Rest for the Best

According to the Pew Research Center, over 46 percent of US workers don’t take all of their paid time off. Their research shows that the more “successful” someone is (that is, their income is the highest) the less likely they are to take their PTO.

This is a big problem. Hustle doesn’t replace happiness. And, without sufficient downtime, our capacity to handle the changes life throws at us is low. To have the bandwidth, we need the ability to rest.

“We underestimate how much good serious rest can do us. And we also underestimate how much good we can do if we take rest seriously,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang writes in Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.

In his book, Alex shares four big insights about rest and its place in our lives. These insights have the potential to change how we think about powering our productivity and our purpose.

1. Rest and work are partners.

We tend to see productivity and rest as opposites. But this logic can only take us so far. If someone defines themselves by their job, then when they leave the office, they stop existing. Although that kind of life may be available in horrifying sci-fi, it’s certainly not one that we would want (for ourselves or for anyone).

In The ONE Thing, Gary and Jay write about the counter-balance of work and life. Counter-balance is the process of focusing exclusively on the important task at hand, whether it’s work, teaching our kids something or balancing our monthly P&L.

The ONE Thing, p. 80.
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The preceding image shows counter-balancing works best when we give extreme attention to work at less frequent intervals, while giving our personal lives more frequent attention, even if it’s a little less intense.

Now, life may be the “rest” of what we do outside of our work, but it is not always restful. The big idea that we want to illustrate here is that life and work, just like rest and productivity, are not exclusive. They are two-sides of the same coin, and we need to be mindful of their relationship.

2. Rest is active.

Rest isn’t about doing nothing. Anyone who has done nothing knows that rotting on the couch streaming entire seasons of a comfort show doesn’t exactly make anyone feel good.
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Rest is surprisingly more active than it gets credit for. Many writers and thinkers credit physical movement like walking or running with boosting their creativity. The time spent pounding the pavement creates a liminal space where thoughts can chase each other, connections can form, and the mind can reset. A Stanford study noted that walking could increase a creative person’s output by an average of 60 percent.

“Cultivate some gaps in your days,” recommends Jay. Find your white space. Do something that helps your mind wander, and you may find that when your path winds back to the task at hand, you’re feeling ready for what’s next.

3. Rest is a skill.

Sometimes, even if we are able to do something naturally, we need to become purposeful about how we approach it in order to get the results we want.

Consider breathing. Everyone does it, right? Kinda a requirement to exist. Do you think that you breathe the same as nine-time Olympic gold medalist long-distance swimmer Katie Ledecky? Absolutely not. At some point in her training, Katie had to get purposeful about her breathing – taking the deliberate effort to become skilled at something that she was literally born being able to do.

Rest is like that. If we’re hoping to rest in a way that will be restorative, creativity-enhancing, and help us crush it in the areas that matter most, we also need to be deliberate about cultivating the skill of resting.

4. Deliberate rest stimulates and sustains creativity.

Gary and Jay advise starting your habit of time blocking by first blocking your time off. Why? They argue that successful people know when they need it and when they’ll be able to afford it. We’d also add that it has the potential to change your perspective about productivity. When you’re planning around your time off, you are managing your work time around your down time instead of the other way around. You’re also setting boundaries and letting others know well in advance when you will be off the clock.

In Rest, Alex says that we should treat our white space with the utmost priority. He calls for taking it, time blocking it, and building a bunker around it.

“Rest is not something that the world gives us… it’s never been something you do when you’ve finished everything else. 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,” (p. 10).

Our challenge to you, after reading this newsletter, is to pull up your calendar or take out your planner. Ask yourself:

Is there time blocked on my calendar and in my life for deliberate rest?

If you don’t see it in your calendar, you know what you have to do.