Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less - Hardcover

Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465074871 ISBN 13: 9780465074877

Publisher: Basic Books, 2016

Synopsis

"Rest is such a valuable book. If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves."---Arianna Huffington, New York Times Book Review

Overwork is the new normal. Rest is something to do when the important things are done-but they are never done. Looking at different forms of rest, from sleep to vacation, Silicon Valley futurist and business consultant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang dispels the myth that the harder we work the better the outcome. He combines rigorous scientific research with a rich array of examples of writers, painters, and thinkers---from Darwin to Stephen King---to challenge our tendency to see work and relaxation as antithetical. "Deliberate rest," as Pang calls it, is the true key to productivity, and will give us more energy, sharper ideas, and a better life. Rest offers a roadmap to rediscovering the importance of rest in our lives, and a convincing argument that we need to relax more if we actually want to get more done.

About this title

From the Author

I became interested in the importance of rest in creative lives began when I noticed a paradox: many of history's most accomplished thinkers, artists, writers, and composers organized their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as diverse as Charles Darwin, Salvador Dali, and Maya Angelou think about their work constantly, and achieve much more than most of us, yet they spend fewer hours laboring than we do. What accounts for their success?
The key is not the quantity of their work, but the quality of their rest. Many super-creative and -productive people take a distinctive approach to rest. 

• They see rest as a skill: like speaking or running, it's something we all do naturally, and can learn to do better. 
• They learn to harness mind-wandering: they develop habits that give their brains a break, or give their unconscious minds time to explore new ideas. 
• They treat rest with respect, and make time for it in their daily schedules. 
• They recognize rest as a resource that can extend their creative lives.

Rest blends history, biography, and recent work in neuroscience and psychology to uncover the critical but under-recognized role rest plays in the lives of creative people. It shows how creative figures structure their days to make good use of rest, and why long walks, afternoon naps, vigorous exercise, and "deep play" stimulate creative work and sustain creative lives.

About the Author

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is founder of The Restful Company, and a visiting scholar at Stanford. He is the author of two previous books: Empire and the Sun (Stanford, 2002), and The Distraction Addiction (Little Brown, 2013), and for more than a decade has worked as a technology forecaster and consultant. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, the Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Wired, and American Scholar, and numerous scholarly journals. He lives in Menlo Park, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0465074871
• ISBN 13: 9780465074877
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320