In this weeks podcast my guest is one of my favourite authors Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. We discuss why it’s so necessary to rest so that you are more productive and get more done in your life.
You can listen to the podcast here
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Alex Soojung-Kim Pang studies people, technologies, and the worlds they make. His latest book, SHORTER: HOW COMPANIES ARE REDESIGNING THE WORKDAY AND REINVENTING THE FUTURE explores the global movement to shorten working hours, and how companies in a variety of industries are moving to 4-day weeks or 6-hour days without sacrificing productivity or profitability. It’s the third in a series of books that makes the case for recognizing the value of rest in creative and prolific lives, and blend science and history to better understand how we can live and work better in the digital age. His previous books, REST: WHY YOU GET MORE DONE WHEN YOU WORK LESS, and THE DISTRACTION ADDICTION, have been translated into 14 languages. Through his latest venture, The Restful Company, he speaks and consults around the world with companies who want to put this work into practice in their organizations.
Alex received a Ph.D. in history and sociology of science, and has been a lecturer or fellow at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Oxford University, and Microsoft Research Cambridge. A native Californian, he lives in Silicon Valley.
LINKS
The Restful Company: www.restful.company
Blog: www.deliberate.rest
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/askpang
Twitter: @askpang
If you want to read the transcript you can do this here:
Natasha Collins: Hello, and welcome to the NC Podcast. My name’s Natasha Collins and I am the founder of NC Real Estate, which includes its members club for property investors to come and build a profitable property portfolio that completely aligns with their goals.
Natasha Collins: I am so excited today, because I have one of my favorite authors. Because the book that I read this year has completely revolutionized my morning, which has revolutionized my day. And I cannot wait to introduce you and have this conversation. So for those of you who have seen all the posts, the blog posts I put out as well about the book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, I have got Alex Pang who’s authored this book come to speak to me today.
Natasha Collins: Hi, Alex. How are you doing?
Alex Pang: I’m just fine, Natasha. Thanks for having me on.
Natasha Collins: Oh, my absolute pleasure. I’m so excited to have you here. So you’ve just finished a book. Is this the one, Shorter: How Companies are Redesigning the Workday and Reinventing the Future?
Alex Pang: Exactly. So the new book is essentially about companies that are putting Rest into practice by moving to four-day work weeks or six-hour days. And what I love about them is that they are, first of all, incredibly varied, right? I’ve got Michelin-starred restaurants, I have software startups, advertising agencies, or call centers, manufacturers. They’re all over the world. Some of the biggest are in Korea and Japan as well as Scandinavia or the UK or the US.
Alex Pang: And they are shortening their working hours right now, without sacrificing people’s salaries or cutting productivity or alienating clients. So I think it’s … they illustrate for us how it’s possible to do this thing that seems impossible or science fiction-y right now at incredibly low cost with great benefit. So that made it a fun book to write.
Natasha Collins: Amazing. And what are the key benefits that you’ve seen from six-hour days, four days a week. Oh wow, that’s a dream.
Alex Pang: Right. So for organizations, most of them get into it out of a need to … it’s about recruitment and retention for one thing. And, you know, so this is why restaurants do it, for example. They have tremendous issues with retention. And then another one has to do obviously with work/life balance; with making it with attracting more experienced workers when you’re a startup, let’s say; and I think with figuring out how to make companies or institutions more sustainable, right? Sort of, if you want to build a company that doesn’t just get sold in three years, but rather is like a place that you can imagine working for the next 30, you have to think about the work that you do as a marathon rather than a sprint.
Alex Pang: And I think especially when you’re in, let’s say, software or one of these other industries where long hours are the norm, where burnout is virtually a public health crisis, figuring out how to design your organization and design your workday so that you can do this work that you really love for a long time rather than doing it to the point of self-destruction is a real challenge.
Alex Pang: And it’s one that … As I talked about in Rest, there are various things that we can do as individuals to help reach that state. But it’s also really important to recognize that our ability to do that is shaped and constrained by the places where we work, by occupational and professional cultures. But also that those places and those cultures can be re-engineered to support that kind of better rested, more sustainable kind of work.
Alex Pang: So that’s what the next book’s about.
Natasha Collins: Fantastic. Oh, I’m so excited to read it. I cannot wait for that to come out.
Alex Pang: You know, I would love to have an example of a real estate management company or such to be able to throw in here, so if you know of one who wants to give it a try, I would love to talk to them.
Natasha Collins: Okay. I think I know somebody.
Natasha Collins: So can we talk a bit about Rest, because this is the book that I’ve just finished. And as I said, I’ve made changes because of that and it’s just been great. I want to start by asking, what got you excited about studying rest and doing the research for Rest? Why did you begin?
Alex Pang: Well, you know, I first started getting interested in the subject a few years ago when I was on a sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. And I had been, for the previous 10 years, working in Silicon Valley as a technology forecaster and a consultant. Which is really, really interesting work, but it means always that you are at the beck and call of clients; it’s a lot of travel; it’s a lot of jumping from one project to another. And I think like a lot of people I was in that position of feeling increasingly stressed about a job that under other circumstances I would really love, right? It’s work that has an awful lot of appeal about it, but was leading me to a point where I was going to burn out.
Alex Pang: So fortunately I had this chance to sort of step back; I got this fellowship at Microsoft Research. And about a month into it, I was out one evening with my wife. We both had several books with us at this café, and I realized that I was getting enormous amounts of stuff done, I was having really great conversations, I was writing a lot. But at the same time I didn’t feel like the constant time pressure that I did … that is a part of normal life in a place like Silicon Valley.
Alex Pang: That started me thinking that we think of overwork, of long hours, of that kind of time pressure, that stress, the risk of burnout, all as essentially prices that we have to pay in order to do really good work. And this experience made me think, maybe that’s actually backwards. Maybe in order to do really great work we have to figure out how we can build in more rest into our lives.
Alex Pang: And that started me looking at the lives of Nobel Prize winners and other super accomplished people for whom we have really good information about their day-to-day working lives. Also into research on the neuroscience of creativity, the psychology of creativity, that in recent years has first off helped us better understand the role that downtime plays in the creative process; and second, helped us look into the brain in those apparently idle moments when all of a sudden, you know, you’re in the shower, you’re cleaning house, and all of a sudden you have this idea. An aha moment. A solution to a problem maybe that you were thinking about or maybe a new approach that you can try.
Alex Pang: And all of that stuff put together made me realize that there actually is a really interesting story to be told here about the hidden role that rest plays in the lives of really creative people. And that can be explained using this research. It also, you know, for me it offered a way to do good work but also to balance that with rest in a way that seemed to me far better than the way I’d lived before.
Alex Pang: So that’s the story.
Natasha Collins: Okay. So interesting. And so did you start changing your routine first, or did you do the research and then change your routine? What does your daily routine look like now because of it?
Alex Pang: Right. The two of them kind of co-evolved. I do pretty much everything that I talk about in the book. So I think naps are a good example, right? I think I started taking them before I got into the literature on naps. But the science of naps and the relationship between naps and restoration and creativity certainly confirmed to me that this was something really, really worth doing.
Natasha Collins: So do you nap at the moment? You have that in your daily schedule?
Alex Pang: It’s not completely a daily thing; it’s pretty close to it. But I certainly am willing to do it whenever I feel tired. You know, when I get to that stage where previously I would have like had some more coffee. I’m the sort of person who, with practice, has learned to drop off for about 20 minutes. And, you know, a relatively short nap I find is restorative in a way that more caffeine is not necessarily.
Alex Pang: So naps are one thing that I do. I think, like you, I have found that developing a good morning routine turns out to be a very powerful way of setting up the rest of the day. And of getting a lot done and having a sense of accomplishment much earlier in the day. Which really kind of brightens up everything.
Alex Pang: And so I’ve become more serious about exercise. I haven’t had another sabbatical yet, which is one of the other things I talk about in the book, but I’m ever hopeful that someone will come through with another offer. So to the extent that I can do the things that I talk about in the book, I absolutely do them.
Alex Pang: And I think that the proof of their value is that it took me, what, like 10 years or so to write my first book. And in the time since I’ve been doing all this stuff, the stuff that I talk about in Rest, I have written now three books in about six years. So I am working better. I think I’m having better ideas. And I certainly have a far better work/life balance than I ever did before.
Natasha Collins: And have you managed to set up your business in that time as well? Or have you always worked for yourself as a consultant?
Alex Pang: It’s been a mix of working either for other people or of running The Restful Company. So I think like a lot of new ventures, it’s one that sort of started out as more of a kind of side gig or stage name and has become more of a thing over time. However all the books are ones that I’ve done while doing something else as well.
Alex Pang: And indeed one of the reasons that for plenty of us morning routines are really important is that you’ve got to go off to your day job. And so the super early morning is a time when you can work on your own stuff. And so that’s another reason why it really matters.
Natasha Collins: Yeah. I mean, definitely since reading your book, and I think I’ve raved about this as well, I realized how my daily routine just wasn’t there. And if I moved everything to before 9:00 a.m. then that would give me the whole day to go out and do whatever I needed to do. So I was exercising at lunch time, but it was just this thing in the middle of the day which would kind of catch me out because then it would take me ages to get into the working routine. So I moved that to 6:30, and then after that I was like, right, in your gym clothes just go out and take the dog for a walk.
Natasha Collins: And that first three hours, where I’ve been to the gym, I’ve then sat and had breakfast in between, and I read my emails. And I just absorb what’s going on; I don’t reply to anything that time in the morning. I’m just like, right, what do I need to think about that’s going to happen for the rest of the day. I go out with the dog for three or four miles because otherwise she’s … she loves it, but otherwise she’ll just run around like a crazy dog all day, which doesn’t help me. And then I get started with my day once I’m back.
Natasha Collins: And that has just changed how I feel because I know those first … and it takes me three hours to get that done. So that’s from, waking up around 6:00 and then being at my desk by just after 9:00. That’s three hours, which I completely that a lot of people listening to this may think, Natasha, I just don’t have that. But it changes how I feel about the day. Can you give any practical tips for someone who has to get up and go and do that whole day at work? What could they do in their morning routine to get a bit of that or get all of that, in fact? I don’t think you need it to be three hours; I just take my time.
Alex Pang: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay, so first off I think that it is important to recognize that we have a little more control over our time than we’d like to think. I’ve been doing talks about rest all over the world. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is that no matter where you are these days, if you ask someone how they’re doing, the reply is, “I’m so busy.”
Natasha Collins: Yeah.
Alex Pang: And this is true … I got this … I was in Azerbaijan last month and you hear this there. You hear it in Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, all over the place. But I think that, first off, recognizing that while we are very accustomed to this mode of busyness as a kind of way of life, I think that learning to recognize that we have a capacity to take back control of at least parts of our day. And to take it back from things like social media, from self-generated distractions, that this is something that is always within our grasp.
Alex Pang: The second thing I would say is that even relatively small practices can make a big difference over time. So, you know, I think that there are lots of people for whom contemplative practices, whether it is meditation, whether it’s [inaudible 00:16:33] prayer, other things, will report that these things don’t necessarily take up a lot of your time. But they can set a tone for the rest of the morning and the rest of the day that delivers out-sized value.
Alex Pang: You know, one of the things that I’ve discovered about rest is that for really creative people rest is pursued somewhat in the way that rest periods during high intensity exercise are pursued, right? You know, you go all out and then you rest and then you go all out again. And the rest periods actually are really, really important in those routines.
Alex Pang: And for figures like scientists and composers and mathematicians, that ability to really dive into a problem to work very intensively on it is an incredibly valuable and often delightful and incredibly pleasurable thing. But that’s not something that you sustain for long periods. And the people who get really good at it recognize when they’re no longer at their peak effectiveness. And at that point, they stop and they go do something else. And they recognize that, you know, I’m going to be better off if I take a break now, I go do something else, rather than if I just kind of grind metal for the next several hours and not actually get anything done.
Alex Pang: But I think it’s also important to recognize that our jobs, our careers, professions, professional norms, all of these put really significant constraints on how much and how seriously we’re able to take rest and to bring it into our lives. Not saying that it makes it completely impossible, but rather I think we don’t want to … It is incorrect to see this simply as a matter of needing better personal management or to become better at self-care. I think that, especially for say parents or for working women. They live in a world in which you’re expected to parent as if you don’t work and pursue your career as if you don’t have children. To do both of those at exactly the same time and then to take the blame if you fail to live up to these impossibly high ideals of both domains.
Alex Pang: That’s not something that can be improved with tips and tricks. Right? That requires a fundamental … a rethinking of the way the careers operate and professional norms. There are structural solutions to those problems that actually have been pioneered in the companies that I’ve been looking at for my latest book that can be applied more broadly. So I think it is always valuable for us to take our own time more seriously. To recognize that rest in the context of periods of intensive focused activity can be both very restorative and can help us work better. But also to recognize that there are big structural issues that make it really hard for people, I think especially women, to do work at the level that they want to do while having the kinds of lives that we all want to have.
Natasha Collins: Yes. Definitely. And it’s something that’s very much discussed. I know in the property industry we’re always having these conversations where I meet up with other surveyors or speaking on the phone, and that’s the one thing that is a massive problem is that if we leave work early or there’s a need to go and collect your children or be involved in that, there’s very much that stigma around, oh they don’t care enough.
Alex Pang: Right.
Natasha Collins: But what have you experienced that can be done to change that?
Alex Pang: So I think that the, you know, part of what you’re describing is something that sociologists call the flexibility stigma. And for a while people had been interested in why it is that professional organizations will have flexible work programs, will have like part-time programs for new parents, and people don’t use them. Something like 90% of law firms offer flexible work, and only 4% of people who are eligible actually take them.
Natasha Collins: Wow.
Alex Pang: And this is a big frustration for everyone, because it means you lose people who could become great lawyers or accountants or other professionals. It’s costly for organizations, because once that talent walks out the door you’ve got to hire new people, you’ve got to retrain them. Twenty years ago, companies hired 10% of their workers from the outside; these days it’s more than 60%. And so you’ve got these … Both the number of gaps that companies have to fill and the seniority at which they have to be filled is greater than ever.
Alex Pang: And so while flexible schedules look … they are well intentioned, but the problem is that there is still the kind of cultural sensibility that, you know, people who are working flexibly are taking advantage of the system or they are creating more work for other people or they are less reliable because they are not available 24/7 just in case someone has a question about something. It doesn’t have to be an emergency any longer; it’s just got to be, you know, I feel like, “What were those quarterly numbers from two years ago. I just kind of want to know.” And in an era when we can get DoorDash all the time, shouldn’t we be able to get information all the time? And someone should be able to deliver this to us.
Alex Pang: And then on the other hand, people who work flexibly report feeling like they have to work … they actually have to work harder than they would in the office in order to deal with all that kind of coordination stuff that just happens normally when you’re around other people. But also to make sure that their bosses know that they’re not slacking off. And so it feels like a kind of lose-lose proposition for everyone.
Alex Pang: And I think that while there are some organizations that have been better than others at stating that flexible work really genuinely is an option and that you can have a good career doing this. And they’ve been very mindful about trying to promote people who have been working part-time, or making sure that they continue to get opportunities to work on interesting projects, that for a lot of places this is a really hard thing.
Alex Pang: One of the things that I think places that go to four-day work weeks or six-hour days do right is that they give some of the benefits of flexible work to everybody. So for parents, being able to leave at 2:00 or 3:00, you know, in time to pick up kids every day, is an absolute gamechanger. I had someone say that they now got to spend time with their kids before they got cranky at the end of the day. I assume they meant the kids rather than themselves, so now that … Actually I got to go back and look at the transcript of that.
Alex Pang: But to be able to spend time with the children before the kids have the meltdown is you know, that sounds like a small thing but if you’re a parent you know instantly, that’s actually a big thing.
Natasha Collins: Yeah.
Alex Pang: And companies that reduce working time reduce it for everybody. And so there is no stigma about leaving the office early when everyone is leaving the office early. And so I think that that places that have done this demonstrate that with the right set of rules and with the right attitude, it’s entirely possible to do five days worth of work in four days. Or 40 hours worth of work in 30. And to do it in ways that help people be happier at work and to have more lives outside of work.
Alex Pang: So I mean, I think that this is not to say that we should give up on like flexible options, but I think that it is worth recognizing that the cost … I think the costs of flexibility may be harder for some organizations to deal with than the costs of just moving everyone to shorter hours. And that you may have happier outcomes doing the second rather than the first.
Natasha Collins: Yeah. Definitely. You’ve touched on some really key points. When I moved to America … With the university that I work at, I’m on a part-time contract, which is 21 hours. And when I was in the UK I had to be going into the university at least two days a week; I needed to be sat there two days a week.
Natasha Collins: And then when we moved to America and I said to them, “I’m going to America, I’d still love to work with you,” and they put me on that flexible contract. I remember the first couple of weeks that I was doing that flexible contract, and I’m now on a different time zone so I’m not there when they’re having their morning meetings or what have you, it was so tough for me to get used to. And the fact that I was still working and doing as much as I did when I was in the office, but I couldn’t always make the meetings to dial in or sometimes there was no point … in fact, actually, what they realized with some of the meetings there was no point in me being there because they didn’t need me anyway, but because I’d been in the office they had to invite me.
Alex Pang: Of course. Yes.
Natasha Collins: Yes. Anybody from the university that’s listening, thank you for not including me in all of the meetings. I really appreciate that; it saves my time. But it was the transition period that for me was really tough, because I always want to show that I’m working hard, that I’m doing what I say I’m doing. And now, now that I’ve got that back into the routine I feel completely good about it, I can pick it up and I can go out and have a walk. In fact I’ve got walks scheduled into my calendar with the university. And the flexibility now is fantastic. And they just dropped everybody down so that a full-time contract is now 35 hours a week rather than 42, which is brilliant.
Natasha Collins: But it’s also that transition and it’s getting from, you go completely flexible and you think, oh my gosh, no one’s here. I can’t talk to anybody. Or you can talk to people; they might not think you’re doing anything. And then getting that routine in for yourself. Have you experienced that? Have you experienced people getting into their own routines? And why do you think that would be so beneficial?
Alex Pang: You know, that’s a really interesting question. We think of routines as like the enemy of creativity, or the enemy of good ideas. And I think they actually get a bad rap. What well designed routines do is essentially kind of lay the table for innovation or for insight and for creative thinking.
Alex Pang: Stephen King has a great line about this in his book about writing. He says that the idea that you get inspired, right? The muse throws the lightning bolt at you and you have this great idea and then you work in this creative frenzy is backwards. That’s not the way that Stephen King says he’s written, what, 50 books now, or however many. Just an astounding number. But rather you start the work and it’s while you’re working that you get inspired. That dealing with the technical issues of craft but of going back to this problem of, okay, how do you end this chapter, it’s while you’re struggling with that that the light bulb comes on.
Alex Pang: That basically the muse needs to know where to find you in order to hit you with that jolt. And I think that this is something that a lot of creative people discover and it becomes a kind of centerpiece of how they work. The artist Chuck Close said that the muse exists but it has to find you working. And so this basic idea that you get inspired by working, you don’t work after you are inspired, is I think a central discovery for lots of these folks.
Alex Pang: Now, why is this? I mean, now I think that there is some indirect evidence that this is simply kind of how the brain approaches problem-solving. And that we have in a sense evolved to find creative solutions to very practical problems. You know, where is today’s food? What can we use to build shelters? And that for a long time, solutions to problems were things that were incredibly specific and involved problems that were right in front of us, right? It wasn’t about like abstract creative products.
Alex Pang: And so I think that there may be a kind of evolutionary argument for this, that for a long time human beings mainly were concerned with solving issues right in front of them to allow them to survive for another day or through the next season. And so work being the trigger for creativity under those circumstances makes total sense.
Alex Pang: But, you know, I think that the other important thing that people like writers and composers tell us about this issue is that there’s an awful lot of what we think of … a lot of stuff in creative work that actually is pretty routine once you get good at it. So Tchaikovsky has this line about going for long walks in the forest, sort of after he’s been working in the morning. And he says, sometimes you come up with these great bridges between one movement and another or ways to connect these ideas. And sometimes you don’t, and you just kind of write something that just kind of makes it work. And you just live with that and you move on to the next thing.
Alex Pang: But I think the point is that there is in every big project, whether it’s a book or a symphony or something else, there is plenty of work that is more ordinary problem-solving. And you can make a lot of progress on these big projects if you work diligently on that stuff. And sort of trust that the magic of the creative insight will hit at some point in the course of doing that work.
Alex Pang: And it’s certainly a much more reliable way of getting stuff done than waiting for the muse to strike and then starting the work. Because that can be a scheduling disaster.
Natasha Collins: So every project then you schedule in a little bit of time. Just so that you know you’re going to do it and just give it a go. Just try and work on it, bridge the gaps between where you are now to moving forward and then from that you get inspired.
Alex Pang: Absolutely. And I think there is biographical evidence that people also get better at working this way over time. That lots of people who sing the praises of this kind of consistency have earlier in their lives periods where they work in these self-destructive blazes of glory, or at least have really terrible time management skills. As I did in college and graduate school. I was one of these people who never started work until after David Letterman was over. Partly because I was lousy at actually managing my time. But also because, you know, I thought that’s how creative people work, right? It’s like [inaudible 00:35:52] stuff that happens in the middle of the night.
Alex Pang: And I think that there are plenty of really famous people who become the best versions of themselves when they learn to tame that and to take what looks like a more kind of stable almost sort of boring bourgeois approach to their work. But which allows them actually to do their best work. And so they kind of learn this the hard way that actually, while it is kind of dramatic and in its way kind of fun to do this work at the last moment in this kind of blaze of pressure, that really the odds of actually finishing it and of doing a good job are much better if you work in this more sustained way.
Alex Pang: And that over time it seems like people who start to practice this actually get better at it. I mean, I personally have not quantified this or tried to mark the number of times that this happens in a month of writing, but I do think that I have more of those experiences of switching on the light at 5:00 in the morning and starting to write, and having some really, really good idea in that kind of semi-conscious phase where I’m operating a little bit on automatic as I write. And I have some insight that I seriously doubt I would have any other time of day.
Alex Pang: But I think that I have more of those things now than I did six years ago when I started working in this manner. And from what I can tell, other people report similar things. That this is, you know, it’s a practice that improves over time. It’s not like a one-time thing where you switch your calendar and the ideas just switch on. It’s not like starting an oil well, right? You know, you drill once and then you get the oil forever. This is more like farming or fishing. It’s about developing a relationship with this time that allows you to work better for a long time.
Natasha Collins: It’s really interesting. So you have to develop that skill, and then … and I want to tie this in with a question that I’ve been asked from some of my colleagues who are looking at writing books or doing their PhDs. As well as that, how would you fit in that extra project? You tie that in with maybe starting and doing it for an hour and your creativity comes, rather than having to know everything about the topic before you start? You kind of just start going at an angle?
Alex Pang: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, you know, I think that it is … Let me think about this for a second. I mean, for me, that period in the early morning when I’m working well, I’ve got to have something that I’m working on in order for that period to be super useful.
Alex Pang: Just thinking about the four-day week book, I don’t get up super early to think about new ideas, I mean, when they’re in the very early stages and I’m trying to figure out what’s the angle here, is there a story here or not, is there enough material. That kind of calculation is not stuff that happens between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. The actual writing of the book is what happens then.
Alex Pang: And so for me that really early morning is a period in which I can be inspired about something that I’m already certain is worth working on. It’s already something whose contours I have mapped out, and it’s really about working through the million and one details.
Alex Pang: So let’s say for a graduate student or, you know, someone who is, let’s say, pursuing a degree while working. I think that at a practical level, it may be that … I think the morning is never a bad time to get stuff done; it’s just a question of how you design your routine and what it is that you choose to work on. And certainly, I mean, for me the period between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. when I’m writing is a period that is … that’s like, okay, I’m not a morning person. I have never been a morning person. Getting up at 5:00 is a real sacrifice for me.
Natasha Collins: Wow. Yeah. I’m not a morning person.
Alex Pang: But the reason that I do it, the reason that those hours are super valuable, is that I’m not quite awake and so it’s almost like the door to the creative subconscious is still a little bit ajar because I’m not yet fully conscious. And the routine that I have developed for writing in that period is one that is designed to minimize the number of distractions that I have, the number of decisions that I have to make in that period. Essentially allows me to stay in that state for as long as I can, but just sitting in front of a keyboard rather than in bed.
Alex Pang: And I think that there is something about that time of day that actually genuinely is special. There’s a reason that Buddhist monks or in Benedictine monasteries you’re getting up at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m. in order to chant an hour of prayers. There is something about that time that is unusual for most people. And so for me that period is designed in order to allow that part of my creative mind an opportunity to sort of express itself and to get out some words that my conscious self would have real trouble formulating.
Alex Pang: After that, I become closer to the more normal rational thinking person. And so I think that, you know, if I were still in school, those first couple hours of writing would still be really valuable. But then after that it might be that dealing with coursework and more normal kinds of things would be what I would shift into.
Alex Pang: So, you know, and in fact when I’m writing it’s often like the second half of the morning when I’m doing stuff that doesn’t require quite as much creative energy but is more thinking about organizational stuff or like writing up stories, and requires good craft and attention to detail and so on but doesn’t necessarily require the same level of intense creative fire that some other parts of any book do.
Natasha Collins: Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s really interesting. So do you think that this … I mean, you said looking at the six-hour working day or four-hour working week, do you think that our working lives in the future will change to take into account the times of the day when we’re really in the flow or the times of the day when we’re feeling a little bit more that we have to go out and do an activity? Do you think that our working lives will start revolving more around that?
Alex Pang: The answer is the companies that are doing this absolutely pay more attention to those things.
Natasha Collins: Okay.
Alex Pang: One of the things … Yeah. At least creative firms are doing this. So what they will do is they’ll redesign the work day so that the first … usually the first several hours of the day, the morning, is reserved for people’s most intensive, most challenging work. And what that means is number one, absolutely no meetings. You might have like a five-minute standup meeting, but that’s just to do some really quick coordination. But the hour-long meeting that starts at 9:00 a.m. and basically destroys the rest of your day, nobody does this. Absolutely nobody does this.
Alex Pang: So quick standup meeting and then the next couple hours are, you know, you work on whatever’s most critical. The office generally is quiet. You also have the right to tell people to buzz off. You don’t have to answer the phones. You don’t deal with email. You just have permission to work on your most important stuff.
Alex Pang: And then the day kind of eases up after that. You hold meetings in the afternoon. Maybe you’ve got a [inaudible 00:46:38] block of time for clients, you’ve got another block of time for internal kinds of things. But it’s definitely the case that one of the things that these companies do is recognize that we are better at some kinds of tasks at one time of day and better at other kinds of tasks at another time of day. And they match those tasks to those times.
Alex Pang: The way that far too many offices work today is they assume that every moment between 9:00 and 5:00 basically is the same. It’s just like we’re in a factory, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re making widgets at 9:01 or 4:59, you’re still doing the same set of things with your hands. But cognitive work doesn’t work that way. Brainstorming at 9:00, brainstorming at 4:00 are actually pretty different kinds of activities.
Alex Pang: Our attention levels vary throughout the day, which is why the last thing you ever want to do is be in a meeting after lunch. And I think that, you know, one of the keys for the companies that have moved to shorter days is recognizing that you can really get a big boost and you can recover some of the productivity that you might otherwise lose by shortening the work week by paying more attention to designing the day to synchronize activities sort of with circadian rhythms and cognitive abilities.
Alex Pang: So that’s absolutely something that they’re already doing with clear benefit.
Natasha Collins: And for people who work in companies who don’t yet do that, how could we start to approach our employers and asking them about this or showing them the research and saying, perhaps we should look at moving towards this. Or what could be a small step that we could just ask the question?
Alex Pang: To some degree you just answered the question, right? I mean, that there’s this body of research that demonstrates the benefits of this. There are places that already are doing it. One of the things that you might do is … I think starting with meetings is actually a really good way to begin trying to nudge a department or company down this path. Nobody likes meetings, right? And I think that, you know, learning to practice the discipline of making meetings shorter; thinking about what times of day meetings can best be held or are kind of most damaging to people’s productivity, that that is almost the easiest win that you could have in a kind of secret campaign to shorten the workday.
Alex Pang: I mean, I think that it illustrates how by thinking a little bit more about process, right, thinking about who actually needs to be in the meeting, what things need to be done here, how quickly can you get through them. Those are all good things that should happen in any meeting anyway. And then thinking about when during the day the meeting can happen begins to clue you in to the fact that you can [inaudible 00:50:23] there’s a big gain to be had by synchronizing organizational activities to circadian rhythms. That maybe is a way of first showing these benefits.
Alex Pang: And then, after a month or two, pointing out that, okay, turns out there are other things that we can do like this that are also really good. For example, doing similar kinds of things around email and other kinds of technology use. And that ultimately it turns out companies that do this are able to become so much more productive that they get all their work done at the end of Thursday and everybody now has a three-day weekend every week.
Alex Pang: I think that so far the organizations that have done this have done it … it’s been sparked from the top down. These have generally been either relatively small organizations or big companies that still have the original founders in charge. And so, you know, these charismatic figures who are able to take a 2,000-person company and say, we’re going to go in this direction. And the company actually will still do it. But the actual work of figuring out how to implement this, about how to do five days worth of work in four days, is something that happens from the bottom up.
Alex Pang: And so, I mean, I think that, you know, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario under which you didn’t have the boss saying, “Okay, we’re going to try and do this.” And having them do it often for quite personal reasons, right? They want to have more time with their family, they want to have … you know, the various things that all of us it turns out actually want to have.
Natasha Collins: Yeah.
Alex Pang: But I think that starting with things like better meeting practices may be a way of starting to nudge open that door so that before too long the boss can see, hey, there’s this door here. Maybe we ought to walk through it. And then providing the organizational managerial permission to take the more radical step of actually formally shortening the workday.
Natasha Collins: Yes. That’s such good advice.
Natasha Collins: Okay. So final question. If you could encourage my audience to incorporate rest into their daily lives by making one small change, what would it be?
Alex Pang: You know, I suppose the one small change would be sleep more, which is both incredibly simple and harder than it looks. I mean, incredibly simple in that we all know how to sleep. But I think that of all the things that I talk about in the book, sleep arguably is the most valuable, both in the short term and in the long term, in terms of the effect on mood, the effect on our overall emotional states, on our honesty at work. People who are sleep-deprived are more likely to cheat if they think they’re not going to get caught.
Alex Pang: We work better, we’re better people when we’re better rested. And I think that taking sleep more seriously is like the gateway drug for taking other kinds of rest more seriously. So whether that’s sleeping better at night, sleeping longer at night, or whether it’s being able to work in a nap during the day, I think that’s the single most valuable thing that you can do for yourself as a person, as a professional, as a parent. And it’s less likely to be the last thing that you do along this road than the first thing.
Natasha Collins: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We need to take that on board. So everybody that’s listening, please, if you can, take on that more sleep, because you’ll get more out of your day. And you’ll be far more productive, and that’s what we’re all after. Because if we want to be fitting in everything that we’ve got to do, we need to be working smarter, resting longer, and you’ll get to where you need to be. Would that be the key takeaway?
Alex Pang: Exactly. Yes.
Natasha Collins: Amazing.
Natasha Collins: Alex-
Alex Pang: Very well said.
Natasha Collins: Thank you so much for coming on my podcast today. I really appreciate it.
Alex Pang: Oh, thank you. Always a pleasure to talk about this stuff, Natasha.
Natasha Collins: Amazing. Thank you, everybody who came and listened to this today. We really appreciate it. If you want to find out more about Alex, I’m going to put his bio and all of his social media and contact details below so you can go and have a look. And also if you want to come over and want to check out my website, head on over to www.ncrealestate.co.uk.
Natasha Collins: Thank you for joining us today. I cannot wait to catch up with you again soon.
