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Rest · Humanity Working

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Paul, are you rested and ready to go?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a lot of talk about hustle culture and long hours, and with some CEOs complaining that people just aren't working hard enough.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: We looked at this with our episode called Super Busy.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: But let's look at the flip side, rest.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: When you talk about rest, are you talking about sleep?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's part of it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting you you referred to the um to the CEO stuff.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um maybe we'll see if we can pop a link or two in the show in the show notes about this.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: But it's been, it's, it's really interesting.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a it's been kind of a hot topic of late.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and a lot of the CEO is doing the kind of like, well, I didn't get where I am today by slacking off, right?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And and I'm successful because I work 90 hour weeks, and you guys will be successful too if you do it, and everybody's too lazy.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's kind of like the environment that we live in.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And as you mentioned, we talk about some of this in uh in SuperBusy and how uh how counterproductive it is.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what we have found in our research is that there's four types of rest, um, and they're all important and they're all different to each other.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: And all of them, um, if you can practice all of them effectively, then you can be really effective in the web workplace over time.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's go through them.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I mean, I think you'll I think as I go through these, you'll recognize you'll recognize all of them, but the point is that they are different to each other and they serve a different purpose.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the first is, you know, the long breaks.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so think of it as um vacations, but even weekends as well.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh there's that famous, uh, well, semi-famous thing from Gary, Gary Neville, the the uh former Manchester United footballer and online influencer now, and he talks about this idea of having mini vacations, and you really can tell he's just talking about weekends.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: But they are but they are sort of similar to each other in the sense that it's it's giving us a uh a period of more than a couple of hours to actually uh uh take a mental break, and they're critical for full recovery.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh second is sleep.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh so don't need to say much more about that, as I we know we don't get enough of it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh third is what I'd refer to as daily downtime.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like the okay, I finished work for the day, and now I'm in a mode where I'm predominantly not working versus predominantly working, watching TV or going to see your kids play baseball or whatever.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Fourth one, micro breaks.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it's um you're doing this piece of work, you stop, you take a minute, you go back to work.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: So one minute, two minutes, five minutes, those kind of things.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um great for resetting your brain and going back in again, then maybe grabbing coffee, stretching, all that kind of stuff to help you sustain focus.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um I have a couple of tools that work to help me do that during the day, like the even just the stuff that comes with the eye watch where it pings you and says you need to stand up.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like that it's like, oh yeah, I've been sitting here for four hours.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let me get up and just even stand up, literally, and and and get away.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there's lots of tools there.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um are some are some groups of workers better at taking them than others?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's a cultural element as we've spoken about before.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so I think that's uh that's part of it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, there's there's professions where this is well understood.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, athletes being the primary example of that, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: But um I think acting as well, we've seen uh we've seen that as well, that most actors get a sense of like, okay, I if I'm gonna be at my best when I'm on stage or whatever it happened to be, then I need that that then rest and recovery needs to be an important part of this.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's really any profession where they're actually measuring peak performance.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the difference of success, whether you have success or not, is based on that actual measurement.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because the irony is that most of us that work in corporate America are not being measured in that way.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so therefore, we don't think of it as being important in the same way.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: But you can imagine a different world whereby they're like, okay, I'm not suggesting we should do this, by the way, but what they're gonna say, we're gonna measure your effectiveness based on how much stuff you can get done in like a 15 to 20 minute period on a Friday afternoon or whatever, you would make sure that you were that you had had enough rest, you would make sure that you were uh focused enough to allow you to do that really well.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's part, it's related to culturally how we've uh how we've measured it.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: And in in those areas where we don't consciously measure it, we tell ourselves this sort of lie of hustle culture, we'll sleep when we're dead.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, all that kind of stuff.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody needs these breaks.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like what what uh he should definitely take long breaks.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um what should we do about it?
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um the key is to track all four types of rest.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um so most is most of us are bad at like at least one of these, right?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and using one type to try to make up for another doesn't really help.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, a lot of people will do, okay, I'll be sleep deprived during the week and I'll catch up at the weekend, but that sleep in the week is different to that resting period that you're uh that you're doing in the weekend.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And in reality, if you're spending a lot of time in the weekend uh sleep, catching up, then you're not doing the other stuff that you get from the weekend, which is sort of your active uh you know, your active brain rest doing different things, doing different things to you uh to your normal work stuff.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really about that uh that conscious thing of tracking each of them and making sure that you're doing well across all of them.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: So your iWatch does your Apple Watch, sorry, does a bit of that for one of the types of breaks, but it's not doing all of it across all of them.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it'll show you how you slept in retrospect, but not help you, it can't help you do it proactively.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Like Precise can't put you to sleep.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, I mean it makes sense when you say like athletes train hard and then they prioritize recovery, yeah.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, to be at peak performance, but in office work, rest is often like optional or not even considered, you know.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and so, so you know, the different types of rest that you need, how's that applied in in the office setting?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a it's a really good question.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously we've been through the um the the four that are there.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and those are actually kind of universal, whether you're an athlete or uh or whether you're anything uh you're anything else.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I think the way in which it's applied is subtly different.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's applied, um it's it's applied in the context of the work that we do being over a much longer period than these people who need to peak in uh you know for specific activities.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, if you think about it, right?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you're you're saying bowl, you got one job which is to be absolute peak for 10 seconds.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got other folks who do other sporting events and their peak needs to be like a couple of hours or something like that.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: For us in office type jobs, ideally what we're looking to do is peak for like a 40-hour period once a week.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we're kind of like the distance runners of this stuff.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's like, how do you you need you need to really prioritize all four of these things while you're doing it?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: So just like if you're a long-distance cyclist, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's about the nutrition that you're taking while you're actually cycling, as well as what you're doing out of ban.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: So in an office setting, we need to think about what we're doing when we're not working, and we also need to think about what we're doing when we are working in order to be able to sustain it.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I would love it'd be so fun to have like the uh, you know, like I got a big meeting coming up, and I not do anything until that meet, like, oh no, I'm sleeping, got to get ready for the meeting, practice like it'd be so unheard of because we have to go from one thing to another, you know?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: There are examples, historical examples of presidents who were like sort of going to important meetings, um, who had five minutes in the car and they just slept for five minutes just before the important meeting.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: So, so it can be done.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Crazy.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so this comes from the top.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Leaders have to set the tone for this, right?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a leader, take visible breaks, don't send emails late at night, encourage your team to disconnect, uh, all of this kind of stuff.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And just make sure that people are really aware of it.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and they're building that into software and stuff now too.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Outlook has that delayed send where you can you can because sometimes you're thinking in at midnight and you bang out all these emails.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if people receive them at midnight, they're like, oh my god, I gotta work at midnight now.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, no, no, send it later.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is just how my brain works.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: So uh all right, very interesting.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul, we did it.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Go take a nap.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Dave.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Our interviewer is Paul Slater.
• 9:43
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• 9:46
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• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.