I’ll confess: I didn’t write Rest with the aim of it being picked up by people writing on subjects things like executive staffing and book marketing, but that’s one of the great things about the book: it’s a tool that’s useful in domains I know nothing about.
Though I really should learn more about book marketing.
University College Dublin philosophy professor Brian O’Connor has a nice piece in Time Magazine about “Why Doing Nothing is One of the Most Important Things You Can Do:”
From the age of Enlightenment onward, philosophers, political leaders and moral authorities of many kinds have tried to convince us that work is one of the most important opportunities for freedom. Through work, we can become a somebody, relish the esteem we gain, structure our lives and, while we are at it, contribute nobly to the common good. This is a strange brew of ideas, but one that has seeped deeper into our psyche than we may realize….
The ever-tightening connection between our work and our personal identity constricts even more. We come to believe that being idle at all is, somehow, the antithesis of freedom. But we would do well to think about idleness more, and rather differently from how we do….
The potential in idleness for greater freedom seems worth the exploration. Or at least an attempt to think about what prevents us from truly doing nothing right now.
I suspect Rest might come in for some criticism from O’Connor, in that it sees work and rest (and leisure and idleness) as partners rather than opposites, and I definitely think of them as sustaining and justifying each other.
His new book Idleness: A Philosophical Essay, which just came out last week, also looks promising. So does Patricia Hampl’s new book The Art of the Wasted Day.
So the first episode of my podcast Rest with Alex Pang is now up: it’s an interview with Stephan Aarstol, the founder of pioneering stand-up paddleboard and beach lifestyle company Tower Paddleboards and author of the book The Five-Hour Workday.
Aarstol’s name has come up in a number of other interviews I’ve conduced with founders who have implemented shorter working hours at their companies, and so it made sense to start with him and the Tower Paddleboards story.
You can listen to the episode through the player below, or you can subscribe here (I recommend the latter). Either way, enjoy!
I finally managed to push through some mysterious technical issue, and am now in the process of getting my modestly-named podcast listed through iTunes. Which is good, since I’ve almost got a couple episodes ready to go!
The first one should be up on Thursday, and the next one will be up the following week.
Yep, I’m starting a podcast.
The paperback edition of my book is coming out in a couple days (in the US, that is– it came out in the UK a few days ago!) and I’m now doing lots of interviews with people for my next book, so this seems like a good time to dive into the podcasting world.
Here’s a teaser.
I figured I do a lot of interviews, and those are often with very articulate, fascinating, smart people who are very generous with their time; so why not share those with my readers?
Besides, I’m now starting a new book, and rather than keep it all under wraps until the very end, I figured I’d try flipping the process, share the interviews as I go along, and give readers a sense of how the project unfolds. (The blog does a little of that already, so this is really a step in a direction I’ve already taken, not a radical departure in my practice.)
I still need to get it registered with iTunes, etc., but I’ve got material for several more episodes. My plan is not necessarily to release every single week, but rather to organize them into thematic seasons.
I’m at Squaw Valley for the Gruter Institute conference, giving a talk about the future of work. It’s a very intersting time, and not just because it’s up near Lake Tahoe. The Gruter Institut for Law and Behavioral Research
is a research community that fosters collaboration across disciplines in order advance our understanding of the interplay between law, institutions and human behavior. The goal of the Institute is to build a richer understanding of the underlying behaviors at the heart of society’s most pressing problems and to improve our understanding of how law and other institutions facilitate or hinder those behaviors.
I came here last year to talk about rest and creativity, and this year am talking about my new work on shorter working hours and the future of work.
For me, the event is interesting precisely because I’m not a legal scholar, or biologist, or economist or public policy person; but lots of the issues they talk about turn out to touch on things that I’m interested in, and so for me it’s a chance to pick up some new ideas, and think about my work in a new light.
Though of course being in Squaw Valley doesn’t hurt. To me, this is the quintessential example of a place that supports deliberate rest: I have these intense intellectual exchanges, then can go for a long walk and let these fizzy ideas play on their own and turn into something while I admire the mountains. And even if I’m just going to the coffee shop in the condos across the street, I have a great view of the mountains, which I find helps stimulate divergent thinking.
Indeed, after dinner last night I was walking around, and stopped to make some notes about my talk by a fire pit.
I just hope the talk lives up to the place!
The only downside is that that it doesn’t happen during spring break, so my wife can’t make it, too.
There are people who treat conferences like a theatre. I once saw a very eminent scholar who writes on technology and social life arrive at a conference by limo a half hour before their talk, give their talk (it wasn’t that good), shake a couple hands, then leave. As a display of professional eminence it was interesting; but intellectually it was a lost opportunity.
But I’ve decided that if I’m going to travel to a conference, and the organizers think I have something worth listening to, that means that they probably have things worth my listening to. And at the very worst, there’s always a nice walk.
In These Times interviews LSE professor David Graeber, author of the new book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. As he explains it, “A bullshit job is a job that the person doing it believes is pointless, and if the job didn’t exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better.”
His 2013 article about the phenomenon got a lot of attention, and it looks like the book could be really good.
And Graeber sees explaining the rise and spread of bullshit jobs as the first step toward making work better. As he says:
With bullshit jobs, there is the idea that if you’re not working hard at something you don’t enjoy, then you’re a bad person and don’t deserve public relief. Those deeply rooted beliefs are the strongest weapons capitalism has.
The anthropologist’s role is to take things that seem natural and point out that they’re not, that they’re social constructs and that we could easily do things another way. It’s inherently liberating.
The Washington Post has an article about how esports franchises are starting to build training facilities for teams that offers some surprisingly useful lessons about work-life balance.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, esports is becoming a big thing in the gaming world, and in sports more generally. It took off as a professional, corporate activity in Korea in the early 2000s, and recently has expanded to the U.S. (In fact, some teams playing in the U.S. are from Korea [insert bad immigrants taking our jobs joke here]). If you’r not familiar with it, this video provides a good introduction to the business:
For a long time, many companies would set up “team houses in which players both work and reside,” but as aXiomatic Gaming CEO Bruce Stein explains,
When we formed the idea of a training center, it got [the players] out of training and living in the same environment…. We felt that was a little stifling. It didn’t give them a separation between relaxation and work. And it wasn’t the ideal setup for training with the coaches and the analysts. So, we built a facility.
Given that aXiomatic Gaming’s owners include owners or partners in two basketball teams, two baseball team, and two hockey teams, it’s not a surprise that they wanted to.
The center is like any other professional sports facility: there are playing fields, a film room for reviewing games, and a kitchen and chef.
What do the players think?
“I think this facility is insane…. Six years ago I was scrimming [practicing] out of like this tiny dinky house in Diamond Bar [in Eastern Los Angeles County], the cheapest possible place you could fit five people.
The coaches like it too.
Overall it fosters a more structured and work-focused environment compared to esports houses.
“Players would just wake up at 10:28 for a 10:30 morning and just crawl out of their beds to it,” assistant coach Jun “Dodo” Kang said, speaking about how it was in the gaming house.
Coach Nu-ri “Cain” Jang said, via translation, that, “Having living and working space in the same place makes it too relaxed for the players. . . . Separating that just helps players focus on being professionals. Like, you’re waking up and actually going to work.”
Kim “Olleh” Joo-sung, one of the Korean players, said the facility helps him stay more balanced.
We hear a lot about the benefits of being able to “blend” work and life, or professional and personal stuff, but there’s a big literature on the psychological and productivity benefits of work-life separation— of having really clear boundaries between work time and your work self, on one hand, and your personal life on the other.
For one thing, having time off is simply psychologically good for you. It gives you time to recover the mental and physical energy you spend at work. This is especially true for people who are in highly stressful jobs, or jobs that explode them to unpredictable, chaotic situations– ER nurses, doctors, and law enforcement are the obvious examples, but people who work in badly-managed offices can also benefit more from clear boundaries. Studies have found that people on zero-hour contracts, who can be ordered into the office on short notice, or are on call, have more trouble detaching from work, and their performance suffers over the long run. Having a physical distinction between work and home– like a training facility rather than a gamer house– goes a long way to enforcing those boundaries.
Predictable breaks and good boundaries between work and home life are good for short-term recovery, and for good long-term career development. There’s a reason people who discover what I call “deep play,” serious hobbies that are as engaging as their work, have more distinguished and longer careers than people who don’t: deep play gives them a degree of balance and control in their lives that they wouldn’t have otherwise. And people who are really ambitious, or get very involved in their work, need the benefits of breaks, and the structure of having them enforced by physical distance and time, even more than average workers. Your highest performers are also the ones most likely to burn out– and really cost your company– if you don’t get them out of the office on a regular basis.
Strong work-life boundaries also make it easier to enforce professional norms and get good performance. Like many people, I like the fact that work allows me to behave differently than I do in my private life; and that’s easier to maintain if those lives are actually separate. I know lots of employers like to talk about “bringing your best self to work,” but that assumes that your “best self” is the same whether you’re in the living room or the courtroom or operating room. One of the reason we find work and hobbies meaningful and rewarding is that those activities let us cultivate different best selves, or exercise parts of our selves in one context that we can’t in another.
The example of gamers moving to a training facility model is significant because these guys are the perfect workers of neoliberal corporate capitalism. They’re young men, unmarried, without families or even house plants. They have no lives, and it’s not clear that they really want them. They live and breathe their work. Most corporate sponsors (or employers) assume that to get the most of these people, you want to encourage those habits, and make it possible for work to overrun life.
But raw passion doesn’t make for world-class performance, and mere obsession can be beat by super-focused work. Combining great training and workplace with stronger work-life boundaries lets people work more intensively, at a higher level of performance– and that’s really what you want. You want them going home, so they can beat the guys who are sleeping under their desks.
The latest episode of the “Psychologists Off the Clock” podcast features a conversation between me and Brown University psychologist Yael Schonbrun, in which we talk about deliberate rest, the role of downtime in creative lives, and why young children are like vampires.
I’ve been doing a little more media recently, as I head toward the release of the paperback edition of REST (with a new foreword by Arianna Huffington) on June 12. I’ve also got a number of other things that are happening to mark the publication of the new edition, and to spread the word, so yesterday I spent a few hours cleaning up my backyard office, getting things together, and making lists of things I need to do before the book comes out.
Interestingly, it’ll be out in the United Kingdom several days earlier, as a retailer wanted to include it among some summer titles, and needed it sooner.
The Tracking Wonder podcast has an interview with me and Srini Pillay, a psychiatrist and author of Tinker Dabble Doodle Try.
It was a good time, in part because the interview was somewhat more autobiographical than most, and because Srini is doing some pretty interesting stuff. I actually met him when I was in Utrecht for the Happinez festival (he was a fellow speaker), so it was cool to connect again and trade ideas.
The Distraction Addiction: Getting the Information You Need and the Communication You Want, Without Enraging Your Family, Annoying Your Colleagues, and Destroying Your Soul© 2018 Deliberate Rest
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