade, and it is not a claim that 20 minutes a day is enough on its own. It is not. A lunch break test is one piece of a study system, not the whole system. It is a way to keep topics warm, find out what you have forgotten, and use a gap that would otherwise disappear. If your course needs more hours, those hours have to come from the morning, the evening, or the weekend — not from your lunch.
Sources
- Dunlosky, J., et al. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14 (1), 4-58. Only practice testing and distributed practice received a high utility rating; rereading was rated low.
- Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: a meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6), 1432-1463. Testing beat restudy by g = 0.50; with feedback g = 0.73, without feedback g = 0.39.
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning. Science, 311, 648-649.
- Cepeda, N. J., et al. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380.
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006).
- Ward, A. F., et al. (2017). Brain drain: the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2). One study found a phone on the desk cost focus even when off; a later replication did not find the effect, so the evidence is mixed.
For the full system behind these lunch tests, start with the two-hour study system for working students, and for the fuller one-hour version, read the one-hour study system for working students.
Questions
How long should I study on my lunch break?
About 20 minutes of study inside a 30-minute break. Use five minutes to eat and settle, 20 minutes to test yourself, and five minutes to check your answers and pack up. Do not study through the whole break.
What is the best thing to study in 20 minutes?
Testing yourself on one small topic from memory. Flashcards, five practice questions, or writing down what you remember from yesterday. Twenty minutes is enough for a test. It is not enough for learning a new chapter.
Should I eat first or study first?
Eat first, even if it is only five minutes. Studying while hungry is slow study, and eating after the test means the food waits. Eat, then test, then check your answers in the last five minutes.
What if my lunch break is only 20 minutes?
Then study for 10 minutes, not 20. Eat in five, test for 10, check in five. A 10-minute test five days a week is 50 minutes of testing a week, and that is a real contribution to your course.
