The new year brings some good news. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang says, “Rest more and work less, you will be successful.” He has just released a book by the same title.
As one reads the title, one gets those fleeting fictional images of kings who lay in bed and grapes fell into their mouths, they clapped their hands and maids came in with all kinds of services, they…the imaginative exercise has to stop for Pang intervenes to say, “There are some misconceptions we have about rest…that it is always a completely passive, inactive thing. Rest is not sitting on the sofa and doing nothing. Often, the best and most restorative kind of rest, the kind that recharge our mental batteries and give us energy are active, they can be physically strenuous, mentally challenging, what matters is they take us out of our work day world. They give our minds and opportunity to subconsciously think about and try out new ideas and they provide us with new ideas that we are not able to get in our routine, but which we need to get ahead.”
Continues Pang, “Rest is the time that we expend the mental and psychological energy that we do not spend during work. We come to see rest as unimportant or uninteresting. Rest is actually an active thing and very important in people’s life in helping them be more productive and plays a huge role in the life of creative and productive people. Often overlooked role in the lives of really creative and prolific people…we take these insights and put them in our lives to work less and get more done.”
Pang conceeds that,”The problem is worse since in 80s partly because we are living in an increasingly competitive job market and global economy and partly because we have mobile technology that lets work follow us everywhere and has created an expectation that we are always available…it is harder to know when to stop working… when the sun goes down, when the factory whistle blows…”
As we realise that we have no modern-day clarion call to tell us to stop working, Pang continues by saying that we assume we can get stuff done if we put in more time labouring. There are centuries worth of research that teach us that chronic work and not taking vacations is actually counter productive…more prone to mistakes and less sympathetic to the cause. The argument holds both for individuals as well as for organizations. In the short term longer working hours may yield results but in the long run, it is counter productive.
“The first thing to do is to take rest seriously,” says Pang, “…rest when you finish everything else…you will never get done with ‘everything’...The next step is to look at how your schedule really works. What the studies show is that people who have lot of control over their time, tend to weave rest into their schedule. For people who do not have control, their rest tends to get pushed to evenings and weekends…so strategies will differ. It is really important to maintain strong barriers, wherever possible, between work time and rest time..turn off their phones when you leave work, for example…”
Exercise is a great example of active rest… Pang tells us that if we have a good exercise regimen it will be easier to meet with emergencies and deadlines, that great and prolific authors, on an average, seem to have a very active physical life, for example some are great gardeners…Pang mentions walking and meditation as some of the easy-to access tools for rest.
Pang has some really worthy advice. “Sleep is the original deliberate rest…eight hours in the course of the day is terrific…make a very early start…early hours are often my most productive and creative times, no distraction, by waking up at a time when I am still a little bit groggy, the door between awareness and sleep is still a little bit open…” Pang says that time is the best to maximise the ‘aha’ moments. Not only does Pang advice early hours in the morning for creative work, he also says live by the aphorism, ‘Earn your right to rest ‘.
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