In the middle of the last century a group of people worked in shifts on problems of extraordinary consequence. The work was secret, relentless and exacting; a lapse in concentration could cost more than anyone in the room could see. Sometimes during breaks they walked around the lake; they played games on the lawn. Those in charge understood that people needed these breaks. The workers might not have called this an intervention, yet it seems to have been part of how very pushed minds kept working.
Many people who make decisions under pressure today have no lake; what they do have: a desk, a screen and the next email already arriving just as their phone rings. Colleagues who might once have suggested a walk are on a call, working from home or under the same pressure themselves. The step outside, if it happens at all, tends to be a scroll through a phone, which can offer distraction more than rest.
This essay asks whether three carefully structured minutes and one personally meaningful image might be an effective intervention for today’s very pushed minds making decisions at work.
Who is this for
This is not an essay about people in crisis. It is about someone else: the person at work who is stretched but still steady. They are good at what they do and want to keep doing it well. They wonder if they are out of their depth. Their decisions carry weight for clients, patients, colleagues or the public and they make many of them in a day, often quickly and often with something else competing for their attention.
They may be a solicitor deciding how to advise a client before the end of the afternoon, a clinician between appointments, or a manager with three urgent requests and room to answer only one properly. None of them is failing. But each is working in conditions that make good judgement and decision making under time constraints perhaps harder than they need be.
I have spent over twenty years in law and have seen this: capable, conscientious colleagues being asked to do more than time allowed. What I noticed was not that they made bad decisions but that the conditions rarely helped and encouraged them to take time and make their best ones. The question this essay asks grew from that observation.
The question and why decision quality matters
There is already reason to think that a short break can help people feel better. But feeling better and deciding better are not the same thing. Someone can feel calmer and still decide poorly; someone can feel harried and still decide well. This essay is interested in deciding better.
For me decision quality at work has two main parts. The first is process: how a decision is reached. Did the person consider alternatives, weigh the relevant information, notice what was missing and resist the pull of the first plausible answer? Research suggests that pressure tends to push people towards more habitual thinking and a narrower focus. The second is outcome: whether the decision itself was better. Did the error get caught? Was the right option chosen?
Both matter. A good outcome reached by luck is not reliable. A careful process for decision making that still leads to a poor choice may point to something else going on. A useful intervention should improve the process in ways that, over time, show up in the outcomes.
What Saelarc is
Saelarc is the tool I am building to make this question testable. I conceived and designed Saelarc and direct its development. I write it with Claude Code and continue to test my research, ideas and work with Claude and against other AI tools along the way. It’s taken nearly a year so far and I started by typing .html in WordPad. Transparency is at the core of Saelarc; it is right to be open about how it is being made. Learning to build with AI is part of the project for me.
Saelarc offers a carefully structured three-minute visual experience using an image the person chooses: a photo or an artwork from their own device. It uses no AI and the image never leaves their device. The current prototype of Saelarc uses my own drawings and there is an option to upload any image. My drawings are the default setting simply because they were mine to share. Saelarc is not about my art. What matters is the image that means something to the person using it.
Saelarc runs entirely in the browser and a person’s images and reflections never leave their device. There is no feed, nothing to scroll and nothing pulling the user onwards. The experience ends and the person returns to their work.
Privacy is a principle but it also matters for the evidence. People under pressure at work are unlikely to use something regularly if they suspect it reports on them and a tool nobody uses honestly cannot answer anything. Saelarc is not offered as a proven remedy. It is a consistent, private way to give many people the same carefully structured experience, which is exactly what a study needs.
Saelarc is free to use and early feedback suggests that viewing on a phone is the best experience.
(a) How can this be evidenced?
One difficulty is that better decisions are hard to measure. Whether a solicitor’s decision making has actually improved may only become clear months later and even then other factors play their part.
The evidence for this is likely to come in two kinds.
The first is from real life. People who use Saelarc at work can say what they noticed: whether they came back to a decision differently, slowed down where they would have rushed or saw an option they might otherwise have missed. A reflections tool is built in so that people can look back over their own experience. It is private to them: their reflections stay on their device and are never sent to me. This kind of feedback reaches me only if someone chooses to write to me at hello@saelarc.com about what they noticed. That is both its strength and its limit. It shows how the experience fits into a working day, which no study can. But it is people judging themselves and I surmise that it will tend to come from those who found it helpful. It can show that the experience is valued. It cannot, on its own, show that decisions improved.
The second kind would come from controlled comparisons of the sort a research partner might run. The same people could complete decision tasks under time pressure on different occasions, once after three minutes with their personally meaningful image and once without, so each person is compared with themselves. Some tasks would have known best answers. Others would be realistic professional dilemmas, such as how to respond to a difficult client email, with the responses rated by experts who do not know whether the person had the three minutes beforehand. Researchers could also look at how people decide: how many options they considered, what information they checked and how long they took.
Neither kind is enough alone. Real-life reports keep the question honest about working life; controlled comparisons test whether the effect is real. Together they could begin to answer the question.
(b) The three minutes, the image, the meaning, or another factor?
If decisions do improve, the next question is why. At least four ingredients could be doing the work:
The three minutes. Time away from the task may help on its own. Research on short breaks suggests they might help people feel more energetic and less tired, though their effects on performance are less consistent.
The image. Some images may help whoever looks at them. Attention restoration theory proposes that natural scenes hold attention gently, allowing the effortful kind of focus to recover. There is some evidence that even pictures of nature can have this effect.
The meaning. An image chosen because it matters to the person looking at it: a place, a person, an artwork. This is probably the least studied ingredient and possibly the most interesting. There is some evidence that looking at a photograph of a loved one can change how people experience pain. Whether meaning can also change how people decide under pressure is an open question.
Another factor. The structure of the experience itself, its pacing, its transitions and the way it ends, may matter in ways none of the other three captures.
These ingredients can be separated by comparison: no break at all, with people going straight to the decision; three minutes with a blank screen; with a neutral image; with a nature scene; with a personally meaningful image; and with the same meaningful image but without the careful structure. Each comparison removes one ingredient and shows what it was contributing.
The answer matters. If the three minutes alone do the work, the image is decoration, which is still worth knowing. If any calm image works, a tool could simply offer one. If the structure matters, how the experience is designed becomes part of the answer. But if meaning makes the difference, that says something about how minds recover: that what restores us may be personal rather than generic.
An open question and an invitation
I do not know the answer to the question this essay asks. That is the reason for asking it carefully and for asking it in public.
I would welcome conversations with researchers in empirical aesthetics, neuroaesthetics, decision science and the field of arts and health, as well as with organisations whose people make important decisions under pressure. The question needs more than one discipline and more than one person to answer it well. I can be reached at hello@saelarc.com.
The people by the lake did not need a study to know that stepping outside helped. Most of us no longer have the lake. It may be worth finding out whether Saelarc, in three minutes, can take its place.