Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 230: Work Less, Get More Done | Alex Soojung Kim-Pang

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Many of us can feel burnt out, tired or stretched too thin. It can be hard to balance everything on our plates, especially in work environments that require long hours and multi-tasking. But Alex Soojung-Kim Pang says that overworking can actually hinder productivity, and that working less can help you get more done. After struggling to deal with the pressure of numerous projects as a technology forecaster and consultant, Pang took a sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. He realized that he had accomplished more in just a few short months than he typically did at work. Now, Pang challenges the relationship we have with work, claiming that cramming in all those overtime hours is not beneficial to the mind and body. He says working too hard blocks creative flow and has negative effects on quality. Pang discusses how he came to this realization and how it can be applied to your life. Plug Zone Website: http://www.askpang.com/ Website: http://www.strategy.rest/ Books: https://www.amazon.com/Alex-Soojung-Kim-Pang/e/B001KHJ91I Twitter: https://twitter.com/askpang Yung Pueblo featured on ABC's Nightline https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/yung-pueblo-instagram-people-heal-happier-life-69352620 Full Show notes: www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/Alex-Soojung-Kim-Pang-230 Jeff Warren Retreats: https://jeffwarren.org/event/fidgetyskeptics-california/ https://jeffwarren.org/event/how-to-guide-meditation/ https://jeffwarren.org/event/omegaretreat/ Ten Percent Happier Podcast Insiders Feedback Group: https://10percenthappier.typeform.com/to/vHz4q4 Have a question for Dan? Leave us a voicemail: 646-883-8326 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. For ABC, to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, two quick items of business and then we'll dive in. First, a couple of episodes ago we featured a really interesting young guy named Young Pueblo, huge Instagram following, deep meditation practice.

We just did a nightline story on him that I wanted to let you know, but there's a link in the show notes if you wanna check that out. Two, my friend and collaborator and guru Jeff Warren is holding a couple of retreats, which I highly recommend you consider attending. The first is the meditation for fidgety skeptics

retreat. That's in April in California. The second actually is doing two more retreats in May at Omega and upstate New York. Another meditation for fidgety skeptics retreat and then a five day. How to guide meditation workshop and retreat. Go to Jeff Warren.org to learn more. And again, there are links in the show notes here. Go check it out. Jeff's amazing. Love that guy. Okay, so the episode this week, our guest was recommended by a former guest, Jocelyn Gly, who was on a few months ago to talk about having a more compassionate approach to productivity. And I got a ton out of that interview.

And she in the course of our discussion dropped a reference to a book called Rest, which was written by Alex Su-jung Kim Pang. Alex Su-jung Kim Pang. And I went and checked the book out, and it was a revelation for me. You know, these issues around productivity, and Jocelyn has this great phrase, productivity shame that I struggle with. You know, I've done a ton of work in my life around, you know, trying to be a better happier person. And one of the areas that where I still feel I have some of the most growth needed is around not working so hard so maniacally so many days and

meanwhile being able to hopefully keep up with what's required of me and also thinking strategically about how much I'm allowing other people to require of me. So Alex has a ton of good thinking about this. I got an enormous amount out of his book, which as I said is called Rest. The subtitle is Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. And in the book, he really talks about how in an individual life, you can do what he's promising, do who do less work and get more done. And he's got a new book now, which I didn't know about until I met him. And it's just about to be published. It's called Shorter, Redesign Your Workday, and reinvent your life. And the first book I read, Rest, is more about sort of a micro level what you can do in your own life. He heard as feedback in the course of publishing that

book that a lot of people felt like, well, I'm stuck in a system or in a workplace where I can't make the changes you're recommending. And so he's written this next book shorter about it's really an ode to the four-day work week and aimed at people like me who are helping to run companies to think about whether it makes sense to cut down on the amount of work you're requesting of your employees and that his argument is that we'll pay dividends down the line. We talk about structural approaches to proliferating the four-day work week. We talk about how to cultivate on an individual level what he calls deliberate rest and he'll talk about what that means and why he thinks that's a key to productivity. He talks about structuring

your workday around the most creative hours of your day and he talks about how meditation and other restorative practices can help with all of this. So here we go, here's Alex Sujong Kim Pang. All right, great. Well, nice to meet you. I've been wanting to talk to you for a long time. Well, thanks. Really enjoyed your book, the old book Rest, which I've read in its entirety, and read it. I had a chance to read a little bit of shorter the new book, and we'll talk about both of them. But first, I'm just interested in you for a second. Why is this issue of how we work and

Why is this issue of how we work and overwork and its revifications on productivity and psychology? Why is this such a big issue for you? How did you get into this? Well, I studied history of science when I was in school and graduate school. And what I was always really interested in was how scientists work, what makes them creative, how you discover new ideas. And so in a sense, this has been a kind of through line in my own intellectual and academic life for a very long time. I've worked in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years or so. And it's a place, of course, that is famous

as the world's capital of overwork. And the startup culture is very intense. This is a place where people make enormous fortunes very quickly, putting in herculian hours before the market changes, or their technical skills become obsolete. And in an earlier incarnation, and this was very much the way that I was working, and I was a consultant at Think Tank, doing a lot of projects, juggling a lot of stuff, a lot

of multitasking, always felt kind of half a step behind. And eventually started to feel like I was burning out on this. And got an opportunity to go on a sabbatical, to go to Cambridge, to Microsoft Research, and spend some time there doing research, and discovered that about a month into it, I was getting enormous amounts of stuff done, I was having great ideas, I was reading all sorts of stuff, but I didn't feel the kind of constant time pressure that you always feel here in the Bay Area.

And it started me thinking that maybe our assumptions about the relationship between overwork and success, between the number of hours we have to put in in order to do the kind of work that we really love to do. Maybe those assumptions actually need to be questioned. Maybe in fact, they're completely backwards. That started me on a path that so far has produced the distraction addiction, which grew out

of the work that I did at Cambridge, and then REST, which was very much a kind of contemplation of the personal stuff from that time. And then the new book shorter, which kind of draws together some issues from those first two and tries to push into some new territory. So that's the story. Well, it's great. I mean, it's great and it's to all of our benefit that you've had this intellectual through line.

So let's start with a new book. I just sent out a tweet a day or two before we were recording this, where I saw an article about some company, maybe it was Microsoft, experimenting with shorter work weeks and it really worked. And I wrote as, I tweeted the article and wrote as my caption, I really want to feel this is true. But somehow in my viscera, in my molecules, in the axons and dendrites of my brain, I do not feel it is true that if I work less, I'm gonna get more done. Now, I think, you know,

the first of the study you're talking about is sort of Microsoft Japan did a month-long trial for about almost 2,300 people in sort of the various Japan offices. They took every Friday off. There were five of them this year in August, and they found that by doing a few fairly simple things, they were able not only to maintain the same level of productivity working four days as five, they actually were more productive.

They also not, had lower energy bills because the office was closed for a day. There were various other good things that happened, right? People had better work-life balance. They spent more time volunteering and doing other things. But, you know, I think it is, you know, when I saw that, I thought, first off, this is terrific. And second, this is exactly like every other company that I thought first off, this is terrific. And second, this is exactly like every other company that I write about, right? There, and I have looked at more than 100 companies ranging from Michelin starred restaurants

to steel works, to startups, creative agencies, companies in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, and all of them find that no matter what business they're in and no matter what size they're in. We're at a point now thanks to technology, thanks to things about the way we work that are just waiting to be improved, that it's now possible to do five days work and four to be as productive for companies to adjust and to be as profitable and to do all of this in a way that not only keeps employees happy, but also keeps client satisfied. also keeps clients satisfied. And I think this is, but the idea that this is crazy talk

is also one that reflects the amazing degree to which these assumptions about the necessity of overwork, almost the kind of moral value of long hours, is ground into every single one of us and I think that you know for those of us For a lot of us, you know, this is a reflection of maybe how we worked in college It's a reflection of how we've seen all of our peers work We get messages in all kind of from all kinds of channels about this being the obvious way of working. And to argue that you can actually do all this while working, you can do great work while

working fewer hours, almost sounds like sorcery. But it turns out it is absolutely true, and it is true for a wider range of companies and industries and professions than I think we Then we realize what's the mechanism? So Top line things are first of all there is research that shows that most companies waste two or three hours a day in meetings bad management multi, multitasking, distractions from Slack channels, et cetera. So if you can just kind of clear that stuff up, there's a whole bunch of productivity increases

that technology is made possible that are kind of crushed under the weight of bad management and bad technologies. So how do you relieve that? One thing you do is you get really disciplined about meetings. Everyone kind of defaults to meetings being an hour long, mainly because most calendaring software sets meetings for an hour, and we just accept this as part of the way that the world works. Microsoft Japan cut meetings first to 30 minutes

and then to 15 minutes and limited the number of people at them. That's a very standard kind of practice. And it turns out that a lot of companies find they're able to be just as communicative, inclusive, decisive, running far fewer meetings with far fewer people than before. That's number one.

The second thing is redesigning the workday. So setting aside periods of the day, often in the morning, for people's most focused heads down creative work. What that means is you don't have to answer the phone, you don't have to talk to people, those conversations where someone asks, you know, can I ask you one quick thing that turns into a 20 minute diversion? You can't do that, or if someone asks,

it'd better be because something's burning down. Past that, it becomes a lot of little things that are kind of company specific. And it can be, you know, better project management, better technology use. And but I think all of them point to is the third big thing, which is kind of reorientation in the way that people think about how you spend and measure and value time. In so many companies, we assume that when we're working late, we're crushing it. We're

debt, we are getting a lot done. We're showing our devotion to our work, our love of our company. And what these places do is turn that around and say, you know, the really professional people aren't the ones who need 12 hours to get something done They only need six hours to get it done right the measure of skill the measure of devotion is not how long You spend doing something but whether you can learn Learn from your your experiences. You can work well enough with other people You can master your tools so that you can get this done in less time. And that's what I see whether I'm looking at Noma in Copenhagen or Noma, the restaurant in Copenhagen, or a telemarketing agency in Glasgow, Scotland, or a cosmetics maker in Melbourne, Australia.

They all do these kinds of things and they all see common benefits. And the doing thing, particularly as it could pertains to creative work, doing things more with more speed, doesn't lead to shotier work, Russian. Interestingly, no. Partly what happens is that first of all, it's often the case that when you have particular things to execute, that focused work often beats long hours. So being able to concentrate on an aspect of an ad campaign or a design for three or four

hours, really dive into it, get into the details, get to the bottom of it, is really valuable. Super valuable in something like software development, where you've got a lot of little things, a lot of short variables that you've got to keep track of and memory of how one piece of this code relates to this other thing over here, keeping track of all of that is really difficult. And you need to get very, very immersed in the problem in order to work on it well. Having a few hours in order to do that generates much better results than kind of working on it more kind of half-mindedly for a very long period.

The second thing is that, you know, when people regularly talk about having more time to think about, think deeply about problems in their extra time off. So, you know, they're not just using it to, you know, binge watch whatever later show is going on, but they are also using some of that time to kind of turn over problems that have occupied them at work. And we all know there's a world of difference between,

you know being laid at the office and trying to finish a problem and kind of thinking about it when we're out on a hike and having that extra time to allow your creative subconscious to work on problems even while you're doing other things. Turns out to make for more creative results, deeper insights and overall better products. Well, I just think I do a lot of creative teamwork. Right now, I'm in the middle of editing. I've got two big sort of TV or video projects and I work with the team and we edit them. We edit the story where we're actually working on the script and then we have

an editor who's physically editing the video tape and I just think these projects kind of, I mean in my mind, but you're going to challenge this assumption I imagine. Kind of take the time they take and there's And there are barriers around the physical time it takes to actually edit the video. And I can imagine it being very frustrating if my boss said, your work case is five hours. You're done. Basically, you're going to do three hours of hard work and then the rest of the day is going to be emails and meetings and then you're out. I can imagine that being incredibly frustrating and that we would create some sort of rump group and meet on the outside and

get it done then. So how do you respond to that? It takes time to figure out how to do it. But to speak to the video example, I actually have a couple video or video production companies that have done this. They've gone more to six hour days, so they're doing 30 hour weeks rather than 40 hours plus. I think that the short answer is that we all have more inefficiency in our systems or than in how we work and work together, then we often realize. And that once you start thinking about and finding those things that you can make more efficient, it's really, you know, that begins a process where you kind of start questioning

everything. Companies often start with reducing the length of meetings because most people don't like meetings and most companies don't run very good meetings. That's kind of an easy win for everyone, but it also demonstrates that by making these kinds of organizational and normative changes, you can actually let people go home at the end of the day on Thursday without creating, without making people who want to do really good work, who really enjoy this stuff feel like

they're having to make a sacrifice. And so, but, you know, everyone does say that it takes time to kind of figure out this new rhythm and that it can take weeks or a couple months to really kind of adjust to this, but that they do. But it's not, if I'm, it's possible that I'm misunderstanding this,

but I was under the impression that it's not just the efficiencies that allow us to do more work and less time. It's also the psychological, energetic boost we get from not having to spend so much time stuck in the office that allows us to do more in the reduced time. Yes, that of, in one of the things that I talk about in, or in my previous book, REST is that a lot of super creative people kind of layer periods of really intensive work and periods of leisure, what I call them, the book deliberate rest. And in a sense, these companies are doing the same thing at scale, right? They're trading long hours for more intensive work periods.

They're designing the day to make that possible. And in exchange, people are able not only to work intensively to make up for the time, but they've also got more time on their own, or sometimes hanging out with friends after work when work ends at three o'clock or work ends at the end of day, Thursday, to kind of continue sometimes to play around with these ideas. So I think that- Did that work? I would say, I think we all know the difference between playing around with ideas ourselves versus being in the office and doing stuff on deadline.

I mean, I think it is absolutely the case that for lots of knowledge workers, that boundary does get sort of sometimes difficult to establish. But I think it's also worth recognizing that there is a difference between playing around with ideas versus having a charge at the office. I think actually software companies are a really good example of this. There are a number of them that have implemented what they call free Fridays. You do four days working on the product, doing stuff for clients, and then your fifth day, you can do your own stuff.

Google did an informal version of this, you know, the famous 20% time, which people and at Google, some really great stuff came out of it like Gmail and AdWords, but people always had to kind of fight for it and advocate for themselves to get it. At these companies, places like Cockroach Labs, a startup in New York City, it's built into the schedule. And you talk to the people there, and the opportunity on a Friday to play around with your own thing, whether it is prototyping something, working on a kind of side project that lets you learn a new programming language. You talk to them about that and yes, it involves some of the same kinds of skills, sometimes even some of the same tools that they use when they're working, but for them,

it feels very different from work. So, but I think this is always kind of a challenge to work through, but I think, especially for people who kind of love what they do. It's useful to kind of tease apart these different kinds of ways of relating to what we do and how and when we do it. I'm kind of thinking of this discussion and you know on a that we're having we're going to have it on a couple of levels now we're kind of on the structural

level of how to how to corporations pull this off and what are the impact what's the impact on workers and then we're going to move in so that's the new book shorter but your first book not your first, but the book that I read first rest is really about, you know, how can the steps that we can take as an individual on an individual level as opposed to structural in order to sort of balance our work time so that we're not more effective and less insane. But just staying on the structural level for a second, because I want to get to the individual eventually, you were just describing their sounds to me

different than a four-day work week, or a 30-hour work week. It's, you still have to go to work on Friday, but it's a play day kind of. Some places, in some places, the office is open and you can go in if you want. I'm essentially the resources of the company, whether they are servers or 3D printers are available to you.

However, if what you want to do on your free day is, go somewhere else or go to the new cool exhibit that might give you some design ideas, then that's also something that people do on the free Fridays. So, you know, depending on the kind of work you can do, and kind of depending on how place dependent it is, it can happen in the office or somewhere else. Do employers in this situation, and I'm saying this now as an employer, do they have to

police their employees? Because I could imagine we would have employees at 10% who are just super into their work they're doing and would really want to do it. You have to police them in the sense of convincing them actually that you're serious about moving to a four-day week. I hear stories about companies where people are still showing up Friday morning the first couple weeks, and it's basically habit. They just don't really quite know what to do with themselves.

And so I think that it does require leadership to get people to take this seriously and to think that it's gonna be okay. There are also, at many of the companies that I've studied, one or two people who will quit rather than move from a five day week to a four day week. Now, they just don't like the pace or the rhythm or there's something else that makes them decide that this isn't for them.

But, you know, I know you said before that it boosts productivity because people have more energy and we're cutting back on inefficiencies. I just wonder, I can imagine if I'm an employee in a situation like this, I would think, well, you're actually not expecting me to get less done, but you're giving me less time in which to do it. Right. That is correct. On the other hand, you are also,

there is a social contract that's at work here. It is that if you are able to realize these increased efficiencies, if you're able to redesign your day to work better with other people, you get to keep the productivity gains, right? The gains don't, I mean, in the sense that the time that you save becomes your property. In many places, you know, productivity gains go entirely to capital to sound Marxist for a second. And so, yes, you are asking people to do more work in less time,

but the flip side is that they get more time for themselves. And so, and they also, by the way, also get the same salary. The places that I'm looking at keep salaries the same, and in fact, there are some that have given bonuses in the form of the overtime that they used to give people. So to make sure that people don't lose money in the course of doing this. So I think that's that, yeah, I mean, it definitely is the case.

You're asking people to work differently. It's going to be more intensive. They do have less time, but the net benefits will be clear to the individuals themselves and also to companies and ultimately to clients as well. Did you see spectacular failures in your research here and what will count it for those? There were a few that decided to back off. Some of them eliminated four day weeks when there was a downturn in the business. They felt like you can't do things like layoff people and

still keep a four day week. So that's one thing that happens. In a couple other places, they couldn't quite figure out how to make kind of the social side work. So, one of the failures was a video production company in Hong Kong. And, you know, with people already were out doing shoots, you know, meeting clients, spending a lot of time out of the office. And once you introduced a four-day work week, everyone felt like they were able to get the same amount of work done, but the office was a ghost town. And they didn't like that. And so they went back to a five-day week as a result. I don't know of places that have eliminated it because of managerial problems or productivity failures,

but that may also be that people kind of tried it and it didn't work and they just haven't wanted to talk about it. Companies like people are much more willing to talk about their successes than about their failures. So this is a sampling problem. And if there are any companies that have gone through that, I would love to hear about them.

Not me, by the way. I have made a whole career out of talking about my failures. Let's go back to Mark's for a second because in reading your book, it's clear that you're kind of embedding this idea around shorter work weeks, shorter work days in a critique of modern capitalism and that its capitalism is not working for many of us. And we have inequalities, we have overwork, we have particular, you point this out, you go at, you're at pains to point out in particular how mothers suffer in this current environment.

So you can just hold forth on how this is in some ways and antidote to much of, we're in an era now where we've got a lot, especially a lot of young people leveling socialist critiques against modern capitalism. So I'd love to hear you paint that picture. Sure. Well, I think that there are people who advocate for a four-day week sort of coming from

an avowately left-wing kind of point of view, right? That this is bound up in, um, or of trade union advocacy. And of course, unions have been essential for getting us things like the 40 hour work week and the, you know, in the modern weekend. One of the things that has struck me when I was working on the book was how little politics mattered for the people I was talking to. For them, it was about making the business better. It was, in a sense, a kind of Elizabeth Warren style wanting to fix capitalism rather than

a kind of democratic socialist wanting to uproot it substantially, kind of thing. But I think where all of them converge, all of these critiques converge, is in a sense that the way in which we have organized work and workplaces, the ways in which we have tried to develop policies to deal with things like the balancing of parenthood and careers, mainly for women, but now increasingly for men as well. These things, however well-intentioned, have not actually worked as well as they should have for as many people as they should. And that the approach that so many of us have been taught,

which is that challenges with things like overwork or work-life balance are things that we have to solve ourselves through better management of our own schedules or tips and tricks is, you know, I think that that's good in the sense that it's always good to be aware of how you spend your time to be mindful of, you know, how you make use of this, you know, your time on earth and how you can, you know, how you can do it better. But I think that also serves to divert our attention away from the bigger structural problems that are at the root of all of these problems that we all have. And that, I think one of the great innovations of these companies is recognizing that these are problems that we can solve much more powerfully if we solve them together and if we solve them structurally rather than individually. Do you want to call that capitalist or do you want to call it socialist?

I mean, I think in a way, the arguments that I've had with people who run companies about this is that there's a start-up spirit that comes from working long hours that you lose. I think the answer is maybe, maybe not. And that this is clearly a way of working that better suits people who have young families. It's often super attractive to people who have come from the Googles or cantars and McKinsey's who've done a few years of 80 hours and you know, they know how to do that but they can see that you know at some point in their careers. They're not going to be able to sustain that and figuring out the challenge of doing this kind of work at this level in four days rather than five is sort of like flipping a bit

right you're applying the same kind of devotion and dedication, but you're trying to figure out how to apply that to do great work in fewer hours rather than in more hours. And ultimately, you know, this provides benefits in recruitment and retention in employee satisfaction and work life balance. It helps companies be more productive and creative. And I wonder, which of these things do managers object to? Which one don't they want their companies and their people to have?

And so, and maybe we'll find out specifically, which one people don't like. But I think that this is whether you're in the business of reforming capitalism or changing it profoundly, I think that I would love to get to the point where we argue about the philosophical reasons for having a four day week rather than should we even try. What are these companies do about email and slack and off hours communication? That seems like a backdoor way to really level everybody back up to 78-year or work. Oh, yeah. No, you know, one of the great ironies of modern, you know, of being able to carry our offices

around in our pockets is that we had this vision of flexible work where you would work for a few hours and you'd go deal with kids and that, you know, you'd be offline and then you would come back to work later and you'd work some more, breaking it up into these big discreet chunks, making it more manageable. Instead, what's happened is that they have turned work into a fine powder that spreads through a whole day. An amazing number of us check our email within 30 seconds of waking up. Many of us have had the experience of being at dinner when people are texting under the table

or no longer under the table. And so what these companies do is, they get rid of a lot of that behavior. There are in some of them explicit rules about no email after hours, unless something is burning down. They, you know, with Slack and asynchronous and sort of systems like that, it varies depending upon the number of remote workers you have and whether this has been a problem before.

Generally, if you've got a more remote distributed workforce, you tend to kind of live on Slack and systems like that, so you figure out how to manage better within it. If on the other hand, everyone is in the office together, there's a tendency to turn it off or turn down the number of channels and to encourage people to just talk more face-to-face. Right? So, I think that the bottom line is nobody gets rid of the technology, but they do a lot of

thinking about how you really need or how you can use it in the most effective manner rather than, let's say, just the speediest manner. That seems key. Well, last question for me on the structural, although if I've missed something, we can go into it. I was struck in reading the book, how confident you seem, not overconfident, but you really have a, it shines through that you're painting a picture that this is a trend where we're heading toward a world where it's possible that this becomes the new way we work.

I'd love to hear more about your confidence there. Sure. So, I would say that first off, I've worked as a futurist for close to 20 years or so. And you see a lot of stuff about how the world is falling apart, right? Climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, or the manipulation of social media, or for various nefarious and AI. AI, yeah, robots are going to take our jobs. And I think that part of what I'm responding to is that this is a, this is one in the field we call a weak signal, right?

It's a small thing that's popping up in all kinds of very different places independently that, however, is responding to a set of root causes that's often using technologies in the same way, solving problems in similar ways in very different kinds of markets and environments. And it looks to me like the beginnings of a global movement that just really isn't yet aware of itself. And I think that the other thing that makes me sort of optimistic or enthusiastic about it is that it is a really simple way to solve a whole bunch of problems that we face in the workplace today and are going to face in the future.

That the idea of companies today are dealing with issues around gender inclusivity with or of bringing more women or working parents into managerial positions or senior positions. They're dealing with, you know, if they don't already, they're already starting to worry about automation and AI and how to bring technologies into their workplaces. Millennials want better work-life balance. A four-day work week turns out to offer a toolkit for solving all of these problems in, I think, a beautifully holistic way. I think we've seen that individual efforts to attack particular problems with flexible work programs, for example, are

useful to a degree, but they also have pretty hard limits. And the four-day week is something that is really simple to describe. It is simple and easy to envision and to imagine. But it's also something that offers an enormous amount of flexibility at the local level, right? Every company works it out a little bit differently. Every company solves these problems of how do you improve collaboration? How do you get better leadership?

How do you communicate with clients? For themselves, but they all do manage to do so and to enjoy a common set of benefits as a result. And I think the final reason is that the people who I talk to in the book, the people who stories I tell, the company founders, the managers, the workers, they themselves are really enthusiastic about it. They admit that there's a lot of work that goes into it. It continues to be a lot of work. It requires thinking differently about your workplace.

It requires, you know, it almost becomes a reflex to question what it is that you do and how you do it. But it's not more work than working 10 or 12 hours a day. And it brings benefits that are continuous and that are shared by everyone. Okay, so let me ask a question that, well, I think we'll, a personal question which will bridge us out of structural and more into the individual level. I just as I, and I began with this skepticism,

I'm just thinking about my, all of these ideas I'm very intriguing on many levels, theoretical, practical, and yet I cannot think about, I cannot imagine how I would operationalize this in my own life. Not as, now I'm not talking about here as an employer, I'm talking about as a person who has a lot of work to do. And many jobs, many hats, many projects. Yeah, I just, and I work seven days a week. I don't work, it's rare for me to work a lot of 12 hour days, but long days are not the question. Some of them are shorter than others, but long days are not the question.

Some of them are shorter than others, but I'm writing a book on top of everything else I do and it just won't get done if I don't shove it into the nooks and crannies of every other day. Well, there's your problem, I mean writing a book, but the worst thing in the world. Exactly.

So, I think that these companies are ones that are, yeah, they're doing one thing, right? They're making dinner. I mean, it's a world-class dinner. Or you're talking about the chefs and the restaurants. Or they're making other products. They tend not to be doing a whole bunch of different and somewhat kind of conflicting things simultaneously. But I think that even for those of us who are essentially multi-hat entrepreneurs, that you can look at these companies sort of like elite athletes or like world-class chess

players. I will never be as good a chess player as Magnus Carlson. Right. But there are still things that you can learn about the game and how to approach the game from studying what he does, or Usain Bolt or Serena Williams, and even if you can't get to that level, there are things that you can learn from them about how to up your game, about how to make your game more sustainable, so that you're not even if you can't get from working seven days to working four, you might be able to get to working six and doing seven in a way that isn't going to burn you out and that leaves you, that allows you to acknowledge the necessity of taking some time off, of recharging your batteries and of being able to continue to work so that you don't just finish the next book or the next startup, but you've got enough of your own life left so that you can continue doing what you

love for a long time rather than having to do it really intensively for a short time. Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that. And I, in part because of having read the book, we're going to turn to next your previous book rest. I have been playing with how to, um, even if I do have to work your previous book, Rest, I have been playing with how to, even if I do have to work six, seven days a week, how to make the days more restful. But let me just ask you. Are you, you write books and have a company and I don't know what else is on your plate? Are you working four days now?

I am close. So I mean, I tend to work intensively for more of the week. So I'm more like four to six really solid hours, five or six days. And at some point, I might be able to get down to four, but at this stage, I'm probably doing like 30 hour weeks or so, if I'm really honest with myself. So however, that's basically me looking at a keyboard doing stuff, right? So I'm not having to manage people or work with, or work with teams most of the time. So, you know, I have, and also my kids are older. So, you know, I have flexibilities in my schedule that I didn't have when they were younger

and I had to really be more disciplined about picking them up from school on that sort of thing. But I tend to do shorter hours per day, more intensive leisure, but spread out not over four days, but four plus. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on page six or du moire or In court. I'm Matt Bellas. I and I'm Sydney battle and we're the hosts of Wonder E's new podcast Disantel where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup why it happened happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us?

The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Let's turn out to the question that is implied by everything you're talking about. Once you cut back to four hours in theory, once you cut back, at all, the question is, what are you feeling the rest of your time with? And you have the book rest, which was galvanizing for me and recommended by a previous guest on the show, Jocelyn K. Gly, a host of an excellent podcast called Hurry Slowly. You have a whole book about how, how we can fill that time and

how important it is that rest and work, as you say, are not opposites. They're, they're compliments. So hold forth, if you will. Sure. So this was kind of the big discovery that I had when I was on my own sabbatical right in Cambridge. And we think of, and in most of our daily lives, work and rest are kind of competitors.

And rest is the thing that you get after you're done with, you know, after you're done with everything. But in today's world, you know, most of us don't stop work when the sun goes down or when the factory bell rings. So, you know, there is, and you know, for most of us, there is no being done with everything. And it makes it really easy for us to default to a condition where we never really carve out time or for rest for ourselves. But what I saw when, you know, after Cambridge, as I said, I was an historian of science, and I've got a whole bunch of biographies of scientists. I started going back and trying to reconstruct the daily schedule so people

like Darwin and Einstein and various Nobel Prize winners and composers and things. What I found was that they tended to work shockingly few hours a day compared to modern humans. Us. And they did a couple really interesting things. And one was that Darwin, to take one example, worked really hard in the morning for about four hours, doing experiments, writing, sort of, et cetera. And then he would quit and go for a long walk.

And he actually had a path on his property that he called his thinking path. And he would spend a couple hours out there getting some exercise and then go back do a little bit more stuff and then you'd be done for the day. So working probably about five hours a day, Darwin was able to write the origin of species, the descent of man. You know, this is a guy who changed the way we think about nature and gave us a toolkit for thinking about evolution that is, you know, still in use. And you see this similar kind of pattern with lots of other people where they work fewer hours than we would expect and they have schedules that layer periods of of focused work with this intensive or deliberate rest. And what I mean by deliberate rest is it's a kind of rest that first of all in the day comes almost immediately after this hard work period

comes almost immediately after this hard work period, which gets them generally outside, doing something that is not necessarily very intellectually intensive, or... and that's important because what's happening is that period gives your creative subconscious time to keep working on the problems that you were just focusing really hard on. And you know that experience where you're trying to remember the name of that actor who was in that movie you saw last week who was in that thing before, you know, in that TV show. And you can't remember it. And then a couple minutes later, you're doing something else.

And the name pops into your head, right? Oh, that was huge, Ackman. That is your creative subconscious continuing to work on problems that you haven't been able to solve even while your attention goes on to something else. And what the people I talk about and rest are doing is a kind of big-scale version of that. They're organizing their days to give themselves both time to work intensively on problems,

but also time to recover from that and time for their creative minds to continue turning over these ideas and often coming up with insights or solutions that they weren't able to come up with or through conscious effort. I think it was Aaron's mock, the 19th century German physicist who said that to his chagrin, his subconscious turned out to be the better mathematician than he was because it could solve problems that he himself could not.

And he always felt a little guilty about this, but he also, at a certain point, started organizing his days or to give that subconscious time to do math. And one of the, and in the last 20 or so years, there have been some advances in brain science and the psychology of creativity that show that this isn't just some sort of kind of semi-mystical mumbo jumbo, right, that there actually are things going on in the brain that we can start to talk about that explain what it is that's going on and why this works

and how we can figure out how to harness it in our daily lives. So I would love to know more about how we can harness it in our daily lives. So the kinds of rest you're talking about here are it's active deliberate rest. So hiking, playing sports, I don't know what else would work in, I don't know what else would, woodworking, I don't know what else would fit in this category. I was a little disappointed because I thought it was going to be Netflix and napping. Well, you know, napping definitely, Netflix, I think, in moderation. Unfortunately, the science suggests that, you know, the kind of rest that involves, like a remote in one hand and salty snacks in the other, is not as creatively recharging or of insight generating as active rest.

And in fact, we often think of rest as totally passive. And it certainly can be lying on the beach, can be a great thing. But it also turns out that active rest, going to the gym after a long day at the office can also be restorative as many of us know and as probably too many of us aspire to put into practice but aren't completely successful at. But I think that recognizing that the most restorative, useful kinds of rest for ourselves

and for our professional odds or whatever, our active is a good thing. It's also recognizing that rest is a skill, right? Rest is something that you can actually learn to do better. It's a bit like breathing, right? Breathing is a completely natural thing. But if you are an opera singer or you are a marathon runner

or a swimmer, you learn how to use your breathing to help you reach the back of the auditorium or to conserve your energy or to give you that last burst of speed in the last half of the last half of the lap or the last half mile. And so I think that, you know, one of the things I see with the people who I study is that, you know, all of them kind of learn how to use rest. None of them, none of them start off early in their lives kind of just doing it naturally. Almost all of them have the kind of experience that I had or that so many of us do, right? You know, you know, or of you have some kind of crisis, you get sick, you burn out, you've got something that signals to you that you've got to make some changes. We all learn

about the value of rest the hard way. Even the smartest people are dumb about this. And I think that, you know, the, I don't know why that is, but I think the good news is that if it's true that Thomas Mann and Charles Darwin and Tchaikovsky had to learn it this way, if you and I have to learn it that way too, it's probably okay. Okay, but, but so how do we learn this? What are the steps required for developing this skill? Right, so I think first off that the critical at a two-dinal thing is to take rest seriously, right? You don't think of rest as something that you do once you've done everything else. It's something that you actually have to actively pursue, right? You have to think about how you build it into your schedule, how you make time for it rather than kind of sacrificing it or

deferring it. The second thing is that different kinds of people and jobs allow for different kinds of rest. So basically the more control you have over your daily schedule, the more you can pick up some of the things that Darwin or Tchaikovsky did, right? Working in... So, among those, I think that working in regular breaks in these intensive periods, so, at the very least, what we find is that most people are able to sustain attention on a serious level for about 90 minutes to two hours. And so, you know, and so the more you can design your day so that you have clear blocks where you can really focus,

but you've also got time, you've also got time for breaks. That's a good thing. Also, the more, in the modern world, you can push meetings and other kinds of interruptions to later in the day for most of us, the better off you are. Most of us have essentially more energy and more attention earlier in the day. And so the more you're able to do focused work then and reserve the more kind of social stuff or less critical or cognitively demanding things

for later in the day, the better off you are. I think the other thing is that there is, recognizing that there is also value in the kinds of rest during the day that we tend to do to little of or that our employers think of as time theft, I think is the term that one big company uses. So maps, for example, used to be amazingly common in the modern office. And you see a few places that, you know, like you know, Silicon Valley companies like Google have gone back to having things like NAP pods or NAP rooms where people can take 20 minutes in the afternoon rather than, you know,

another espresso. If that's something that your company allows, that can be a really, you know, that those kind of practice is a pretty restorative thing. If on the other hand, you're in a job where you don't have a lot of control over your daily schedule, then what's important is to be as disciplined as you can about disconnecting in the time you have, which means, you know, we're disconnecting on nights and on weekends as much as possible. People who have longer happier careers tend to have better, higher boundaries between work life and personal life, which is something that a lot of us have become bad at, but which turns out to be a really valuable thing.

The other important thing is take vacations seriously. Americans are terrible at this, partly because we don't have as much vacation time as the rest of the world and you think that going on vacation is like a sign that you're not that serious. But there have been, you know, there are longitudinal studies that have shown that people who take vacations live longer, they are happier, they're less prone to chronic diseases, and dementia's than people who don't. Ideally, we would all be able to take a week off every three months or so.

we would all be able to take a week off every three months or so. But in reality, the only bad vacation is the vacation you don't take. So that's my advice. Okay, so there are a bunch of threads that I think are worth pursuing there. Let me start with what it is we do for rest. This is actually an existential question, because if you're cutting back to for days of work a week, you're looking down the barrel of a lot of time. And I think for a lot of us, that can freak us out. So how do we go about figuring out what it is that our deliberate restorative rest is going to get system?

That is a terrific question. It's one that a lot of people actually do grapple with. I think that at a daily level, the things that are easy and restorative are stuff like walking. Most people know how to walk. I think that if you can incorporate into things like walking meetings, that tends to make meetings more effective and shorter.

And if you're disabled, if you're in a wheelchair, for example, it could be just going out in care. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that the thing, when it comes to more engaging kinds of leisure activities or hobby stuff, The thing, when it comes to more engaging kinds of leisure activities or hobby stuff, one of the things that I think is most interesting

is that people who have both really amazingly productive careers and serious hobbies, choose hobbies that offer some of the same psychological rewards as their work, but in a very different kind of context and kind of time frame. So my favorite example is rock climbing. There are lots of scientists and actually lots of executives and professionals who are pretty serious rock climbers. And scientists talk about it as rock climbing, they like rock climbing because it's like science. You've got another way of interacting with nature.

You've got a big problem that you've got to break down into a lot of little pieces. It requires concentration and focus. These are all things that you really like about science. But at the end of the day or the afternoon, you've either made it to the top or you haven't. And just so often in science, you can spend a year working on a problem and doing an experiment and the results will come back, well, maybe. So it offers some of the same kinds of challenges that they like best in science without the ambiguity. And it does so very quickly. It's also, of course, a very physical kind of thing. So I think that that combination of being physical, if you're in a sedentary job, or actually being more sed,

being more cognitively engaging, if you're in a more active sort of job, of speaking to some of the things that you like best about your work without the frustrations is the thing that everybody who develops a really serious hobby that lasts for, that engages them for a very long time shares. The other thing is it's gotta be that interesting to get you out of the office.

So a lot of people listening to this show, I suspect, we'll be wondering does meditation count? Mm-hmm. The answer is yes it does. I mean, I think that certainly as an important form of rest and restoration, meditation does count. I would say that often people are choosing daily breaks that offer an opportunity more for mind wandering than for clearing and focusing the mind. But I think that for some of the psychological benefits, the restorative benefits are common across both of them. So, I mean, I'm just trying to think of my own rest. I would say it's meditation, exercise, hanging out with my kid, although it's, I don't want to experience it as super restful. And hanging out with friends, socializing, you say, I get a lot out of that. I've really tried to prioritize that.

And chilling and watching Netflix my wife. There you go. And especially if you're doing it with your wife, that's... We work out together. Okay. That's another thing we do a lot together. I think that socializing turns out to be an unbelievably healthy thing, both mentally and other wise. And we've deep prioritized it to our detriment, because we're wired deeply for social connection.

Yes. And you take it away, we go crazy. Absolutely. Absolutely. Rest. Yeah. Or worse. Yeah. No, you know, it is, again, these longitudinal studies looking at like, you know, healthy people over the course of 60 years, and one of the most important things

for you staying healthy turns out to be other people. And in fact, to loop back to the 4-day weekbook, you know, one of the other interesting things that these companies will do is you see a big boost in things like communal activities. so to counterbalance the focused work time, people will do things like everyone eats lunch together. I had one company in Glasgow after it went to a four-day week. For the first few weeks, some of the guys were coming on on Friday doing 10 minutes of work in the office and then disappearing. And it turned out they hadn't told their wives that they were working a four day week.

So they were coming in and then spending the whole rest of the day at the pub. The important part of that though is, you know, the workplaces where we socialize, right? It's where we see other people and a lot of our you know a lot of our our friendships are with colleagues and so I think that that the Glasgow story illustrates how important those are and how important it is for any company that moves to a shorter schedule to pay attention to those and to create opportunities you know to make sure to those, and to create opportunities, to make sure that those social bonds don't get dissolved in the course of everybody getting better at their own,

everybody getting better at their jobs and the company getting better at its job. What's your arrest? What have you cultivated as hobbies in order to enrich your life and your work? Right. Well, I have two dogs, so my daily schedule is a lot of walking with them.

Because I live in the Bay Area, I have some of the best hiking trails and biking trails anywhere, and so I do a fair amount of that. And then, yes, I get value out of my Netflix subscription as well. But the fact that you can be outdoors pretty much year round here in the Bay Area is one of the things that I treasure most about it. So, but I walk, but mainly thanks to the dogs, I do walk three or four miles a day.

And the morning walk is actually one where I will Take them out after having been writing for a couple hours So it's a break from that, but I've also still got a lot of prop you know a lot of Unsolved just technical issues running around in my head And so while I'm out with them I often have really good ideas that I'll then go back. You bring a notepad? I absolutely do. I bring a notepad. I write it down instantly because otherwise I will forget it.

No matter how good an idea I have in the moment, my brain doesn't want to hold onto it. And I used to think, oh, I'll remember that. That's such a great solution. And I don't. And a notepad is much more reliable than my own mind. So yeah, the dogs have learned, I got to stop and write this down, they got to treat, we keep going. I write it out, and then by you know, generally I'm done. And, you know,

the first book I wrote took me about 10 years or so. And working this way, right, these intensive bursts, the breaks for walking the dogs, taking naps in the afternoon, doing all the things I talk about and rest, I've been able to write three books in the last, what, eight or so. So I think it's, you know, I am, I am not a bad example of how putting all this into practice can help you be both happier but also more productive. I think do better work. So I'm experimenting with this. I haven't, I can't say yeah, that it's really made a huge difference, but I'm just at the beginning. So I've been thinking, so I'm writing a book and I have some control over my schedule.

So there are, I'd like, for example, I'm in the middle of a month right now where I won't be able to work on the book at all because I truly just don't have control of my schedule this month. But because I truly just don't have control of my schedule this month. But many days I have some control over my schedule and what I've been trying to do, I used to work out in the morning until I read your book and rest, that is. And now I've been experimenting with, when I wake up in the morning, I basically, there's some time where my wife and kid are around,

and if he wants to pay attention to me, I pay attention to him if he doesn't. I kind of like sit on the floor near him and work. Just looking through my notes, getting ready, planning out the day. And I just, I've been using your argument for increased mental acuity early in the day to get me into working for a few hours first thing

in the morning on writing. And then at some point, I'll burn out. And I will either meditate or exercise then. And then I'll go back and work a little bit. And then in the afternoon, I will do all the stuff that other people want me to do, calls, meetings, etc., etc. That sound right to you in terms of a routine. It certainly sounds, it sounds right in the sense that it's pretty similar to what I do. Yeah, you know, sort of move the big cognitive stuff to the first part of the day. Working out as a kind of break from that, and then sort of the less intensive stuff later on.

That's what a lot of people do. I will say, you know, it is incredible. It is far more worthwhile for everyone to figure out what schedule works for them than to try other people's schedules and to try and adapt to those. I mean, I think it absolutely is the case that there are certain things that really seem pretty common. The number of hours we can focus intensively,

the amount of time that you can spend before you need a break. That seems to be fairly common for most of us, but how you put those parts together in your day is something you want to figure out for yourself, because not only do you end up with a better routine, but I think you also have the tools to figure out how to adjust it as you get older, as your work changes, as some stuff that early in your career was super challenging becomes easier later on. Now the balance of what's hard and what's easy really ought to change over the course

of your life. And so rather than looking for another person's routine to follow, as those changes take place, being able to rely upon yourself to be able to reflect, to see what works for you, to try new things for yourself, that I think is the more valuable thing. So, work it out for yourself.

Yeah, so I mean, I've really, the more I've read about habit formation, experimentation is really the key because we are different. Yes. Special snowflakes. Let me go to something, sorry, let me stay with routine for a second. One of the things I believe I read in your book that struck me is, it's like this, that struck me is it's like this.

The routine for creative people is like creating the conditions where the muse is likely to visit. I think there was a quote from maybe Picasso, which is the muse will visit, but she has to find you working. Yes. So there were there were a bunch of people who've said things along these lines and the and the idea is that Chuck Close has this one, inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up. And the basic insight there is that the romantic idea of creativity is the mu strikes

and you get this inspiration and then you rush to the canvas or the whatever and you work yourself to exhaustion, realizing this vision. The reality though is that for most creative people, you start work and then the muse shows up. The inspiration doesn't drive the labor, the inspiration arises in the course of laboring. As absolutely how it happens for us.

Yes, and that's how it happens for everyone from Stephen King to Scott Adams to a Hemingway talk about doing this. And that first of all, in creative work work there's plenty of just like you know technical stuff that you can work on productively. You know, Tchaikovsky talked about how you could hear in even a great symphony that there were parts that had come from genuine inspiration and other parts where the composer had really had to work through and make something happen. But I think that certainly for me, recognizing that a regular routine provides a kind of foundation

for creativity as opposed to being an impediment to it was like one of the most important things I've ever discovered in my entire life, because when I was in college and grad school, I was very much about waiting for the muse to hit, and usually the muse would hit like at 1 a.m. the night before something was due. And when you're 19 or 20, your body can handle that sort of thing. When you're older on the other hand, you're really ought to be smarter about how you'll work. And discovering that what Chuck Close and Stephen King were saying was absolutely true was for me life-changing. And I think it's, you know, it is a basic insight that you see creative people using. And I think it is, you know, it kind of runs under

the surface of what a lot of these companies are doing too. Let me tip a critique I know you've gotten many times, which is a lot of these people we're talking about who have integrated rest into their days in order to become more productive and more creative are wealthy, mostly white men. Yeah, that's absolutely the case. I think that, and I think my answer is that the fact that it's no surprise that privileged people are able to do this first because they have more control over their time. But again, I think that the fact that they're able to experiment with their schedules and that there is, I think some pretty good science that helps us understand why these schedules work should not

disallow this way of working for the rest of us. There's a wonderful organization called the NAP Ministry, which is run by a woman who, and she's actually a minister, but she organizes these events where she talks about rest as resistance and rest as reparations. She's an African-American pastor. And, you know, for her rest is a way of reclaiming something that she feels has, you know, was not available to many of her ancestors that, you know, that had been, that had been

expropriated or stolen. And I think that she offers, and the rest ministry offers a great way of thinking about rest, not just as the exclusive domain of the privileged and therefore as something that is inherently tainted, but rather as something that should be a human right, something that belongs to all of us and something whose loss is to be lamented rather than or whose preservation by the wealthy should be taken not as a sign that it's something that the rest of us should not respect, but rather we should see its reclamation as something that helps make us all more human. Two things. One is this critique, you know, you write this in your new book.

This critique that you heard after having written rest is what provoked you to write shorter because you were doing all these, you were taking paraphrasing your own words here, you were doing all these radio interviews and interviews for the to promote the book and people kept saying to you, yeah, this sounds great, but I can't do this because my boss is a maniac or whatever, I work for an employer, the system in which I find myself is not congenial to what you're suggesting. So hence the new book, which really gets at the structural fixes here. But just going back to this Ministry of Rest idea, it, you know, there are overtones of this in your book rest that rest is not something anybody's going

to hand to you. You need to take it. Yes. And you need to prioritize it. Nobody's gonna do this for you. That seems like a really important point to make. Yeah, no, I think that, you know, we need to reclaim it both from our own daily schedules and sort of our, you know, our own kind of deprioritization of rest as something that we need to actively make time for rather than enjoy once everything else

is done. But I think we also live in a world that has fantastically well-developed machines for capturing and commodifying and reselling our attention. If in today's world we don't know what to do with our time, there is an algorithm that will provide an answer for us. I think especially today that layered on top of that basic existential question that we talked about earlier about, what do you do with your extra time? How do you find a satisfying way of using it? There is the additional challenge of a greater number of structures than ever that are aimed

at that time, right? A couple of years ago, read Hastings on an earnings called Read Hastings is CEO of Netflix was asked, what is Netflix's biggest competitor? And he didn't say Amazon Prime or some other service, he said, our biggest competitor is sleep. I do our audio engineer, Jake, is in the room. Hi, Jake. And he just heard that in bust out laughing.

Let's keep that in, Jake. Let's not get that out. I would love to think that Reed Hastings was joking, but I'm not sure. We can ask him. All right. So last question for me, and then I'll give you a chance to make any points that I did not give you an opportunity to make. Just to end on a sort of rousing, go out there, take back your rest note.

I want to point out a quote that you use in your book from Thomas Jefferson. Here's the quote, it is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give happiness. Now, I really like that quote and I think that it reflects a sensibility, what is the line, tranquility and occupation? know, it reflects a sensibility. What is the line, tranquility and occupation? Tranquility and occupation. Right. Rest and work. Rest and work. You know, and I think that all too often we think that we have to sacrifice one of these for the other, you know, that, you know, either you are successful or you've got good work life balance. And one of the biggest things that I've learned

writing these last two books is that that can be a false choice. In the new book, one of the reasons that I chose places like elite restaurants or software startups is I didn't actually want to write about guys selling beads out of their van down at the beach. People who were entrepreneurs in search of a particular kind of lifestyle. I'm always fascinated by people who are driven to do amazing, you know, world changing stuff. And people who are working in really, really intensive professions and occupations where overwork is the absolute norm, right? There's a, I mean, one of the, you know, the founders of restaurants like, you know Baume and Palo Alto, which has as many Michelin stars as it has employees,

too. These guys start work at 15 or 16 washing dishes. They are doing 70 hour, 80 hour weeks through their 20s. These are people who work intensively hard, mastering, you know, mastering a craft that edits best. They absolutely love in environments that can be magical. The problem is on the downside, they can also be really awful and all-consuming. And I think one of the, you know, one of the things that inspires me most about these people is that, you know, they never give up this desire

to push the limits of what's possible in their craft or to discover new things about their own work, new ways of working. But the fact that they're doing this in the context of building companies that work four days a week, that show their employees that it's not necessary to burn your to risk burning yourself out in order to become a great chef or great developer, that it's possible to think about the relationship between work and rest, between your productivity and your career, between your work life and your family life, in ways

that are profoundly different from the kind of defaults with which we have grown up and which we take to work. That we can change all of that and still do amazing, amazing work is something that I think is really inspiring to me and which I think will be inspiring to a lot of people. You know, at the end or shorter, there's sort of one of the people I write about talks about how they work a four day week at her company because after a three day weekend, anything is possible. And I love that line. And I think that for, you know, whether, you know, whether you're in a tiny company or as Microsoft, Japan just showed if you're in a tiny company or as Microsoft, Japan just showed

if you're in a company with more than 2000 people, you know, if you are in Scandinavia or if you're in a nation that has had to invent its own word for working yourself to death, you should work a four day week because that makes anything possible. Which nation and what's the word? because that makes anything possible. Which nation and what's the word? They're two of them in Japan and Korea. So in Korea, it's Guarosa. And in Japan, Kauroshi, I was blanking on it, but I finally pulled it out.

Good. Kauroshi. Good for you. Final two questions that I ask everybody. If they're or almost everybody, is there something I should have asked but didn't? I think we covered everything and I tend to talk long anyway. So that's a podcast that you're invited. Exactly. So that's a plus in this context.

Final question is what I semi-faciously refer to as the plug zone. Can you just plug all of your books where we can find you in social media, et cetera, et cetera? Sure. The books to worth mentioning, obviously, are shorter, work better, smarter, and less. Here's how, which is coming out in March with public affairs, available in, or to find book in Korea online and in the real world. The previous book, Rest, why you get more done when you work less is available with a new forward by none other than Ariana Huffington. And then my earlier book was called

the Distraction Addiction. And that was about our technology and attention and how we can learn to use devices in ways that help us be more focused and mindful rather than continuously partially, constantly distracted. And then if you want to learn more about this, I am AskPang ASK P-A-N-G on pretty much everything. I'm the only AskPang in the world. So Twitter, Instagram, which right now is mainly pictures of my dogs. And then my website is strategy.rest.

So rest, fortunately, right before the last book came out, became a top-level domain. So strategy.rest is where I continue to write about shorter working hours, issues involving rest, and how to put all this into practice. Great job. Really appreciate it. Thanks very much. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks again to Alex. If you have a friend who you think could benefit from getting a little bit more rest

in his or her life or their life, forward this episode to them, I think that would be a service to your friend and also would be great way to help us grow the podcast. Before I go, as always, big thanks to the team, Ryan Kessler, Samuel Johns, Grace Livingston, Lauren Hartzog, Tiffany O'Mahandro, Lake and Schneider. We'll be back with a new episode next week, Wednesday with Jess Mori, whose teacher on the meditation app, the Temperature and Happier Meditation app, but she also runs this extraordinary program that is designed, and she's been on the show before if you want to go back and listen to her

in preparation for this next episode, but she also runs an extraordinary organization that teaches teenagers how to meditate. She does these incredible retreats with teenagers, and so we are going to talk to a group of teenagers who Who had recently completed a meditation retreat and you are this is not quite wisdom from the mouth of babes Because they're not babes, but it's a lot of wisdom and it's from younger people than you might expect and they're also talking about sort of what It's like to stay sane as a young person in this Tech drenched era so very excited for that one. We'll see you next week.

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