Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Rest: why you get more done when you work less. Basic Books. New York. 2016.

Notes by section

Introduction

  • Details
    • Rest is work's partner. They complement and complete each other
    • Waves: highs can't exist without lows
    • John Kay: Companies that put profits first are more likely to lose money than those that treat profit as a by-product of doing great work
    • Creative achievement needs to be approached obliquely
    • Maturity includes developing sustainable routines that bring together rest, how you work, and what works for you to deliver your ability to think
    • William James (paraphrase): If living excitedly and hurriedly would only enable us to do more, then there would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the exact reverse is the case.
    • WW1 factory workers proved that long months of overtime created lower productivity, more mistakes, and more incidents
    • Recreation is essential for efficiency
    • Charles Forbes: how we spend our non-working hours determines very largely how capably or incapably we spend our working hours
    • If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.
    • restorative daytime naps, insight-generating long walks, vigorous exercise, and lengthy vacations help creative people do their work
  • Work and Rest are partners
  • Rest is Active
  • Rest is a Skill
  • Deliberate Rest Stimulates and Sustains Creativity

The Problem of Rest

  • Advice for a Young Investigator (worth reading)
  • Leisure: The Basis of Culture - ratio, intellectus, and leisure
    • knowledge needs logical methods and discursive methods, as well as contemplative practices and attitudes
    • leisure enables contemplative practices and attitudes
    • leisure: attitude of non-activity and inward calm

The Science of Rest

  • Resting brain is active; 'default mode network' engages at same level of intensity as thinking brain
  • Giving your brain the right kinds of "rest" is critical for development, health, and productivity

1. Stimulating Creativity

  1. Four Hours

    • Charles Darwin and John Lubbock combined productivity with downtime during the day
    • Edensor Littlewood: close concentration needed for serious work meant that mathematicians could work four hours a day or at most five, with breaks about every hour (eg. for walks)
    • Van Zelst and Kerr: M-shaped productivity curve with peak around 10-20 hours each week and 35 hours per week only half as productive as peak
    • Van Zelst and Kerr: second peak at 50 hours similar to first peak with continuous drop off after second peak (more than 60 hours each week least productive)
    • afternoons for walks and messages?
    • Scott Adams: My value is based on my best ideas in any given day, not the number of hours I work
    • Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences: ideal day for a visiting fellow
      • morning working in solitude from 08:30 to 12:00 in two 90-minute bursts
      • two 15-minute breaks
      • lunch
      • afternoon of walks and conversation
    • Arthur Koestler
      • concentrated fury for four hours in the morning
      • two additional hours in the afternoon
    • Thomas Jefferson: vigor of the mind at different times of the day had a great inequality
    • Karl Anders Ericsson: deliberate practice
      • great students practice more often and more deliberately
      • deliberate practice involved engaging with full concentration in a special activity to improve performance
      • focused, structured, clear goals, and clear feedback -- observing how you can improve
      • deliberate practice available when greatness has a clear route and shared definition for good work (fastest time, highest score, most elegant solution, etc.)
      • Deliberate practice involves improving your career prospects while crafting a professional and personal identity -- it reinforces your sense of who you are and who you will become
      • deliberate practice - an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day (too much: injury, mental drain, or burn out) **
      • success requires avoiding exhaustion: limit practice to an amount from which you can recover on a daily or weekly basis
      • frequent shorter sessions amounting to 4 hours each day
      • four hours of focused serious effort each day
      • top performers practised more and slept an hour a day more than average performers; best students practised hardest and longest in the morning, napped in the afternoon, and practised again in he late afternoon or evening
      • the best performers devoted more energy to organizing their time, thinking about how they would spend their time and assessing what they did
      • applying deliberate-practice habits to resting and downtime
      • Carl Emil Seashore: The command to rest is fully as important as to work in effective learning. Rest and intensive practice worked together: practicing at your peak abilities for shorter periods, rather than halfheartedly throughout the day, not only saves time in learning but develops those traits of personality in which you show yourself master of the situation.
      • world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep
  2. Morning Routine

    • Thomas Mitchell, Essays on Life
      • map time, divide it, tackle one thing at a time
      • drifting helter-skelter through work achieves comparatively little
      • One thing at a time will always perform a better day's work than doing two or three things at a time.
    • Scott Adams: creative people who use the power of deliberate rest
      • start the day early
      • follow a well-thought out routine
      • do most challenging work first
      • find work that creates conditions for inspiration
    • Developing and keeping a morning routine creates space for rest
    • Weith and Zacks: optimal circadian (peak) time serves best for analytical work, insight problem solving greatest at non-optimal time of day
    • William Osler: four or five hours daily it is not much to ask for dedicated effort every day
    • Ingmar Bergman: sit down pedantically every day at a definite time, irrespective of whether you're in the mood or not
    • A routine creates a landing place for the muse
    • to keep rest in your day, you must use your routine like a fortification to protect your time
  3. Walk

    • create 30 and 50 minute routes that we can use for walking meeting rooms
    • Ted Eytan: a walking meeting gives physical stimulation and boost brain activity
    • walking meetings
      • can shield you from eavesdroppers and interruptions
      • separate people who depend on slides from those who think on their feet
      • meeting gives chance to focus on one thing for more than a few minutes
  4. Nap

    • Chinese sleep lab: lying down delivers better naps than sitting up
    • William Gibson: lunch nap gives state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking
    • Churchill, Johnson: afternoon nap and bath to break day into two
    • Regular napping can improve memory; naps help consolidate recent learning
    • Naps with slow-wave and REM stages (90-110 minutes) help solidify neuromotor skills
    • Olaf Lahl: 5 minute naps can give statistically significant memory improvement
    • Jennifer Goldschmied: Naps reduce mistakes and limit bad behaviour
    • Ariely and Barnes: fatigue and mental exhaustion decrease self-control and decision-making ability (boosts impulsivity)
    • Short 20 minute power naps boost alertness and mental clarity
    • Sara Mednick: 60 or 90 minute naps provide the same kind of cognitive improvements seen in people who had slept for 8 hours
    • Sleep pressure cycle: when high, your body demands more short-wave (deep) sleep
    • 6 hours after you wake, your circadian rhythm dips (drowsy) for
      • a great time for a 20 minute power nap to give you a mental recharge without grogginess
      • a great time for a 60 minute nap for REM with short-wave sleep
    • 5 hours after you wake, you get a nap with more REM sleep for creative nudge and problem-solving boost
    • Any nap provides benefits recovering from mentally and physically taxing effort: restorative and creatively energizing nap (No sleep is going to be lost time)
    • use the hypnagogic state in the transition from sleep to waking
    • Dali: sleep delivers creative work in a very brief block
      • nap in a bony chair with your hands over the sides
      • hold a heavy key between thumb and forefinger in one hand over a steel plate
      • allow the key drop to wake you at time when you can recall your dream
      • this nap taps insights, restores energy, and guides creative work
    • Tore Nielsen: Upright Napping Procedure
    • Naps are powerful tools for recovering our energy and focus
    • Even during his country's most desperate hours, when he felt the fate of the nation and civilization hanging in the balance, Churchill found time for a nap. We would be wise to ask if our days and our work are really more urgent
  5. Stop

    • John Littlewood: while your natural impulse at the end of the day is to finish the immediate job; ending in the middle of something eases a start in the morning by going over the latter part of the previous day's work
    • Neal Setphenson: stop mid-thought so that the next morning has something in the buffer, waiting to be written
    • Haruki Murakami: stop every day right at the point where you feel you can write more so you get a smooth next day
  6. Sleep

2. Sustaining Creativity

  1. Recovery
  2. Exercise
  3. Deep Play
  4. Sabbaticals

The Restful Life

Acknowledgements Notes Bibliographic Essay Index