Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is a consultant in Silicon Valley and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He writes about technology and its cultural impact. His latest book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, is an empirical argument in favour of more limited working hours and greater understanding of the benefits of active rest as a means of raising creativity and productivity.

What made you decide to write the book?

I’ve been working as a technology forecaster and a consultant in Silicon Valley for about 15 years, and a few years ago, after lots of long projects and multitasking and travel, I started to feel the classic effects of burnout. My first response to this was to try to fit more into the day, to try to work harder. But when I was on sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, I found that in three months I got an enormous amount of stuff done and did an awful lot of really serious thinking, which was a great luxury, but I also had what felt like an amazingly leisurely life. I didn’t feel the constant pressure to look busy or the stress that I had when I was consulting. And it made me think that maybe we had this idea about the relationship between working hours and productivity backward. And [we should] make more time in our lives for leisure in the classic Greek sense, not playing a lot of video games.

Up until you wrote the book, you thought the more you worked the more productive you were?

Yes, there was a straight line going up. More hours equalled more productivity. This is an assumption – a mistake – that we’ve been making for a very long time. And now there’s more than a century’s worth of work that overwork in the long run is bad for people and organisations and also bad for productivity. It’s something that can be sustained for periods of a few weeks but after that you start creating more problems than you solve.

You focus on creativity. Do you think our attitudes to work have a similarly deleterious effect on work that is not creative?

Work involves more improvisation and creativity than we recognise. Unless you’re doing a job that literally involves following a set of instructions that have been written out for you, the odds are your job is going to require dealing with exceptions and problems that will demand some ingenuity. Having said that, the research is very clear that no matter what kind of work you do, overwork is going to impact your productivity for the worse. The studies show that it’s not creative people who are affected by these things. It’s human beings who are affected by them.

The most restorative type of rest is active: exercise and engaging hobbies do more for you than sitting on the couch

We’re now living in a digital age where theoretically there is a great deal of flexibility in our modes of work but at the same time we’re more connected than ever to work. Can you foresee employers enforcing more detachment from work?

I think we have tended to be less critical and questioning of the virtues of new technologies, particularly communication technologies, than perhaps we should. After a generation’s experience with email, a decade’s experience with smartphones, we are discovering that these technologies do not automatically make us more productive or give us more time with our kids. Rather, they have tended to grind work down to a fine powder that spreads out right through our day. Is it possible to dial this back?

The answer is there are companies that are already doing so. There are a growing number of companies in Silicon Valley, for example, often founded by people who are veterans of Facebook, Google, Cisco, Apple… places where the reigning assumption is, if you’re not working 70 hours a week then you’re a slacker. Companies like Basecamp and Treehouse have been limiting email contact in the evening and reducing the length of the working day. Just as Henry Ford showed 100 years ago that you can have people doing an eight-hour day rather than a 10-hour day and still have people doing good work and being productive, I think these companies show that it is not inevitable that communications technologies have to keep us connected 24/7.

Historically there have been very different working cultures in the United States and Europe. We have longer holidays and shorter working weeks than the US and have been told that we’re lagging behind in productivity. But are you saying that maybe Europe was right all along?

More often than Americans like to admit, Europe has been right. I think when you look at the statistics on the relationship between working hours and productivity in the developed world, one of the striking things you find is that it’s not as clear and linear a relationship as you think. Countries like Mexico and South Korea have longer working weeks and longer working years than Scandinavia and France or even Germany, but they have lower productivity rates. As easy as it is for Americans to make fun of the European economic environment as one that is beset with stifling regulation, the idea that it’s important to maintain better work-life balance turns out in the long run to have a lot going for it.

We tend to think of rest as supine. But you say rest can be defined in wider terms than that…

We think of rest as a negative space defined by absence of work but it’s really much more than that. The counterintuitive discovery is that many of the most restorative kinds of rest are actually active. Things like exercise or walks or serious, engaging hobbies do more for you than sitting on the couch binge-watching television. The more supine kinds of rest certainly have their place but active rest delivers the greatest benefits. It also provides occasion for creative reflection.

You talk about the importance of “deep play”. Is that a recognised psychological concept?

The term deep play comes originally from Jeremy Bentham but a cultural anthropologist called Clifford Geertz popularised it. People who are really ambitious and think about their work an awful lot will have these hobbies that look like they absorb gigantic amounts of time and energy. There are all kinds of different terms for roughly the same kind of thing – serious leisure. That there is no one term for this activity reflects the fact that there is no clear idea of its importance. But what I came to see is that these kind of activities – like, for example, climbing Mount Everest – have a deeper value that make the investment of time and energy worthwhile.

What about sleep?

If you don’t care about your mental development or your body, then forget about sleep. Otherwise sleep is the original rest. Scientists still haven’t found the one thing that explains why if you have a nervous system you need to sleep, and even if you don’t have a nervous system you need to sleep – plants do something similar. But it’s incredibly important for brain maintenance. When we sleep the brain takes time to clear out plaques and toxins that have built up during the hours we are awake. Even though we’re not aware of it, sleep also helps us push forward on questions and problems we’re working on during our waking hours.

What’s the most surprising insight or fact you came across in your research?

The big thing that I took away from this book is it’s completely changed the way that I think about creativity. I had a romantic notion in the 19th-century sense that creativity was something that was irrational and chaotic, that proceeds from a bolt from the blue, where you get inspired and then start working. And what you see in lots of creative lives is a completely different model of working. As Picasso said: “Inspiration exists but it has to find you at work.” People who have long creative lives, who do really great work for decades, they don’t get inspired and start work. They start work and get inspired. And they do this every day. That was a real revelation.

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