[Book Club] Rest
Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less?
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Three-Sentence Summary
Breaks are like sleep: we need to take them regularly to benefit. The benefit means staying in the game of your life work. Different types of rest achieve various levels of recovery effectiveness.
Who Is This Book For?
The most brilliant part of this book is that the author lays down systematically the work and rest relationship without leaving one part to fall short. What do I mean by that? If you have read some works on productivity, then you will understand what I mean. Maybe you have heard of Cal Newport’s Deep Work or Slow Productivity; maybe you have read Ali Abdaal’s Feeling Good Productivity; you might try to reach more with methods from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey; or you are on the cynical cycle of your life and questioning the meaning of your work with David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Paul Millerd’s The Pathless Path.
Or all above.
If I am asked to recommend a SINGLE book on balancing the work and rest of the life (yes, I purposefully didn’t use work-life balance), I would recommend this book.
Well, I believe it is also essential to bring the whole picture to you, as this recommendation might also be biased. My enlightenment in handling the relationship between work and non-work part was brought by a few intentional selections of reads together during the beginning of 2025.
Rest is the web, which threads everything together.
Outlive (book club post to come) imprints the long-game mentality for health in general.
Slow Productivity fills the philosophy part of the long-game mentality at work.
If you have joined The Learner’s Week before October 2024, the reason why I selected these books should be pretty apparent. I have been burnt out from working for a very long period, and I have been looking for solutions for a long time. This book and the long-waited 4-week holiday helped me feel genuinely rested for the first time since 2020.
With this long recommendation intro, let’s have a look at what the book is mainly about.
Major Concepts
Please keep up with the following statements and logic chain:
Work in the context of the book means “the life’s work.” The work that gives your life meaning.
Thus, by definition, work is a long game.
Researchers found that we can’t concentrate and be effective at work longer than 4 hours a day. It is also usually divided into two 2-hour sessions. The rest is merely busy with chores.
A certain amount of chores is inevitable. But prolonging work increases productivity marginally in the short run but will make the work less profound in the long run.
There is a weak point in this chain. The following is an excursion of my thoughts based on experiences and reads.
The inherent paradoxes of management give this job a natural pace of fire-fighting. For more details, see the book Being the Boss by Linda A. Hill.
Those paradoxes are never fully and truly resolved. Thus, they make the management job stressful, and potentially, it means work bleeds into rest.
How we can play the long game and stay in the game as a manager yet remains unclear.
Peter Drucker gives one possible proposal in his book The Effective Executive: record, measure, and be aware of where the time goes. According to the author, he was shocked by how wasteful he used his time after analyzing a very detailed tracking.
An alternative argument I can find to support not prolonging the work time is related to self-control or System 2 thinking mode; see the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. A manager mainly manages by making decisions. It requires slow, deliberative, and logical thinking, which is a limited resource. If this limited resource is similar or equal to the deep work mentioned in statement 3, which only maintains for 4 hours, then it supports statement 4.
Rest supports the long game, as it brings recovery.
There are two chunks of time in rest. One is used for sleep, and the other is not.
Sleep is essential for physical recovery, and its importance should be self-evident.
When selecting rest methods, 4 major factors contribute to recovery: relaxation, control, mastery experiences, and mental detachment from work. The more factors included, the better the recovery.
Relaxation means the activity is pleasant and undemanding. Control means having the power to decide how you spend your time, energy, and attention. Mastery experiences are engaging, interesting things that you do well. Detachment means the ability to feel disconnected from the job. That’s why exercising and playing sports are good forms of rest. (Except that you are an athlete.)
To benefit even more from the rest, engaging in a type of deep play will help develop valuable skills or personal connections. Deep plays are mentally absorbing; they transfer old skills into new contexts; they offer similar satisfaction as work; they connect to you personally and reveal much about your character.
Let me know whether you like this way of writing.