Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #223 BITESIZE | How To Work Less and Get More Done | Alex Pang

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Rest is so important for our health, our happiness, and our productivity, but we often think that trying to do more is better.   Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.   Today’s clip is from episode 118 of the podcast with author and former Silicon Valley tech consultant, Alex Pang.   Alex realised that when he went on a sabbatical from work, he became more productive and, in this clip, he explains how we can all work less and get more done. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.  Show notes and the full podcast are available at 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.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 118 of the podcast with author and former Silicon Valley tech consultant, Alex Pang. Now Alex realized that when he went on a sabbatical from work, he became more productive. And in this clip, he explains how we can all work less and get more done. A lot of the time, people seem to get an understanding of the importance of downtime,

the importance of rest, after they burnt out. How did you get interested in this whole idea of deliberate rest? Well, I've seen very much the same thing. 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. And so, 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. It's the 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. I was lucky enough to have an offer to go to Microsoft Cambridge for three months to have a sabbatical. I was lucky enough to have an offer to go to Microsoft Cambridge for three months to have a sabbatical. 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. And 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. It becomes really easy to default to the idea that, well, we'll do just one more thing. Everyone should take their evenings and their weekends more seriously, by which I mean 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 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 when we are – both when we are at work and just as importantly when we're, 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 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. It's this whole cultural idea that more is better. Doing, doing, doing is what gets you ahead. We're really seeing this resurgence, aren't we, in terms of the importance of sleep, the importance of rest. 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. If we delve into the neuroscience a little bit of deliberate arrest, I mean, what happens when we 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? Right. 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. 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. but which get them out of the office and which give their creative minds time to keep turning over problems that they were just thinking hard about 30 minutes ago. When you kind of load up your creative mind with those outstanding problems, it kind of 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. But I think that on a daily basis, if there's one serious place in which to begin, I think it's recognizing 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. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with

your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday

and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.