Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #118 How to Work Less and Get More Done with Alex Pang

Episode Date: June 23, 2020

Why is it that we equate long hours with greater effort? Could a four-day working week be the change we need for public health as well as the economy? My guest on today’s conversation is Alex Pang, an author and former Silicon Valley tech consultant who noticed that, when he went on sabbatical from work, he suddenly got a lot more done. This led him to research and write about resting more and working less. We begin the podcast by talking about active rest or, as Alex also terms it, ‘deep play’. How taking regular breaks from intense work to do something you love is a means to enhanced creativity and productivity. We talk about how the technologies we thought would give us a better work-life balance have instead robbed us of boundaries and ground our work down into a fine powder that settles on all areas of our life. It works both ways – we check social media or do our online banking while we’re at work, just as we check our work emails when we’re at home.  The solution, says Alex, is to work shorter, more focused hours and balance that with more ‘serious leisure’ time. There are already progressive companies out there who are shortening the working day or week and reaping the surprising rewards of increased profitability and productivity! At a time when many of us are working in very different ways from normal, Alex’s work seems incredibly prescient. As lockdown slowly lifts and workplaces start to reopen, finding a balance between work, rest and play that promotes productivity and growth alongside employee wellbeing feels like a no-brainer. The same applies to the self-employed and across all industries. Surely this is our window of opportunity to explore what the ‘new normal’ should be? I found this conversation really inspiring and I hope you do too. Show notes available at: https://drchatterjee.com/118 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maybe our assumptions about the necessity of overwork, right? The constant pressure of deadlines always at your back. Maybe our assumptions that we need that in order to do really good work, that that's a natural expression of passion. Maybe that's actually completely backwards. Maybe in order to do the kind of work that we really want to do, it's necessary to pay more attention to how we rest. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I hope you're having an enjoyable week so far, but has it been a productive one? Well, I guess that really depends on how you

define productivity. Do you define it as the amount of work you got done or do you define it as the amount of time you got to spend with friends and family or the amount of time you had to do the things that you loved. Well, today's conversation is one that was recorded way back in February when the world seemed a very different place to how it does at the moment. But it is a conversation that in many ways has added relevance and poignancy in the context of the global pandemic. And at a time when many of us in society are imagining what in our daily lives might be different, what can we change? My guest is Alex Pang, an author and former Silicon Valley tech consultant who noticed that when he went on a sabbatical from work, he suddenly got a lot more done and this led him to research and write about resting more and working less. So

why is it that we equate long hours with greater effort? And could a four-day working week be the change we need both for public health as well as the economy. This is a really interesting conversation that touches on a variety of different themes. We begin the podcast by talking about active rest, or as Alex says, deep play. How taking regular breaks from intense work to do something you love is a means to enhance creativity and productivity. We talk about how the technologies we thought would give us a better work-life balance have instead robbed us of boundaries and ground our work down into a fine powder that settles on all areas of our life. It works both ways. We check social media or do our online banking while we're at work, just as we check our work emails when we're at home.

while we're at work, just as we check our work emails when we're at home. And the solution, says Alex, is to work shorter, more focused hours and balance that with more serious leisure time. There are already progressive companies out there who are shortening the working day or week and reaping the surprising rewards of increased profitability and productivity. At a time when many of us are working in very different ways from normal, Alex's work seems incredibly prescient. As lockdown slowly lifts and workplaces start to reopen, finding a balance between work, rest and play that promotes productivity and growth alongside employee well-being feels like a no-brainer. The same principles can absolutely be applied to the self-employed and across all industries.

We're living in a time that provides us with a wonderful opportunity to explore and imagine what everyday life, both for work and pleasure, could actually look like. everyday life, both for work and pleasure, could actually look like. This conversation with Alex really inspired me and I've been thinking a lot about the themes and how I can implement them into my own life. I hope it inspires you to do the same. Now, before we get started, just a quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company, are sponsoring today's show. I am a huge fan of their shoes and have been wearing them exclusively for many years now, well before they started supporting my show. And to say they transform my life is no exaggeration.

show. And to say they transform my life is no exaggeration. Yes, they make really comfortable minimalist shoes. But another thing I love about this company is their ethos. Over the past few years, I've got to know the guys behind Vivo really well. And I love their philosophy, their concern for the environment, humanity, and doing the right thing. And I'm a huge fan of supporting companies that take their social and environmental responsibilities seriously. I've been recommending them for years to friends and family but also to patients and I never get tired of hearing the positive feedback whether it's an improvement in hip pain, knee pain, back pain or just general mobility. I myself wear Vivo Barefoot shoes anytime that I'm not barefoot. So for walking, working, running, or simply playing with my kids. If you have never tried them before, I really would encourage you to give them a go. It's

completely risk-free to do so because they offer a 100-day trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can send them back for a full refund. For listeners of my show, they continue to offer a fantastic discount. If you go to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more, they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA, and Australia. You can get your 20% off code by going to vivobarethought.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Alex, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much. It's great to be with you.

Yeah, look, I have been looking forward to speaking to you ever since i read your first book well the first book of yours that i've read which is called west which i think i read in about 2017 yeah um something like that really really enjoyed it i know we've interacted a bit on twitter and um when i saw that your new book was coming out shorter uh all about how working less could get more done i thought okay I hope he's in London soon to actually do some PR, then I can actually grab you and talk to you. So, that's a coming on. Yeah. So, first question for me is, how's London been so far?

It's been great. And I will confess, I am one of, I'm a huge Anglophile. I did a dissertation on Victorian science. So, I've been coming here for a long time. So it's always great to be back. Yeah, fantastic. Anything you do in particular when you get to London? You know, usually I'm here for work. So, you know, the days are spent doing workshops or consulting or what have you. So most of my free time is in the evening. And I take my camera and go out walking. And London is a fantastic place for just turning a corner and discovering some brilliant little square or beautiful street. So, that's usually what I do. I mean, that's super interesting, Alex, because that in many ways plays into what you write about.

You write about rest. You write specifically about deliberate rest. And, you know, I know for myself when doing book promotion and you're on book tours, it is full on and hectic. And you can be go, go, go from the start of the day to the end of the day, interviews, talks, workshops, whatever it is, which is fun. Obviously, we're very fortunate to have that opportunity. But I know this year with my third book, I have actually been very proactive about putting deliberate rest into my days. It's something I probably didn't do on previous book tours.

And it sounds like photography in the evening for you, in some ways, is your way of counterbalancing all the work stress in the day. Is that fair to say? We can finish now because that's exactly right. You pretty much summed up the argument of rest. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that we often underestimate is the value of that kind of activity and that kind of, you know, active rest in helping us make sense of the day, process ideas, have new ideas, and, you know, kind of generally make sense of our lives, right? And one of the things I talk about in the book is the importance of what I call deep play, like serious hobbies for people. So, you know, whether you are – you know, this can be anything from painting as it was for Winston Churchill to mountain climbing to, you know, other sorts of sports or chess, or my wife is a serious quilter. One of the things that deep play does is it offers a lot of the same pleasures of our work in a very different kind of context. You know, one of the things you talk about in your latest

book is how building healthy habits on top of existing practices is a valuable thing. And I think for super busy people or people who are really passionate about their work, it's often difficult to detach even if they want to because you kind of naturally gravitate to thinking about problems that you're trying to solve. And deep play is really valuable because it offers busy people an interesting alternative to their working lives. And for me, I realized that these kinds of evening walks have that kind of purpose for me because they are, you know – it's an opportunity both for a certain amount of reflection. There's also, in a place like this, a lot of interesting discovery.

One of the things you've got to do in workshops or interviews, you listen very closely. You have to pay attention. You're responding to people. You're kind of doing that with a place when you're out walking with a camera. And then finally, there's often a kind of autobiographical dimension to deep play. It connects to things that experiences you had in your childhood or family things. And I realized a few years ago, actually walking around London one evening, that my dad is a history professor. And I used to go down to Brazil with him as a kid when he went to archives. He'd spend the

whole day in the archives. And what would we do after that? We'd go out walking in the evening, right? And all of a sudden, it hit me. I'm doing the thing that I used to do with my dad when I was eight years old. And I thought, there's something really interesting going on here. So yeah, it's a simple thing that turns out to be actually for me pretty deep. Yeah. It's interesting for me that as a doctor, I see a lot of patients and a lot of the time people seem to get an understanding of the importance of downtime, the importance of rest after they burnt out. Like, I don't know if it's something about the human condition where you can hear it and you can say, oh, that's important, but I'm busy. You know, I've got a busy job. I need to keep going. But when people burn out and they suffer the consequences of it, often that's when they go, wait a minute,

I need to start putting some of this into my life. How did you get interested in this whole idea of deliberate rest? Well, I've seen very much the same thing in both of my books. seen very much the same thing in both of my books. No matter how smart you are, it seems, you learn about this stuff the hard way. Even Nobel Prize winners are stupid about how they spend their time and their energy and how hard they work before they get smart. It makes it a little easier for me to say that I did exactly the same thing, right? I worked as a consultant in Silicon Valley in think tanks, doing technology forecasting and futures work for about 10 years or so. And kind of reached that point where it's a sort of work that's fascinating, but you're always kind of half a project behind, and it is basically impossible to catch up, right? The nature of the work is there's always new clients, new projects. It's difficult to know when to declare yourself finished because there's always a little bit more

you can do to make something a little bit better. And especially if you're a perfectionist, it's a perfect recipe for overwork and burnout. And so it seemed clear to me that I needed to take a step back and figure out how to do things differently or it was going to get really bad. I was lucky enough to have an offer to go to Microsoft Cambridge for three months to have a sabbatical and to do some work there. And it was there that I discovered that I was working on technology and attention projects. But about halfway through, I had this realization that I was getting incredible amounts of stuff done. I was reading a lot. I was having great experiences. But I didn't feel the kind of time pressure that was just a part of everyday life in Silicon Valley. It made me think, you know, maybe our assumptions about the necessity of overwork, right? The constant pressure of deadlines always at your back. Maybe our assumptions that we need that in order to do really good work,

that that's a natural expression of passion, maybe that's actually completely backwards. Maybe in order to do the kind of work that we really want to do, it's necessary to pay more attention to how we rest and that actually that rest is an important part of our creative process. Not just it's obviously important for recharging our mental and physical batteries, but there's an important creative dimension to it as well. And that's what got me started on the research that eventually became Rest, and which I followed up with Shorter. So it really does kind of flow out of my own kind of near-miss with burnout, and my own completely fortunate discovery of, you know, the value of

Rest. Yeah, and you mentioned that you could always do a little bit more, make that project a little bit more finished, a little bit more complete. But there's another way of looking at that as well, in the sense that I often say to patients that, look, your to-do list is never done, right? Because even if you're in a meeting and you're completing something, there will be another email that rocks up whilst you're in that. So it's this whole idea of how do we create some borders, which I think in many ways technology has made it harder for us. And I guess, you know, I want to delve into Shorter, the new book, and how we can, you know, evolve our working practices. But I think the whole idea that technology was meant to save us time, technology was meant to free us up so that actually we can do more of the things that we love,

actually, for many of us, it's had the reverse effect, where instead of technology helping us, it's now enslaving us. And we're sort of a prisoner to these devices that actually is making us more stressed than ever before. Yeah. There were studies that find that many of us interact with our phones or check our email something like 150 times a day now. And it is remarkable how in a short span of time, these have gone from curiosities to being like the thing that we spend most of our attention with and the thing with which many of us interact with in the world. And I think that it is remarkable that we have the ability to carry our – you know, essentially to carry our offices around in our pockets. But the capacity to be always available, the ability to answer an email instantly has moved from a technical capability to a kind of social expectation.

Not really with anyone sort of setting out to do that, but that's definitely the way it's evolved. When people first developed these devices, the idea was that you would be able to break work up into chunks that you could do at different times of day as appropriate to you. But it's turned instead kind of groundwork into a fine powder that now kind of settles throughout our days. And finally, it doesn't help that Silicon Valley, where I live, has done an incredible job at using behavioral science to make these devices even more compelling. But I think that all of this means that especially in a world where boundaries for work don't really exist the way that they did in agricultural economies or in industrial economies, when you stopped work when the sun went down or when the factory whistle went. When we have to make the choice for ourselves about when projects are finished, when work is done for the day, it becomes more of a challenge to do so. And it becomes really easy to default to the idea that, well, we'll do just one more thing. But, you know, making it a choice

makes it a lot harder. Look, when people ask me about stress, I've sort of written a previous book on stress, and people say, what's the biggest stressor in the modern world? And I say, of course, well, it's different for different people. But I've got to say, it's very hard for me to get away from the idea that the biggest or one of the major stressors for most of us is the fact that those boundaries between work life and home life have pretty much vanished. You know, I think even 15 years ago, I'm going to surmise, you, in most jobs, you would have finished your work let's say you worked a bit late you finished at 6 p.m let's say you got home you might have had some food at home and then you probably actually put the tv on to unwind and actually just you know or read a book or something

whereas now it's not uncommon as soon as that's happened or during your dinner even you'll be looking at your smartphone and actually, oh, I've got a work email. I'll just get back to after dinner. And it's this kind of slow, insidious, constant barrage of information that we're just constantly consuming. It is having, I think, a detrimental effect, yes, on our productivity at work, but also on our health. And I think this is why your work, I think, is touching on something super, super important. You started off this conversation talking about deep play. Well, when you are doing deep play, and I'd love you to define what that is as well,

but when you're doing deep play, I'm guessing that actually you're probably not on your device. You're moved to four-day weeks is that one of the biggest benefits that these schedules deliver are clearer boundaries between work time and personal time, and even within the day, between the time you spend focused on work and the time you spend hanging out with your colleagues. colleagues. But to get to the deep play, you know, I think one of the really important features of deep play is that for people who are passionate about their work, or for people who are in high stress jobs, where it's difficult to like leave stuff behind, deep play offers a real, it's important because it offers a kind of easy way to switch out of work mode, right? It's something that is just as compelling as work. You know, you don't have to like work hard to settle your mind or, you know, and stuff, you know, you can just get right into it, which is, you know, which is really important for developing the habit and keeping it. So what is deep play? Deep play's got a couple features.

Paradoxically, it offers some of the same kinds of psychological rewards as work, but without the frustrations. So, Winston Churchill talked about in this book, Painting as a Pastime, about how painting was great for busy people like politicians and writers, because for him, painting was like politics. Not the comparison that most of us would draw, but for him, it was like politics because in both cases, you needed a clear vision of what you were going to do. You had a certain amount of time in which to act. You had to kind of strategize to figure out how you were going to create this thing. But it was different because you were, you know, working in paint and outdoors rather than, you know, with words. And it didn't have the frustrations of political life because while he was painting, he didn't have someone from the

Labour Party looking over his shoulder saying, you know, those clouds are bigger and the trees the wrong colour. And I am amazed at the number of great scientists, neurosurgeons, CEOs, people who are in incredibly competitive, ambitious fields, people who do world-class work, who have these kinds of serious hobbies that will take them out of the lab or the C-suite sometimes for two or three weeks at a time. But it's like the only thing that could possibly get them out. And so as a way of creating an alternative to work that has a really clear boundary, you can't think about office politics when you're 200 feet up a mountain, right?

As a way of providing exercise and kind of you know a different sort of cognitive exercise yeah it reminds me of um well many people you know i interviewed volta longo on this podcast a few months ago who's um you know you know a lot of people think he may well win a nobel prize one day for his work on fasting and what it does in the body um he's a very very musician. I know many scientists who are accomplished musicians. One of my best mates who I play in a band with, he is a helicopter doctor, an A&E doctor in Chamonix in France. And he's an excellent bass player and an excellent ski mountaineer. And it's amazing. It's not, I guess there's that perception,

isn't there, that, oh that oh you know I can't engage in my hobbies because I gotta focus on my work so I don't have time but you could almost flip that and I guess you would make the case that actually by focusing on those deliberate periods of passion and creativity and sport and you know deep play I guess you would make the argument that you're going to be more productive in your work as well as feel better about yourself. Yeah. I think it does a couple of really important things. One is that when there's office politics or when you're in projects that aren't going very well, it's easy for your enthusiasm for work to flag and to wonder of wonder, you know, what is it

that I'm doing here? Not just with this project, like, what am I doing with my life? And deep play serves as a way of helping you remember what life and accomplishment at its best is like, right? I think another important thing is that it can serve as a kind of creative playground in that it is an opportunity for your kind of creative subconscious to kind of turn over ideas, even while you're focused on something else. mysterious, unpredictable things. In reality, though, psychologists have done a fairly good job of identifying periods when these are more likely to happen. And deep play offers a space in which your mind can turn over ideas that you haven't really quite worked out, but can be really important. And one great example is actually the musical Hamilton, right? Lin-Manuel Miranda had been working on In the Heights for like seven years, and he finally takes a vacation, and he takes Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton with him. And he says,

as soon as I took a break from In the Heights, Hamilton jumped into my head. And it's a fantastic example of how these breaks aren't like a competitor to work or a competitor to good thinking, but rather our partner to it. Yeah. And I think that is such a key point, Alex, isn't it? We're in this more is better culture where there's so much to do. So the harder I work, the better it's going to be, the more I'm going to get done. If I work through my lunch break, you know what, I'm going to get more done. People around me are going to see that I'm working more. And it's that big badge of honor in society that in some ways we need to start reframing that as, I can't remember, I think I've heard you say it before, it's... That rest is not work's opposite, rest is work's partner.

That each one justifies the other, supports and sustains the other. I mean, it's a bit like a good marriage, right? Where you are different from your spouse, and yet together you support each other. You make each other better and better people. And work and rest, I think, operate in very much the same way. Yeah. I go around giving a lot of well-being talks to companies now. And, you know, one of my top tips for them is one of the lowest tech tips that's out there, which I say, try and take a tech-free lunch break every day, even if it's just for 20 minutes. And it's like, for all the fancy tech

we've got, like if you, and I explained it to them, if they understood biochemically, physiologically what happens, and I've done it with so many people, so many patients that they come back, they're more creative, they're more productive, they feel calmer, they're less stressed in the afternoon, but they're also less stressed when they go home to their partner in the evening, which results in improved relationships and all kinds of things and this is why i'm such a huge fan of your work because um there's there's so much synergy in what you're talking about and i think the more people who can talk about this and raise awareness of this for people i think the more benefits that are going to be that rest is important it's not a substitute for

um for work it's actually going to help you work better. You've been banging that drum around the world for a few years now. Do you think people are starting to get it? I think people are starting to get it. I think that we're also, though, recognizing more the challenges in taking rest seriously, making space for it in our lives, using it as a kind of space for both renewal and creative activity, that this isn't just about self-help, right? It's not just something that we should think about how we can do ourselves or just in our own lives. For a lot of busy people, there are big cultural demands on our work. You talked about the idea of overwork as a badge of honor. How common is that these days? But there are also big structural things that keep us at the office, that command our attention.

keep us at the office, that command our attention. And I think one of the things that we're beginning to realize is how powerful changes within organizations can be in encouraging that kind of tech-free time or time for reflection. You know, whether it's something small like the imposition of no email evenings, or whether it's something big like redesigning the entire workday, right? So there are times when people can completely focus on their work without having to check their email, be distracted by Slack or other things, and actually having tech-free lunches together, other things, and actually having tech-free lunches together where instead of talking with people for like two minutes around the water cooler, you actually make time to have serious conversations with your colleagues. And that turns out to be an incredibly powerful and valuable

thing, both for the happiness of individuals, but also for the performance of companies as well. And so all of this stuff turns out to be beneficial for people's mental health, for their physical health, for their performance as economic agents and workers, but also as parents and partners. And it also helps, I think, parents and partners and it also helps i think families and companies and organizations as well how did you start getting interested in this quite revolutionary idea of the four-day work week yeah because you know i've been thinking about this um throughout the morning before uh before we we got together to think about you know alice is having to make the case for why a four hour it's not a four hour work

week a four day work week is so beneficial that should be the next book that should be the next one yeah exactly i think tim ferris did that one what's it one about 10 years ago, the four-hour work week, which is a great book, actually, because for me, it's not actually about working four hours a week. It's about understanding that time is a precious commodity and how you spend that time is important. So, that's what I got from that book. But you're making a very strong case in it about why four-day work weeks should be considered. But I want to flip it a little bit and go, when we're living in a culture where the World Health Organization are calling stress the health epidemic of the 21st century, when burnout is going up year on year, when most people these days are feeling that just chronic state of overwhelm, instead of making the case for the four-day work week, do we almost need to make the case for the five-day work week? And actually, you know, at what point have we

proved that the way we've currently got many jobs set up in you know when have we ever proved that that's an optimum way to set a workplace up for productivity or for human health you know the five-day work week is an artifact of the industrial 20th century right it was something that unions and reformers fought for for decades. The chartists in what, the 1830s and 1840s were talking about eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what you will. They were actually talking, I think, about a six-day week. But the five-day week is something that gets worked out in the 1900s, the 1920s, and we just sort of stuck with it. And like many things, it just turns into this default that you never question. Now, the reason that I started

questioning it actually was when I was promoting rest, I would get questions along the lines of, okay, so what does a single mother do in order to get more rest, right? What tips and tricks do you have for them? And at a certain point, I realized that the answer was not do this, do that. Certainly, the answer was not have another middle-aged guy tell you what you're doing wrong in your life. But rather, the answer was that, look, working moms, parents, and to some degree, all of us live in a world that expect us to raise kids as if we don't have careers, pursue our careers as if we don't have children,

to do both to some impossibly high standard, and then to put the blame on us individually when we don't live up to those standards, right? We don't need tips and tricks in order to solve these problems. You don't need to be super mom. What you need are structural changes that don't expect you to do both of these things simultaneously. And you know, you look at things like the problems that we have with burnout, with chronic stress, that we have with burnout, with chronic stress, health issues in the workplace, depression, work-life balance. Turns out, and one of the reasons I wrote this book was that the four-day week is a wonderfully elegant way of attacking all of those things at once, right?

Whether it is mental health in the workplace, whether it's the enduring problems of flexible careers or of encouraging and promoting women into executive positions, allowing parents to continue to have good careers once they're parents. It turns out that we've approached these problems with different strategies and different company policies. But it turns out shortening the work week offers a way of dealing with all of them. It's incredibly simple. I think it's pretty effective. And it is available to a wider range of kinds of businesses than we might expect. And I'm seeing it unfolding in more parts of the world

than I expected when I started working on it. Two of the countries that have the most places that are experimenting with it are Korea and Japan, right? Places in which overwork is such a big thing that, you know, Korean and Japanese languages have their own words for working yourself to death. And that says it all, doesn't it? Exactly, right? You know, Korean and Japanese languages have their own words for working yourself to death. And that says it all, doesn't it? Exactly, right? You know, when you need to change language in order to reflect that reality, you know that you've got a serious problem on your hands. who have moved to four-day weeks or six-hour days, and not only has profitability not gone down,

it's actually skyrocketed. These companies have done really, really well. So, you're saying that by working less, things didn't just stay still, profits, productivity went up. So, this is an alien concept for many people. How can you possibly work less, but gain more? Right. The simple answer is that, you know, if you look at the way in which many of us work, or many of us have to work, our days are filled with distractions, interruptions, poor meetings, not very good project management, crashed schedules. Once you can get a handle on those things, I mean, it turns out that stuff wastes something like two hours of productive time every day, according to some studies. So if you can get a handle on that stuff, all of a sudden you're a lot closer to being able to do five days work in four just by like clearing away that rubble. If we think about that on a, you know, on a 40 hour work week, five days a week.

So if we're losing two hours a day, because we're not being productive, that's 10 hours a week. That's 25% off that, you know, in inverted commas, working week where we're not really working. So, you know, I guess we could, working week, where we're not really working. So, you know, I guess we could even go further back from a four-day week, potentially. It's incredible that. And is that to do with technology? Is that to do with us getting a bit bored at work and going on to Facebook and Instagram? Or what is that? I think technology is part of it, definitely. We are being humans as distractible at work, especially if we're not

working on something that's totally compelling to us. I think also the fact that in a world in which we don't have such clear boundaries, it's easier to feel like if the school calls or if you get an email from your doctor, it's okay to deal with that at work. And sometimes, you know, it really is necessary to deal with those things immediately. But the fact that you've got this kind of interference between work stuff and personal stuff means that that does hit your productivity. And then I think that as most of us have experienced, lots of meetings aren't terribly well run. There were too many people in them. They kind of go on too long.

But we've accepted that this is the way that meetings work. And so just by doing these relatively simple things, right, not accepting the default that the software imposes of a meeting being an hour long, but making meetings 15 or 20 minutes long. Getting rid of the standing daily 9 a.m. thing that kind of doesn't start your day necessarily with the sort of highest energy. Using technology a little bit more mindfully and also creating times of day where it actually is okay to tell people who just have one quick question that's going to turn into 15 minutes, you know, go away, I'm going to finish this thing. All of that stuff together turns out to take you a long way to being able to work more effectively, get more done in a shorter period of time, and to allow you to do in four days what, you days what you used to need to do in five. I think once you start doing the maths on this with some of the statistics you're giving, I think it's probably very clear very quickly that this may well be the way to go for many

companies, if not all companies. You mentioned meetings you mentioned meetings. And, you know, my own career has changed quite a lot in the last few years. So I started off training to be a National Health Service doctor, which is what I have done for the bulk of my time for most of my career. But it's pivoted in the last few years, whereas I still see patients, but I'm also an author now, a podcast host, you know, I go and speak to companies. I'm also an author now, a podcast host. You know, I go and speak to companies. But in terms of meetings, that's something I've really reduced.

Like, I've realized that actually a lot of people would constantly say, oh, we should get together and have a chat about things and talk about ways to collaborate. And in the past, you know, the people-pleasing part of me, but yeah, yeah, sure, let's go and do that. And you think, you know, you're doing all these meetings, you're not getting actually your own work done and you're not actually getting any getting anywhere so now it's a case okay well email me with your ideas or email my PA with your ideas and if there's something there maybe we'll we'll proceed on email so that's my own strategy that I started to adopt

to try and address some of this. But on the topic of email, how much of a work suck and a productivity suck is email? Well, you know, it is now inextricable with most of our work. So going to zero is impossible for most of us. But let's just take two things. And one is the amount of time that is lost to the distraction of email, even if it's an important message. Once you get into flow working on something, you get interrupted by a message. And just reading it will take you out of what you were doing. And it can take a good 15 minutes or so to get back into that state where you're really focused again on something. to get back into that state where you're really focused again on something. Now, we are interrupted by email or other things on an average of 11 minutes.

And so, you know, you – I thought it would be more, you know. I thought it would be more. But, you know, we all have that experience of ending the day and wondering, why don't I get done? Yeah. and wondering, why don't I get done? And part of the reason that we have these days is that we have this constant barrage of interruption that unless, once again, you make a conscious choice about setting boundaries around, can really destroy your attention and destroy your day.

But I think the other important thing that your experience suggests and that I see in the book is that there's a really important like social dimension to these issues. We often think of attention and focus distraction as things that happen between like our eyes and brains and a screen. But my capacity to focus at work depends on other people's ability to respect my attention, right? And our ability altogether to work in ways that let us really be effective. It's a bit like, you know, going to the movie theater. And everybody has this thing that we're supposed to pay attention to, not our phones, certainly not phone conversations. And you work together so that you can focus on what's happening

up on stage. And I think recognizing that there is this important social dimension to all of these things is one of the keys, I think, to dealing with them really effectively. I love the way that you're pitching this as a societal and structural issue, because I think it really takes the pressure off the individual. I mean, you touched on that already, it's not necessarily what can I do individually to get more deep play in my life? Although that can, of course, have some merit. But really, what you're talking about is restructuring society. And it's hard for me not to fast forward a few years and think, well, the research you present in Shorter is really compelling. The stories are really compelling, is, I mean, do you anticipate a point in the near future where you can almost say companies have a moral responsibility

to implement working practices like the four-day work week for the health of their employees, for the health of the country, for the social cohesion, but also on a business level so that they can be more productive. Really hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. Just taking a very quick break to give a shout out to the sponsors

who are essential for me to put out weekly episodes like this one. Athletic Greens have always been a big supporter of my show and this is a company that I really like. They make one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I've ever come across and I myself take it regularly. Now this podcast is all about empowering you to become the architect of your own health and in particular today's show is about getting that balance right so you can work well, but also get the most out of your non-work life. And of course, nutrition is one of the most important pillars of health.

Now, ideally, everybody would get their nutrition from real whole foods. The reality, though, is that many of us struggle to consistently do that. That is why I do like high quality whole food supplements like Athletic Greens. Now many of you have reached out to me and let me know that since taking Athletic Greens you've experienced a lot of different benefits. Now common themes that you let me know about include improved sleep, more energy, better mood, better concentration, and so much more. Now, Athletic Greens contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes. And I personally really like their travel packs, which often accompany me when I'm on the roads or on the move. So if you're looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to

make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of the show, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. You know, I think whether they do it for business reasons or for moral reasons, they see benefits, right? These companies talk about work-life balance scores going way up. People are healthier because they have more time to do things like whether it's go to the doctor or train for a marathon or go to the gym.

They also are healthier because they have more time with their families. Of course, we all know that time with other people is an important thing in keeping us sane, but also keeping us physically healthy. I love the idea that, in a sense, we should treat kind of mental health in the same way that companies are now learning to treat environmental concerns, right? As something that is important. Yes, it's important for economic reasons, but it's also important for moral reasons as well. I would love to get to that point. I think probably sooner rather than later, we will. When you start thinking about it and when you come at it from that position, I think thinking of organizations, thinking of workplaces as places that can do good things for people's health, that can be redesigned in ways to make them healthier.

And not just about adding plants or healthy snacks, which are great things, and which actually a bunch of these companies do. But redesigning the way in which people work so that people can be healthier is, you know, there would be tremendous public health benefits to that. millennials are now seeking jobs that give them purpose and passion rather than just what's the salary going to be like what's the career progression going to be like which is certainly a change from 20 30 years ago in terms of how a lot of people would choose their jobs and i guess a natural consequence of that might be um if we're trying to do a job that we're passionate about that's going to make an impact on the world. Well, we can't do that if we're burning out and actually we've got no time to enjoy the benefits of a happier, healthier society. So it kind of feels as though this is a movement that could very rapidly grow,

particularly with great books like yours, to contribute to that conversation. Yeah, I mean, have you seen particular types of works, particular types of companies more receptive than others to this kind of thinking? I have been impressed at the range of industries in which the four-day week has been implemented. I mean, it literally is everything from software startups to car dealerships to repair shops to there's a steelmaker in Birmingham who makes Balty Bowls that works a four-day week now. And so it's not just creatives. It's also not industries where people are looking for a totally laid-back lifestyle. No one goes into software because it's going to be an easy life. I think that what they do all share are people at the top who

really feel the necessity of this, who have had that brush with burnout that we talked about earlier. Having a workforce that is willing to take a kind of growth mindset to be kind of experimental, who often maybe are themselves parents and have enough experience in their jobs to be able to say, you know, we've been doing it this way for the last 10 years. Here's how we can do it better, right? Here's what's broken in the system. Yeah. the last 10 years, here's how we can do it better, right? Here's what's broken in the system. And I know enough now so that I think I can fix it. When you've got those things, everything else becomes just a matter of like scheduling and logistics, whether you are, you know, whether you're creatives,

whether you're making things, whether you're salaried or hourly. I think that culture is upstream of all of this. or hourly. I think that culture is upstream of all of this. Yeah. There's lots of employers who listen to this podcast. You mentioned car dealers. I know there's one very, very large car dealer in the UK whose boss and team listens to this podcast. But there's also many HR departments who listen. And for those of them who think, okay, all right, I like what you're saying, Alex, I can see the benefits, but I've got no clue where to start. How would I bring that into my workplace? What would you say to them? them? So for offices, the first place to start is meetings, right? Nobody loves meetings. Generally, in most places, meetings aren't terribly well run. So getting a handle on them, making them shorter, is a way both of clearing out a bunch of time in people's schedules.

It's an easy win because it fixes an enduring problem that everyone is aware of and yet tends to go unrepaired. It also then sets up the question, all right, if we can fix this, what else can we fix, right? You've lived with bad meetings your entire career. And yet, if it turns out in a few weeks that you can get control of them, maybe there's other stuff that you can deal with. And then finally, the other important thing is the social dimension, right? You get 20 people in a meeting for an hour. That's 20 person hours. That's like half a week of one person's time. It's really easy to underestimate, you know, just how many human hours get absorbed in meetings. And once you, until you start to reduce them and you realize easy to underestimate, you know, just how many human hours get absorbed in meetings. And once you, until you start to reduce them and you realize, good heavens, you know, every meeting

turns out to be really expensive. And I think what you're talking about is, I know we touched on this with Tim Ferriss' book before, but it's all coming back to this idea that time is a precious commodity. It's a non-renewable commodity what do we use that time for we ain't getting it back right when it's gone and i guess you know in essence your argument is also that if you're working work be productive at that work and when when you're resting, rest. But don't try and mix and match it all because then you don't do either one particularly well. Right. You know, one of the things in both rest and shorter that I learned from the people I

studied and talked to is that focused periods of intensive work beat long semi-distracted hours every time, right? You know, you can get more done in four hours where no one bothers you than you can in 12, where you're kind of switching in and out and dealing with different things. 100%. And I'm interested to you, how that played out as an author.

And then I'll share with you how it plays out with me as an author. So when you're writing, how do you get your writing done? Because that's not your only job, is it? You do other things as well. Yeah. So, what I do is I get up super early. So, when I'm working on a book, I'm up generally by about five or so. Put in a couple hours, take out the dogs, come back, write some more. And usually in that walk, I'm turning over ideas. And I realized, wait, you know, if I do this, do this transition this way, it solves this problem,

right? So that's a kind of creative time for me. By about nine or 10 or so, the biggest part of the writing day for me is done. And I do this even though I am absolutely not a morning person. I am someone who in college started homework like at 10 o'clock at night all the time. But when you've got kids, when you've got a job – Do you have kids? I do. I have two. One's in college.

One's about to go off. Okay. So when you've got those kinds of demands and when you've got the constant lore of lore of facebook and linkedin and twitter and other stuff you gotta find a time when when you can work undisturbed and for me the super early hours are valuable partly because no one else is up if i'm gonna do this to myself i'm not gonna waste time like on social media yeah i'm actually gonna to do something with that time. And then the rest of the day, I do everything else I talk about in rest. I'm a huge fan of maps. You know, I walk a lot. My first academic book took 10 years to write. Doing all the, you know, and I was like,

you know, in that kind of constant state of sort of overload and thinking that, you know, this was simply the way that unruly genius operated, right? Working the way that I describe in rest, in 10 years, I've been able to finish three books. I think the results speak for themselves. Yeah, 100%. I can't say how many of the things you do are the things that I do, particularly when writing. So, like you, I'm juggling many things. Two young kids, one are a bit younger than yours, nine and seven at the moment. You know, seeing patients, all kinds of other things that I've got going on, like many people do these days. I'm not saying I'm particularly

unique, but everyone feels that they're busy and they've got lots and lots of different things to do. When I am writing, when I'm in those months where actually I know I need to write and I need to deliver something, I wake up early. Now, I wake up early most days anyway. I am a morning person. I'll sometimes go to 4.30 when I'm writing. But I know if I get a half four till half eight window in of writing or a 5am till 9am writing, I get so much more done then than if I started, let's say at 9am and I tried to sort of plough through for the entire day, I never ever beat three or four hours of intense work in the morning. And so, when I'm in writing mode and I've, you know, having, you know, written three books in three years, I've really had to refine my process so that I can actually spend time with my family, spend the time seeing my patients, spend time on myself, on my own hobbies.

I've had to get really good at how I use time. And I know that that morning time for me is peak creativity. And I just don't want to be contacted in the day by many people. So I try not to go on email. I try not to talk to people who help me in my team or anything, because it's, I know that I need to, you know, protect my mental space so that I can deliver what I'm trying to do at the moment. And I guess, you know, not everyone listens to this as an author, but they will have something in their life that's important to get done. And I guess what you're also saying, or the follow on sort of idea from your work is that we got to find out

what works for us on an individual level, as well as a structural level, we've got to find out trying to figure out actually, when are we particularly good at working? When are we good at just sort of closing things off and not doing any work? It's, yeah, it's, I think it has real, real value this. No, I think that for me, it took two or three weeks, right, to really understand how mornings work. And I have certain practices. One important one is actually I set up everything I possibly can the night before. Okay. Because I don't want to have to make a single decision at five in the morning, like what to wear, what I'm going to work on. So the night before, I will outline the writing tasks for the next day. I set up breakfast. I set out the clothes that I'm going to wear. And so I can just operate on automatic until the time when I flip up the

screen and I start work. The great thing about that is that I'm not spending any energy making decisions other than what the next words are. It's also important because it's a sort of self-blackmail, right? If I'm going to go to the work the night before of setting stuff up, I'm a lot less likely to rationalize like sleeping in, right? I'm kind of making my future self commit to this. Also, when you do that, really interestingly, setting up questions that you sleep on makes it more likely that you'll actually answer them. Your mind turns things over even while you're asleep. John Cleese had a wonderful line about how when he first started writing comedy sketches,

that he would get stuck on something at night and he'd go to sleep and the next morning, not only would he have the answer, he couldn't even remember why he was stuck. have the answer. He couldn't even remember why he was stuck. And it sounds mysterious, but you give your mind practice, you let it work on this, and it learns how to do it. And it is utterly miraculous. Yeah, I know you're a neuroscientist as well. And I can't remember what that state of consciousness is called, just as you're falling asleep. Right. A hypnagogic state. Exactly. called, just as you're falling to sleep. Right. But I have- A pedagogic state. Exactly.

Yeah. And why don't you tell us about that? So, it's essentially, you know, those moments in between wakefulness and sleep. It's those moments when it's a little bit like dreaming. Yeah. Except you're sometimes thinking about stuff that, you know, you're kind of turning over things from the day or thinking about ideas or problems. And every now and then in those states, you know, we have these experiences of, you know,

having ideas come to mind. And it's, you know, it's an illustration of how our creative minds are capable of doing things kind of without our conscious effort and without our force. And, you know, one of the great things with deliberate rest that deliberate rest offers is a space for your kind of creative subconscious to work on problems that have eluded your own solution. And whether it's, you know, little things like how to handle these paragraph transitions, or sometimes some very big ideas. There are some famous cases of mathematicians and scientists, you know, working for years on problems, getting stuck, putting them down, and then a few weeks later while they're at

the beach or about to get on a train, all of a sudden the answer comes to their mind. When you give your brain the downtime. Precisely. Not when you're constantly going, trying to be productive, working more. Exactly. And how valuable is that if you're in a creative industry, if you're a leader who has to be thinking about next year's products, who has to be trying to make sense of global trends, thinking about what things just over the horizon could be a real opportunity or a real problem. It's really difficult to think about that stuff just when you're at your desk dealing with the everyday and answering emails. And being able to do stuff like get out on your

bike or work in the garden on that, maybe that fifth day is amazingly valuable for these company leaders and for the people who work for them. Yeah. I mean, I love that idea of, you know, mulling things over at night. So you wake up with the solution and it's something that I very much try and do in my own life. I'm very attentive to what I'm doing in those 10 or 20 minutes just before I fall asleep. I often recommend to people, I think one of the worst things you can do is watch the news before you go to bed. I think you wake up full of anxieties and worries that often impacts your sleep. I think for me, if I'm trying to solve a problem, again, you've got to be careful. You don't want it to be too stimulating, whereby actually it stops you from sleeping. But if

there's a few ideas I'm mulling around, I'll often think about them or read about them just before I go to bed and set myself up for that morning burst of creativity. Exactly. You know, one of the other things that I do is stop writing in mid-sentence. I don't reach the end of a section or even the end of a paragraph. Because partly, it's easier to start writing if you don't have the existential terror of the blank page facing you. As a writing exercise, picking up where you left off just makes things a little bit easier. But it also means that your mind continues working on the rest of that paragraph and then the next one and the next one, even while you are thinking about other things.

So you leave it unfinished so that your brain's trying to complete it a little bit and actually, yeah, I like that. Exactly. And I cannot take credit for this or, you know, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway talk about doing this, but, you know, Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway talk about doing this. Yeah. But, you know, worked for them. Worked for them, exactly. Exactly.

And if we delve into the neuroscience a little bit of deliberate arrest, I mean, what happens when we, you know, are switching off and are fully immersed in that passion, you know, going for a hike or playing a musical instrument or going for a walk? What is going on in our brains that gives us all these benefits? There's been a bunch of work in the last 20 years in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity that's helped open up our understanding of what's going on in the creative mind, in particular in those periods where it feels like we're not in conscious control of these processes or when our attention is elsewhere. So, the first thing is that when you kind of switch off your attention, it sort of feels like your brain sort of shuts down, but it actually doesn't, right? You know, your brain is

actually every bit as active as it is when you are thinking hard about something. It's just that the connectome, the parts of the brain that are talking to each other are different. And in particular, the parts of the brain that are associated with more creative activity, as opposed to kind of just straight on problem solving, are more connected and more active. So in a sense, what the brain does is switch into a mode where it's ready to solve problems on your behalf. Now, sometimes we have a kind of low-level experience of this brain working on our behalf almost every day, right? You know, when you're trying to remember who was the musician who was in that band and then had that single, and you can't remember who they were. And then five minutes later, you're doing the dishes, and all of a sudden, they come to mind. That's the default mode network. That's those brain connections continuing to work on that problem, even while you've gone on to do

something else. Now, in the daily schedules of highly creative people, what you see them doing is layering periods of really intensive work with these periods of deliberate rest. These activities like walking or gardening or going for a swim or other activities that are not very cognitively demanding, but which get them out of the office and which give their creative minds time to keep working, to keep turning over these problems that they were just thinking hard about 30 minutes ago. When you load up your creative mind with those outstanding problems, it likes to keep working on them. If it has the space to do so by the end of that swim

or that hike, it's likely to have made some progress. Because we think of creative work and other kinds of work as involving willpower, expenditure of effort, we tend to shortchange how powerful that other part of our brains can be, other part of our minds. But if we give it the space to operate, if we practice deliberate rest, not only do we recover the energy that we spend in those highly intensive focus periods, when you can actually get – there's plenty of substantive stuff that you can get done when you're concentrating. There's no question about that. But there's also creative stuff that you can come up with that you might never if you didn't take that time, if you didn't have that practice. That for me, for someone who loves writing, who loves

solving the problems that writing books involves, having the practice that helps me create better work, that helps me see the world a little better, that's worth organizing my entire day and a lot of my life around. that's worth organizing my entire day and a lot of my life around. Yeah. It's, it's this whole cultural idea that more is better doing, doing, doing is what gets you ahead. Whereas we're really seeing this resurgence, aren't we? In terms of the importance of sleep, the importance of rest and the importance of deep play, you know, really starting to understand, I think, more and more, it needs to get out there much more than it currently is, but little by little,

trying to get the idea out there that actually less can be more. That actually not doing something can be beneficial, can have multiple benefits, rather than looking at what you're missing out on, we need to start framing it as what we're gaining from doing that. But I do wonder whether there is a big education piece here that needs to happen societally. And the example that comes to mind for me is in the recent general election in the UK, if my memory serves me correctly, Jeremy Corbyn, who was the opposition leader, who was the opposition leader, he or his department or his party at some point, I think, had hypothesized that public sector workers at some point in the future would move to four-day weeks or they were looking into it. And I was super interested by that. But he was actually belittled in the media by many people in the media say oh this is just more ridiculous and i'm not but i'm not making a political argument either way right i'm simply saying that i think

that whole idea as a concept is one that has value and it's one that we should be looking at seriously uh individually on a company level but also politically in terms of how we structure our working systems. But I didn't see it get any traction because people thought it was another reason to sort of hammer him down with. And I think, does this whole idea have a bit of a PR problem? Does it need, I know you're addressing that with your book, but do we need to really get the messages in your book out there to politicians, to policymakers to say, look, there is a strong case here for doing this. This is not slacking off. This is actually going to be beneficial for the economy.

Right. I think with the last election, the opposition was really effective at hammering the idea that the four-day week was going to require another money tree, that the four-day week was going to require another money tree, and that it basically was another giveaway. But if you look at the companies that are doing it, it's a very different kind of proposition, right? It's not about working less. It's not a way of punishing capitalists. Yeah. It is a way of making businesses more productive, more sustainable, and making people happier. If you were making the case to shareholders or to investors who were reluctant and who were so accustomed to the idea that you make more money by making people work longer hours or by reducing

what Walmart calls time theft, stuff like going to the bathroom. Time theft? Time theft. Yes. Is that where we've got to? Yes. Not working is time theft, right? Think about what that means for the way, you know, you think about how life should be lived and how time should be spent. But I think the way to make the larger argument is, first of all, that the shorter workweek has demonstrated benefits in terms of recruitment and retention, productivity and

profitability, work-life balance, and talent development. If you can tell me which one of those things you don't like as an investor or shareholder, we can talk about making adjustments. But I think once you see the numbers that most people who pride themselves on making smart investment decisions or being rational economic actors will see, yeah, it looks counterintuitive at first, but because you do all these other things in order to make the four-day week work, yeah, all right, this makes sense. At another level, I think that there is a kind of cultural change that these companies have to go through in thinking – in moving away from the idea that overwork is like a sign of

productivity or it's a sign of virtue. And these are all companies where long hours are the norm, right? In the restaurant industry, people work 15-hour days for weeks on end. These are cultures where overwork as a mark of virtue, as a kind of necessary step for success is just like built into the DNA of these professions. And as one of the founders put it, it took us a while to get to the point where we realized, actually, anyone can sit in a chair for 12 hours a day.

That's not the hard thing. The hard thing is, the impressive thing is being able to do your work in six hours and knock it out and get out of there. That for so long, we've treated long hours as a kind of proxy for commitment, as a proxy for dedication, for passion, for productivity. And it turns out, these companies show, that that is exactly backwards. The people who are really good at their jobs are not the people who need huge amounts of time to do them. They're people who are capable of really focusing in on what's important, on identifying the key parts of the problem, the most effective way to solve them, and then actually go about doing that.

That's what we should value. That's what these companies value. Yeah. And you've got loads of really nice cases in the book about companies. I think there's one that's a restaurant actually, which did make that change and managed to do it. But one thing I just wanted to think about is, is there a danger that if a company moves to a four-day work week that they push their employees really really hard on those they say yeah you can have your time off but i'm going to work you into the ground for those six hours a day whilst you are there have you seen any evidence of that at all it is a more intense day definitely and there are there are stories of, you know, one or two people at a company who will quit rather than make the changes that they need to in order to make that work for

them. But I think the two things that kind of counterbalance that intensity are first off, the fact that in all of these companies, the workers themselves figure out how to make the four-day week work. The change starts at the top. Right now, you need a founder or a CEO who says, we're going to do this and we're going to do these experiments. Some of these things are going to fail, but we're going to figure it out. out. But nobody at the top knows everyone's job well enough to figure out which parts they can take out, which parts you can automate, which parts are actually incredibly valuable that you want to be able to preserve for yourself and focus on. So the actual kind of redesign of the work is done by people themselves. And most people turn out to be fairly good judges

of what they need to do, you know, where they need to focus. The other thing is that one of the reasons you give people an extra day off or you close the office at three if you're doing a six-hour day is that, yeah, the work is more tiring. But it's more tiring in the way that finishing a marathon is tiring as opposed to being in unproductive, frustrating meetings for 10 hours is tiring. Both of those things take a lot of energy, but you feel really, really different at the end of them. Yeah, it's productive fatigue. Exactly.

Yes. So, so far, the indicator is that, yeah, people actually, you know, you do work harder. It's a little more like high intensity training, you know, in the gym. But it turns out that the extra recovery time, the feeling that you are more in control of your own job, that you have more time to work effectively, even though you're working fewer days. And there were a couple companies have done surveys where they ask people, do you have enough time to do your work? And actually, the percentage of people who say yes goes up when they go to four-day weeks, which, yeah, an extraordinary thing, right? they go to four-day weeks, which, yeah, an extraordinary thing, right? It's a beautiful indicator of the subjectivity of time, but also how much time normal companies turn out to waste. And I think the fact that you are doing this with other people, right? You're having the experience, often sometimes fairly intense experience, of all of you redesigning the work

so that you can all share this common benefit. That's hard, but it's worthwhile hard. Yeah. And that has extra benefits, doesn't it? You know, it's something we've spoken about on this podcast many times before about how important that human social connection is. Yeah. How important it is to feel as though you've got some control over how your life, how your day goes down. Exactly. Which is what you're sort of suggesting. If someone senior at a company says, okay, let's try and do this. And then actually includes the team and say, hey, what are you guys finding productive? What do you think is a bit of a time suck? And the more people who

are invested in that together, the better you feel individually, but also collectively. Yeah. You know, one founder said that, you know, all of my employees now act like they own the company. And all I did was give them a day off. As a company owner, that is exactly how you want people to behave. I mean, it's win, win, win all around this, isn't it? It's just a case of persuading people to give it a go. I guess, you know, we could go into the weeds on every single industry. Of course, some industries might find it more challenging than others, but I don't know, fundamentally, you're talking about how do you do productive work when you're working? And how do you sort of balance that

with doing productive resting when you're resting? I've already said it, but it really is that profound for me that that's what we're fundamentally talking about. But Alice, what would you say, you know, you're talking about companies, many people are self-employed these days. So, if there's a freelancer or someone self-employed listening to this right now who likes your ideas and buys into them and goes, yeah, I can see that, can you give them any tips on what they can apply from this kind of systemic structural change in a company, but what they can do individually as a freelancer? Okay. You know, I think one thing is recognize that these problems aren't individual ones, right? That they are collective ones. And that every change we make in terms of being more mindful of our attention,

of how we use technology, of how we run meetings, is a potential gift to someone else. These companies, all of them worry at the beginning that clients are going to hate this. And it turns out clients are universally supportive because they are solving problems that the clients also have. And it's one thing to hear about someplace in Sweden doing it. But if it's a company that you've worked with for years, that understands your culture and you understand, then the lessons from there feel like they're a little more transferable. But to get back to what individuals can do, I mean, I think that recognizing that social dimension is one thing. But I think that on a daily basis,

you know, if there is one serious place in which to begin, I think it's recognizing that work and rest are not competitors, but rather they are partners for all of the reasons that we've talked about. your biggest, most significant tasks, right? You clear away time in your schedule to work uninterrupted on that. Not only helps you be more productive, it also creates a space for rest. There's this great, you know, the saying in the US Marine Corps, you know, the rest you get is the rest you earn, right? When you're training, you've got a certain amount of time to complete a task and then, you know, a finite amount of time before the next task starts. So the faster you can get through one challenge, the more time you have to sleep before the next one. And I think for all of us, one of the ways to justify getting more rest is structuring our days so that if you get some of that big stuff done first, it's a lot easier to say, yeah, I can take a nap or I can take that walk. I think recognizing that layering that kind of focused work and deliberate rest also has creative benefits as well as health benefits is a good thing for solar performers. And then I think finally, recognizing how much technology is both woven into our daily work

and can absorb and direct our time and direct our attention if we do not consciously manage those things ourselves is the other great challenge for knowledge workers in the 21st century. These devices do a fantastic job of making choices for us when we don't make them ourselves. And they generally don't make choices on our behalf yet, right? They make them on the behalf of their makers or advertisers or companies who are interested in us as data. And so taking control of our digital lives and our device lives is the other really essential

thing I think that you do in order to carve out space both for better work and for better rest. So Alex, look, one of the biggest sources of distraction is our smartphones. So what is your best tip for how we can better manage our smartphones? Okay. You know, in their sort of default state, smartphones are like toddlers. You know, everything is equally interesting. They want to share stuff with you right now. And if you don't respond to them, it's a disaster. And so, you know, I think of it as, let's help our smartphones grow up a little bit. Let's let them be a little more thoughtful about when they demand our attention and help them understand what we consider to be important.

And so, what I've done is, you know, I turn off all the notifications for news and other things, I turn off all the notifications for news and other things, just completely zero that out. Then for phone calls and for texts, I follow something that I call the zombie apocalypse test, which is in the zombie apocalypse, who do you need to be able to call? For me, it's immediate family, right? My wife, my kids, a couple other people. And those people, I give one ringtone, which is the opening bars of Derek and the Dominoes, Layla. Oh, yeah.

Because no matter where I am, no matter what's going on, what background noise there is, that's going to cut through. I'm going to hear that. I'm going to know, oh, it's my wife or my kids. Everybody else in my contacts list and the world at large gets the opening bars of a Yo-Yo Ma solo Bach cello concerto. Because that kind of – if it comes on while I'm doing something, it's easy to ignore. something, it's easy to ignore. It's easy to make, basically, it's easy to make a decision about whether I want to shift my attention to the phone or whether I want to keep working on this other thing. And so, I think that, you know, by doing that, my phone goes from being something

whose purpose is to interrupt me according to, you know to whatever rules it wants or according to someone else's preferences. And it becomes a little bit more like an assistant who knows who you're going to want to hear from, who knows if you're in the middle of a meeting, they should interrupt you, and knows how to say no to everybody else. So turn off notifications, think about the zombie apocalypse test,

choose the piece of music that is going to cut through everything, and have a happier life. Oh, I love it. I love it. And you're using technology and you're, you know, you're sort of playing with it a little bit to make it work for you rather than work against you. Alex, that's a brilliant tip. I think a lot of people could do with applying those in their own life. I don't have a different ringtone. That's interesting. Something I could possibly put in to my life. Although I've got to say my phone is often on silent, so I miss calls all the time. That's the other strategy. But Alex, look, this podcast is called Feel Better Live More. When we feel better in our lives, we get more out of

them. Out of all the research you've done, out of all the books you've written, what is your one tip that my listeners can start applying into their everyday lives to improve the way that they feel? The simplest things that I would suggest would be everyone should take their evenings and their weekends more seriously, by which I mean, you know, take them as yours. The research tells us that whether you are in a creative field or in a high-intensity occupation, that you are less likely to burn out, you're more likely to have a happy life, and more likely to be better at home and at work if you are able to detach from work when you're off the job.

It is fashionable these days to think about work and the boundaries between work and life having dissolved as a kind of cool thing. There actually is a use to those boundaries. And I think that appreciating their value and respecting them both when we are at work and just as importantly, when we're out, turns out to have benefits for us both in the immediate term and in the long run. Over the course of decades, if you take your vacations, if you have a hobby that interests you, that engages you on the weekends, you are likely later in life to be healthier. You are less likely to have chronic illnesses, dementia. You will be more likely to be the person you want to be than if you overwork,

if you allow email to be the last thing you see at night and the first thing that you see in the morning. Just having those boundaries and allowing yourself to have that time is the simplest thing I think that we can do, and in some ways, the single most powerful thing that we can do. Yeah, Alex, I love that. Thank you so much for sparing some of your time today. You know, I wish you all the best for the rest of your time in london we're actually both speaking on the same stage tomorrow at life lessons at the barbican so i think i'm on just before you so we will no doubt see each other in the green room tomorrow at the barbican but alex you've written some great books um i really would recommend them

to people listening to this or watching this on youtube thank you so much and hopefully we can continue this conversation at some point in the future. Great. No, this has been a real pleasure. So thanks very much. That concludes today's conversation. I think there is a lot there for us all to reflect on. I really like the idea that Alex left us with about taking our downtime seriously. How do you spend it? Can you make any changes based upon what you have heard in my chat with Alex? As always, I would encourage all of you to try and think about one thing you can take from this conversation that you can apply into your own everyday life. Of course, do let Alex and I know what you thought of our conversation today. You can find Alex at Ask Pang on Instagram and

Twitter. Also, do check out his latest book, Shorter, How Working Less Will Revolutionize the Way Your Company Gets Things Done. Everything we spoke about today, some brilliant articles in the media that he has written, his book, his social media handles, they're all available to see on the show notes page for this episode, which is drchatterjee.com forward slash 118. This podcast, like all of them now, is available to watch in full on YouTube. So if you have friends and family who you feel would benefit from these conversations, but don't listen to audio podcasts, please do let them know about my YouTube channel. In fact, this is where my own mother watches these podcasts.

She really isn't into podcast apps. So she stays up to date with what I'm up to on YouTube. Many of you have asked me about my latest book, Feel Better in 5. When is it out in different countries? The book came out in January 2020 here in the UK, in India, Australia, and New Zealand. But it is having its big launch in America on September the 1st. So for those of you who listen to the show in America and Canada, you can actually right now go onto amazon.com and place your order. If you order it now, you'll get it on the day that it comes out, which is September the 1st. If you pre-order it, it also really helps me out. It lets Amazon in

America know, it lets booksellers and retailers know in America that this is a book that people want. I've seen the incredible response there has been in the UK to it. It is literally transforming people's lives. Everything in it takes only five minutes and it deals with physical, mental, and emotional health. So if you're a fan of this podcast or my previous books and you live in America, please do go onto amazon.com and place your order. Again, if you just go to the show notes page for this episode of the podcast, there will be a link so you can go straight to the pre-order page. As usual, please do share this podcast with friends and family and with

anyone who you feel would benefit from listening. And if you can spare 30 seconds or so, please do leave a review on whichever platform you are listening to this on, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. A big thank you as always to Vidar Sachatschi for producing this week's podcast and to Richard Hughes for audio engineering. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the

architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time.