December 16, 2016
Interview with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of the book Rest
Mike Carruthers: You’re probably working too hard and you need to stop.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang: What most people find is that they’re able to work at their best in bursts of about 90 minutes to 2 hours.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of the book Rest, says we live in a culture that doesn’t really value rest.
Americans love busyness and we always have. Psychologists 150 years ago were talking about American’s love for over work in contrast to Europe’s. But the reality is that European nations that have shorter working hours actually have higher levels of productivity than Americans do.
The idea of work less and rest more doesn’t mean you just have to go sit on the couch – although you could do that. It’s more about involving yourself in something other than work.
It is easy today to think of rest as something that is both unimportant and uninteresting. Unimportant in the sense that  it’s something that you can do when you’re dead. We think of rest as a very passive thing.It is sitting on the couch binge watching television. But that’s actually a very modern and I think incorrect understanding of rest. And so people who think to themselves I would be bored to death by that. And the reality is you probably would be bored sitting on the couch but you would get an awful lot of benefit doing other things.
