Work hard, play hard? The importance of rest in our working lives

We often start the year with the best of intentions. To create new habits, to exercise more, get more sleep, eat better etc. As we come to the end of the first 90 days of 2024 we can take some time to reflect on the first quarter. The start of 2024 has been busy for many and at our recent AMA, we were asked questions about how to navigate relationships at work when people are just too busy.

This got us thinking about the work/life balance or the new phrase work/life integration and how for some, busyness is fast approaching toxicity, burn out and stress.

Letting work bleed into every aspect of life can happen easily and the pandemic made this even worse for many leaders. But we have to know when to stop, we have to learn to rest. Because it is more important than you probably realise. Finding time to rest when you’re in a busy leadership position can often seem impossible but, in this issue of The Leadership Fix I want to talk about why it is so crucial – not only for our own sanity, but also when it comes to improving our efficiency at work.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently after reading the excellent book Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, which has really helped to crystallise my thoughts on the importance of getting the downtime you need. We share a lot about focus, boundaries and productivity and rest plays an important role in all of it.

In the book, Alex argues that rest needs to be taken seriously and done properly because, quite simply, when you rest better you work better.

How much rest is enough?

Obviously, the answer to this will vary for everyone, but one of the bits of the book that struck me the most was a reference to the often-cited study (made famous by Malcolm Gladwell) which found you need to spend 10,000 hours working on something to become an expert on it. What’s less often talked about is that the same study found that, alongside this, you also need 12,500 hours of rest.

If you don’t make time for deliberate rest – and ‘deliberate’ is the key word here - your brain doesn’t have the time to quieten down, to process problems, to stop procrastinating, and to have the balance you need to live your life to the fullest. Our brains love novelty and, without that deliberate rest, we’re setting ourselves up for failure because we’re not letting our brains do other things. Another excellent book on this subject is Essentialism by Greg McKeown who argues for the benefits of doing less, but doing it better. He talks about replacing the idea of “doing it all” with doing “the right thing, in the right way, at the right time”.

There’s a great fact in there which I often reflect on – until the 1900s the word ‘priority’ was singular, it is only in more recent times that the word ‘priorities’ was developed, adapting the word to bend to the reality of modern life.?

“Deliberate rest helps cultivate calm.”

As Alex states: “Today we treat being stressed and overworked as a badge of honour, but this is a recent phenomenon and it inverts traditional ideas of how leaders and professionals should behave under pressure.” Busy seems to have become our default state. Think about it… when people ask how you are, how often do you respond with “Yeah, good, busy…”?

It's almost as if we’re doing something wrong if we’re not constantly rushing from one thing to the next. As someone who works with organisations to help them move from chaos to calm there were so many points in the book that resonated with me. These are just three of my favourite quotes (along with the one in the headline of this section):

?“Too often busyness is not a means to accomplishment but an obstacle to it.”

?“Deliberate rest helps you recognise and avoid the trap of pointless busyness and concentrate instead on what’s important.”

?“Deliberate rest helps organise your life, it also helps calm your life.”

?Making time for rest

So, if we know all of this, how do we actually make sure that we build rest into our lives and give it the priority it deserves? I think there are three key areas to focus on:

• Boundaries and habit-building: The idea of boundaries is bandied around a lot these days but it’s not always a negative thing. It isn’t about refusing to do things, but about how you can put things in place in your day to create habits that allow you to work and play in equal measure. Building habits makes it easier to do things, because your brain knows what’s coming next. Say, for example, exercise is your preferred form of rest and you want to go to the gym three times a week. You need to remove any friction that might stop this from happening. Perhaps you could put on your gym gear at the start of the day, if working from home, or arrange to go with a friend so that you have some accountability and would be letting someone else down if you cancelled.Creating habits makes it easier to stick to the boundaries you’ve put in place and to stop work taking over.
• Strategic thinking needs space: Alex argues that rest serves two important purposes in our lives – to stimulate creativity and to sustain creativity. For leaders, creative thinking is a crucial part of problem solving, but tapping into our creative mind becomes so much harder if we are not well rested. Our brains needs stillness and quiet in order to think their way around problems, so if you’re in a creative position it’s important to give yourself that time. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown holiday, sometimes just a 20-minute walk in fresh air is enough to get thinks flowing again.
• The importance of play: Greg has a whole chapter dedicated to this with a brilliant example from Mary Poppins about the impact of play in our behaviour. The older we get, we have a narrative that play is a waste of time, trivial and childish but it's actually fundamental to innovation and possibly even our survival. Greg defines play as 'anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end'. Making time for something that can be enjoyed for the sake of it rather than practising to be better or constantly learning helps us adapt to the world around us. Find something to do for pure enjoyment, not achievement.

One other book I read at the end of last year was All it Takes is a Goal by Jon Acuff and it's a great one for helping you become more intentional with your time, and create space for that deliberate rest. There is one quote in it that I often come back to:

"Being present is just learning to be nostalgic about the moment you're still in."

There is a lot to be said for slowing down and as a leader, it's easy to have a calendar full of meetings and less time to think. We cannot become an expert in something, spending 10,000 hours doing something, without the balance of those 12,500 hours of rest.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on prioritising rest. How do you maintain your work/life balance? Do you have any other recommendations for good books on the subject? What does deliberate rest look like to you? Let me know in the comments.