Alex Pang on Working Less, Rest, Leisure & The 4-Day Workweek

I first stumbled upon Alex Pang when my cousin suggested I read his book Rest, which was published in 2016. The book argues that we are ignoring Rest – a key component of a life well lived and more practically (at least in the short-term) a vital component to getting more done while working less. I’ve also written about Pang’s own experience with a sabbatical and how he discovered a renewed sense of energy for engaging with the world. As I’ve talked with people that have taken leaves from work – planned or unplanned – I find a similar pattern. I find that people discover or even re-discover hobbies, interests or projects that they are drawn to. Some people write books, some people decide to volunteer. During Alex’s three-month sabbatical, he had a moment that made it seem like everything he thought about his work was wrong: "It was about a month into it that I had this realization that I was getting incredible amounts of stuff done, I was reading huge numbers of books, I was having all these ideas, great conversations, producing lots of stuff but I didn’t have this sense of being constantly time-pressured and always being half a project behind in my entire life that was just part of normal existence in silicon valley. It was at this point that I realized I had made a significant transition, a mental shift, but also a shift in how I experienced time. It started me thinking about the relationship between work and leisure and rest and creative work" I asked him if there was a single moment in which all of this came to him. "I had been reading Virginia Woolf’s book A Room Of One’s Own that makes the argument that for in order for women to be creative, but really for anyone to be creative, they needed a certain kind of space and independence that had long been denied to women…That got me thinking about all these issues and their interconnection." The connection between rest and leisure is something that has bubbled up in the modern consciousness. I’ve written about how we mistake a vacation for leisure, Andrew Taggart writes about how Leisure was once seen as the supreme aim of life and Pang writes about losing touch with the essence of the idea in Rest (my own book notes here). Of course, I can’t claim any special insight here. The ancient Greeks saw rest as a great gift, as the pinnacle of civilized life. The Roman Stoics argued that you cannot have a good life without good work. Indeed, virtually every ancient society, recognized that both work and rest were necessary for a good life: one provided the means to live, the other gave meaning to life. Today, we’ve lost touch with that wisdom, and our lives are poorer and less fulfilling as a result. It’s time we rediscovered the good that rest can do. https://think-boundless.com/alex-pang/