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1KHO 726: Deliberate Rest | Alex Pang, Rest - The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast | Wave AI Podcast Notes

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1KHO 726: Deliberate Rest | Alex Pang, Rest

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Mon Mar 02 2026

Summary

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast – Episode Summary
Episode: 1KHO 726: Deliberate Rest | Alex Pang, Rest
Date: March 2, 2026
Host: Ginny Yurich
Guest: Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Episode Overview

This episode features a rich and engaging conversation between Ginny Yurich, founder of the 1000 Hours Outside movement, and author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. The primary focus is on the theme of deliberate rest—how redefining our relationship with rest can be a powerful catalyst for productivity, creativity, and personal well-being. Drawing on Pang’s books Rest, Shorter (about the 4-day workweek), and The Distraction Addiction, the discussion covers the science, history, and cultural change around work and leisure, highlighting actionable steps for adults and families under today's pressure-cooker pace.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Rest as a Necessity, Not a Luxury

Timestamp: 00:22 – 01:06

Ginny opens by quoting Pang: "Rest is not something that the world gives. It has never been a gift. 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

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Transcript

A (0:00)

Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.

B (0:02)

My name is Jenny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside

A (0:05)

and I have just read a phenomenal book. It's been around for a little bit, but came out in a new edition. It's called Rest why you get more done when you work less. And the author, Alex Soojun Kim Pong is here. What a book. Thank you for being with us, Alex.

C (0:20)

Oh, thanks for having me, Jenny. Pleasure to be with you.

A (0:22)

So this is not your only book. You also have a book called Shorter, which is about the four day work week, which is like the dream. The dream. I think everybody thinks if the work week could be four days and we have this three day weekend, I mean, it would solve a lot. Although I think you probably have to be pretty careful about not shoving things in and really taking that time to rest. Because what you talk about is that rest is not something that the world gives. It has never been a gift. It's never been something you do when you 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 the world that is intent on stealing it. If we had a four day work week, do you think people would take time to rest?

C (1:06)

The empirical evidence is they absolutely do. So I have worked with a few hundred organizations now around the world that have implemented four day weeks without like moving to four 10 hour days, but rather actually shortening the amount of time that you're working total. Okay. And it turns out that what they do with their free time is ridiculously wholesome things. They spend more time with family, spend more time doing volunteer work, they have less takeout, and they cook more. Giving people more time does not end up with, you know, more idleness or giving people, you know, or people. People don't spend it planning the perfect crime. They spend it with their children or, or with, you know, sort of down at the shelter or something. So yes, people do. And they also spend more time on themselves. There was a really interesting study in Iceland that found that broadly speaking, when public servants there moved to shorter work weeks, men spent more time with the families and women spent more of their discretionary time with each other, on themselves. And so, and I think that's revealing even in a famously egalitarian place like Iceland, where, you know, gender roles and stereotypes are supposed to be sort of, you know, we're followed less than they are in other, in other parts of the world. But, you know, just to wrap up the four. You know, one of the other things that's really impressive about the, about the four day week of is not just its impact on rest, but also the impact that it has on the careers especially of working mothers. And what we see is that, you know, generally most high tech companies, financial services firms, startups, the kinds of places, in other words, that have been experimenting with four day work weeks now they have a default, whether they know it or not, to try to hire 25 year old unmarried guys with no pets. Basically people who have as few external commitments on their time as possible so that they can be asked to and agree to work as many hours as they possibly can without, without, without any inconvenience to the system. When you move to a four day week, as one, you know, one founder told me said, you know, what we need, it turns out, are not people who can slee their desks. What you need are people who are super organized, who are a little bit ruthless with their time but have, you know, but also can work well with others, have good listening skills, are well organized. And it turns out that those, where do you, where do you find those skills? Mainly in sort of working moms who very often when they, you know, when, when they're trying to get back into the workforce, you know, when, you know, after you, after having a child, you know, let's say a child or two really struggle to find positions in the same or at the same level that they had been in before they exited. And so for these small companies who are struggling to find really good talent for them it's an opportunity to get people with a level of experience who they would not be able to otherwise. And for, you know, the women, it's an opportunity to work in an environment that they, that is, is designed not around the idea that you should give as much time as you possibly can to the organization, but rather that you should be as thoughtful as you possibly can about how you spend that time and sort of take that wisdom and use it to having a life outside. So anyway, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. That's, or that's, that's the benefit of the four day week.

C (6:30)

That's a great question. So, you know, and I'm sure that there is a Silicon Valley somewhere, but, you know, who knows, you know, they say you write the book that you need. And so in my case, partly it was a response to my own experience with overwork and burnout. It was also, there was also kind of an intellectual journey which very briefly was that when I was in college, one of the most formative classes I took was called Invention and Discovery in the Arts and Sciences, which was all about kind of the psychology of creativity among famous scientists and artists and other kinds of highly creative, prolific people. And it's, you know, one of those intellectual experiences that, you know, you imagine having in college that not all, that not all of us are lucky enough to, to have. But it for me really set up a set of questions that I've been kind of pursuing sort of ever since. However, when you, when you're interested in things like the psychology of creativity, people are always trying to figure out like what goes on in the heads of people sort of while they're working. Right. You don't, you know, you don't ask. All right, does non work time play some role here? Right. In what? In what people? In, in helping people be more creative. And I had this experience when I had a sabbatical. I was at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and about halfway through realized that I was getting amazing amounts of work done. I was reading a lot, talking to people, having these cool experiences, but I didn't feel the kind of time pressure that is just part of normal life here in Silicon Valley, where you always feel like you're half a step or half a project behind, especially now with, you know, AI threatening to sort of take over everything. And it made me think, you know, maybe in order to do really good work, what we need to do is build in more time in our lives for rest, and that it is not through working more and more like machines or computers that what if we're going to succeed? Because you're never going to win that race thanks to Moore's Law and the fact that, you know, what if machines don't need to sleep, but rather that if we need that, rather that rest can be both a source of renewal, but also a kind of creative wellspring from which good ideas can emerge. And, you know, it turned out that not only was this, was there a bunch of research in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity that helped explain why these periods of downtime or are really creatively very fruitful, but when you look at the lives of highly creative folks like Nobel Prize winners and famous artists and writers, what you see is almost, you know, all of them who have long creative lives learn to take rest seriously. And they rest in some pretty consistent ways that we can follow and put in, you know, put into place in our own lives. So that's the, that's the story behind or coming to recognize the importance of, and then writing the book about rest.

C (11:13)

Yeah, no, this was. It's one of those things that happened not quite by accident, but almost. It was in sort of a special program. The. My alma mater also had a program in history of science, which is kind of unusual. There are not that many of those in the United States. And the person who was teaching this was an historian of technology named Thomas Hughes. And part of the reason that I chose his class was that I was that he had gone to University of Virginia, and that's where I was from. So we actually had gone to rival high schools a couple decades apart. And, you know, I was at that time planning to be an engineer. I was going to, you know, study computer science, kind of, you know, sort of, you know, typical kind of ambitious Asian kid stuff. But taking this class with Tom made me realize that as interesting as spending time calculating circuit voltages might have been for me, actually what I was much better at was history of science and history of Technology. That was a class that combined readings from Sigmund Freud, talking about Leonardo to books about. About or of schizophrenia to Thomas Mons Magic Mountain. There was a. We read a little bit of Goethe's Faust. But, you know, it was, you know, and Tom was one of these. Was one of these teachers who had that brilliant ability to ask a couple questions and then apparently step back for most of. The. Most of the rest of the class and just let things flow. Now, having done some teaching myself, I know that that is one of the hardest things you can do as a teacher. You know, there's that the. There's that line in the Usual suspects that, you know, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was. Was convincing people he didn't exist. And there are some skills that are. That make themselves disappear. And if you know how to do that, then that's really amazing. And Tom had that ability in the classroom. And so that course moved me from studying engineering to design to sort of doing history of science. But the course also, you know, inspired me to do things like I was, you know, I was writing a paper based on the work of a professor at Princeton. And so I called him up, went of. Went up to Princeton, spent a few hours interviewing him. And, you know, not the sort of thing that a freshman typically does. But Tom's class sort of was engaging enough so that. To. To make you want to. Want to do that. So that was. Yeah, so it was a. It was a choice based upon one of these crazy personal connections that have nothing to do with the subject. That turned out to be to have ramifications that I basically I am still living with.

B (14:54)

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C (19:52)

Yeah. You know, we are in a world in which, in which long hours and overwork are so much like an accepted part of life. They seem inevitable and inescapable. That it is, it can be difficult but really revealing to discover that just a generation ago our ideas about success, about what, about what the lives of successful people had to be like, were really quite different. And you know, I think that in the immediate, you know, the years between the end of World War II and let's say about 1980 or so was this, you know, was this era in which you had a couple, for one thing, the heads of America's two most sort of, most prominent companies, right. General Electric and General Motors were both run at different times by two guys named Charlie Wilson, each of whom had worked their way up from essentially the mail room, where the engineering design shop, to the corner office. And that's the way careers worked in America, right? You started in a company, you paid your dues, or if you climbed the ladder and then you made it to the top. It was also the case that this was, it was not obvious that working super long hours was proof that you were really good, but rather proof that you were inefficient. Right. This. And you know, what begins to change in the 80s is the rise of sort of the finance, mainly the finance and the tech industries that sort of operate according to very different kinds of cultural rules here in Silicon Valley, you know, it is, I think, you know, sort of Apple and Steve Jobs that helps sort of promote this idea. Built kind of drawing from the world of, you know, Computer hackers or, or computer bums as they were sometimes called, right. These people who are obsessed with computers who stayed up all night playing, playing space war. People for whom long hours at the terminal was, you know, was a way of life and now it turned into a way of business. And so what happens is you get a shift, a kind of cultural shift to this idea that in order to succeed in this fast moving, globalizing, high tech world, you need to work super, super long hours. And one of the reasons you needed to do that was the technology was going to change. So if you were a technical person and five years from now your skill, those skills are going to be obsolete. So you know, you got to, you got to make hay while the sun shines. I think it's also the case that sort of with process re. Engineering, you know, the whole, the, the tumult of corporate reorganization, downsizing, et cetera in the 80s and the 90s, generally our sense of career stability and goes way down, right. You see sort of the growing use of, of temporary workers or precarious work in, in all kinds of industries, including professional services. Right. Academia, law firms, sort of, et cetera. And so in that environment, it becomes ever more important to demonstrate your worth. And how do you do that? Well, if you're not in a factory or working on a farm, where your output can be measured by how many widgets you've put together in a shift or how many acres you've plowed in knowledge and service industries, it becomes time because we don't have much better measures. And so working long hours becomes both a way of showing your dedication, it becomes protective covering and against being laid off. I mean, I think there, there is some evidence that it is also a kind of rear guard, defensive reaction against the growing presence of women in the workplace, particularly in professional settings, you know, that, you know, as, as the percentage of women increase in or in professions, one of the things that can happen is expectations around hours sort of get longer as, you know, as a, as a way of sort of, you know, keeping too many of these, you know, too many of these women from sort of taking sort of too many, you know, too many jobs that sort of men had. Had. This is, this is a little bit disputed, but, but I think it makes sense. Yeah, right.

C (31:55)

Yeah, some of them are early to bed, early to rise. But even the ones who aren't sort of practice this. And so start really early in part because for creative work, there is some evidence that your creative subconscious is a little more accessible in those super early hours that, you know, I think if anybody, anybody who's been on religious retreats, for example, or spend any time in sort of any kind of monastic environment, those people are up at like 4am praying. And it's not just, you know, like a proof of, you know, a proof of strength or your own devotion. There really is something about being awake at that time of day that is special. And, you know, whether this is for devotional purposes or for creative purposes. So the first thing that they're doing is kind of harnessing a little bit of that. But the other, the next important thing is, is you're working in highly concentrated blocks of 90 minutes to two hours. And this is mainly because research tells us that we can't actually concentrate hard for longer than about two hours. We may feel like at hour three that we're still crushing it, but that's because our capacity to evaluate our own mental states is also on the decline. And so we still think it's, you know, sort of, we still think we're doing amazingly, but that's because our capacity to really sort of, to measure that has broken. So they're doing it for 90 to 90 minutes to two hours and then taking a break, going for a walk, or maybe spending a little time in the garden doing something else. And what this does is first of all allows you to kind of do a mental reset and recharge some of the energy that you had spent down previously. But also when you take that kind of break, you reach the end of the page and put down your pen and go outside. You still got a lot of stuff running around in your head, right? Problems that you haven't solved, the next sentence, et cetera. And that break gives your creative mind, your creative subconscious time to continue thinking about this stuff and even as your conscious attention is elsewhere and you are maybe physically removed from your desk and off doing something else. And so essentially what this does is it creates a situation where you're not just using conscious effort and logical deduction in order to do your work, but you're also able to harness that usually more elusive, harder to reach part of your creative mind. And then you go back, maybe you've had an idea or two that you can then get onto the page and sort of elaborate, do that for a couple more hours and then basically you're done.

C (39:58)

What else do you do during this day? Well, a good bit of what people do is physically active. So, you know, whether that is going on long walks like Charles Dickens did, or going to the gym or going sailing or, you know, Einstein, for example, really loved to be out on the water. So there's often this physical component to your day. A lot of them also will take naps in the afternoon because, you know, particularly the ones who are night owls. You're not getting a lot of sleep between, let's say, you know, 1 and 5am So a long nap in the afternoon is a way to make up for that. And these people also often have hobbies that they're fairly serious about. And, you know, whether this is. They're serious. You know, some of them are serious chess players. Plenty of them are musicians. But, you know, this is. But they recognize at some level that having that kind of hobby is important because it's both a break from work, from sort of the thing that they're working on, but also they recognize that the more creative you are across different domains, the more creative you'll be at work. Creativity. In this sense, creativity is like a muscle, and you don't save it just for work. The more you're able to use it, the more capacity. Capacity it has. But really, if you look, if they were doing time cards, you know, punching in and out, what. What you would see is the amount of time that they're spend doing what we would regard as work comes down to like really four or five hours a day, but doing it consistently, you know, sort of five or six days a week means that, you know, in contrast to these styles where, you know, you're working 20 hours a day for a year on a product and then you know, you're a zombie for six months or you know, you burn out completely, you're able to work, you know, you, you get, you get less done per day perhaps, but you're able to work more consistently. You produce as much or more over the course of a year. And if this is work that you really like, you're also setting yourself up so that able to do it for more of your life. Lots of the people I write about had their published, published their last works or had their last symphony in their 70s or their 80s. And we, you know, I think we make, we make a tragic mistake when we, when we accept the idea that if we have this thing that we really love to do, we should risk self destruction in order to, to do it. And I think that's, this is true. Whether you're talking about professional labor, whether you talk about parenting or something else, that, that, that giving, that giving everything immediately rather than playing a long game is, we are taught, there is some, we believe that there's some nobility to that, that sort of, or that, that that kind of self sacrifice is a good thing. But it means that you have less to give over the course of your life and you risk falling out of love with this thing that you used to be passionate about. So you know, play a long game or make the peaks higher and do this for decades rather than, or rather than years.

A (43:56)

I mean, what a fascinating thing, Alex, that like, if you were to study and this is what you've done, you've studied all these people throughout history and these are like the most recognizable creative figures in all of history, that they have this similar schedule, that it's not some willy nilly thing. And you think, okay, what an incredible life that would be. Like you wake up, you know, you get going on your stuff and you are, you're just like, it's quieter in the morning, you know, you get going, then you go on a walk, you take a nap, you relax and, and maybe then you do some hobbies in the afternoon and you paint, Churchill painted. You know that you have this, this, it's such a fulfilling life, you know, as opposed to this drudgery or even what we throw kids in. You know, kids are at school from 8 to 3. They're exhausted when they come home. And you, you know, you talk so much in the book about active rest and how, you know, it's like so many times we do these passive things and we feel worse. So, you know, to have the energy to be able to do the things that make us feel better. What's so wild is it's so different, I would imagine. And I know you also have a book called the Addiction. It was it called the Distraction Addiction. The Distraction Addiction, where like our world today really is just not that. Like we don't have the large 90 minute, two hours, you know, the four hours. We don't even have that because we're constantly on the phones. And then it's longer. It's just a whole day of distractions. And you talk about these people, Scott Adams included, who just passed away. It was really cool to read about him in your book. But you talk about how they're, they're methodical. Stephen King said writing is just another job, like laying pipe or driving long haul trucks. Toni Morrison, writing before the dawn began is a necessity. And then, you know, they talk about how this isn't about being inspired. You just get up, you do the work. You have the routine. Routine will enhance your creativity. You set it going. Someone said inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. It's a really enticing way to live.

C (46:03)

Yeah. You know, I think that quote about inspiration being for amateurs is one that I love and partly because it flips on its head an assumption that we have about work and passion, which is that you get this flash of insight, right, this lightning bolt of inspiration, and then you rush to the canvas or wherever and you know, you're typing away. You're working for 18 hours until you collapse in this sort of fit of exhaustion. But you've got the Mona Lisa or, you know, whatever or whatever. In reality, it's a cool picture. It feeds into this idea that the creative, that, you know, creativity is beyond our control. It's this, you know, it's this wild animal and that in order to express it, we have to, you know, essentially burn ourselves out, like pour ourselves into our work. It's a very romantic idea. The romantic poets, you know, the first generation of rock musicians, were into this. But it also turns out to be wrong. That the. And in fact, the way that creativity generally works is it's not that you get an inspiration and then you go and, you know, you work it out. You start working and it's there. Once you're at your. Once you start working that the inspiration hits. Stephen King talks about this all the time. That the muse doesn't show up unless you're already at work. You know, you start working on this thing, you get into the rhythm and then that's where the magic happens. And I think that is a really, really valuable lesson for creatives. But I think you. The fact that there are these regular patterns also means that you don't have to be someone who is, you know, who has servants or, or lives, you know, lives a very privileged life in order to put some of these, these lessons into practice. That there are, you know, there are things, there are things that all of us can do in our own lives that can bring in more rest even if we can't get all the way to, you know, a Charles Darwin's or a Charles Dickens or Toni Morrison once she was, you know, sort of famous and could write full time. And I think that the, that, you know, your mention of devices and distraction is one good example of this. That these are, you know, these are technologies that, whose default settings are basically turn the distraction up to 11, but there are things that we can do to sort of dial that back down and to claim back time, you know, time and sort of time in our brains. So literally turning off every notification on your phone is. It takes a little bit of effort to do that, but it, you know, but it's possible and it pays off. I also have something that practice that I call the zombie apocalypse test, which is think about during the zombie apocalypse, who do you need to call and who's going to call you and give those people a ringtone that you're never going to miss. So for me, this is immediate family and like one or two other people. Everybody else gets some. So they get for me the opening bars of Derek and the Dominoes. Layla, because that incredible Greg Allman riff, that is not Clapton, that's Allman. Who came up with that, by the way? I'm going to notice that no matter what, no matter where I am, and I know that this is someone who has the right to interrupt me, right? Just as if we were at a dinner party. If one of my kids came up and they had some urgent thing, I would stop talking to whoever and. Or give my attention to them. All right? Every. The whole rest of the world gets the opening bars of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's solo pieces for cello. And it's nice, it's quiet, and it's easy to ignore if I'm working on something else. So doing things, so taking back control of your devices so that you can rebuild time for attention is one thing. Another important one is preserving nights and weekends. And I think that when you look, for example, at doctors and nurses or, or, or first responders and look at the ones who burn out on the job and the ones who have long careers, one of the things that separates those groups is the ones who last are more have a greater ability to detach from work, to put it out, you know, or to forget about it. Right. Or if once they leave in part because they have other things that they like to do and they're stricter about, not these days, you know, checking work email or doing so very, very briefly, you know, to make sure that there are no emergencies, but not letting the work follow them home. Because the more you're able to rebuild those boundaries, the better a life you're going to be have and the better you're going to be at work. So. And then this leads to one final thing, which is that the more you're able to do this with other people, the better. Right. You talk about going for, you know, going for walks in the afternoon or the evening. One of the things that makes it more likely that you're going to do this, even if, you know, maybe you don't quite feel 100% like doing it, is you're doing it with a couple friends and making this social. Having that kind of commitment and reinforcement turns out to be a really good way to support that habit. Also, for things like, you know, not checking your email in the evening, that gets a lot easier. If it's a policy that your whole team has that, you know, know, if, you know, if I, you know. And so the more you can make this something that not just you do, but we do, the more likely you are to be able to stick with it, to support, to support other people and to get that support in turn. So, you know, these are, these are all problems that we all have, so we might as well solve them all together.

C (54:26)

Yes. So when you look at sort of data that sort of, that scientists gather about lifespans, health, mental states, happiness, depression, et cetera, for like an entire town for 40 years, and there are sort of researchers who did this with framing in Massachusetts, for example, or there are other longitudinal studies that follow a cohort of people across decades to try to answer the question, what makes people happy? How do people. And how can people live in ways that sort of make them happier and make their lives more meaningful? One of the things that turns out to distinguish people who, you know, who are healthier, who have better careers, who have, who age more healthily, and now that I'm in my 60s, this is something I think about a lot, is that they take regular vacations and this and what, what. So not taking them turns out not only to have long term of long term costs, but even people who have more successful careers tend to take, to actually take their vacations. The idea that you're going to, you know, that you're going to accelerate your career by staying and grinding away all the time because you feel indispensable turns out for almost all of us to be sort of incorrect. Now it's also the case that we've learned some Things about that, you know, about how long vacations ought to be and how long the benefits of vacations last. So ideally, if you could design this yourself, and this is what like independently wealthy people do, is you would do a week of vacation every three months because the ha. Because you know, vacations definitely increase your happiness level, but that peaks around day eight or so. So being on vacation for three months doesn't mean that you're like, like 10 times happier than if you're away for a week. You're generally at about the same level and the benefits of vacations last between one or two months. So it takes that long for you to get back to the happiness level that you were at beforehand. And so if you were to take vacations mainly with an eye toward maximizing your happiness and recovery, it would be about a week every three months or so. Having set now, now another important thing is again this concept of detachment. So if you can get away without taking your work, you know, your work phone, never checking your email, setting things up with someone in the office so that it's really clear what that ordinary stuff is going to be covered by someone else and these specific things will or of our emergency enough to call you when you're in the Smoky Mountains or Hawaii or wherever that's going to make it easier for you to put work out of your head and really be present on vacation. The other important and the other benefit to doing these shorter, more frequent vacations is that you don't quite feel the pressure to rush and rush and over planet and do absolutely everything and then feel bad if you don't get it all done done that, you know, if it, if it rains for two days, you know, or if you stay inside, you play board games but you know you're going to be doing it again in a few months, so it's not a huge loss. Having said, you know, and then finally, if you've got kids, let them be, you know, they let them be responsible for their own happiness, right? The more you know, the, this is a great time for them to learn how to play on their own rather than you being responsible for their level of engagement and their happiness. So, you know, it'll be, it'll be better for them in the long run and absolutely better and better for you in the short run. So now having said all that, the only bad vacation is the one you don't take, right? So if your spouse, if your kids, if, you know, if, if everyone's schedule is such that you can only do two weeks a year, Take those two weeks. Absolutely. And you know, even within that, the more you're able to unplug from work, the more you're able to schedule in just leisure time as opposed to, you know, seeing one, you know, to seeing one more thing. And sort of the more you're able to let kids or your spouse be responsible for their own happiness rather than you taking that on, take on their behalf. The better off you're going to be be and the better off everyone else will be. So that's, that's, that's how to have a good vacation and sort of how to benefit from it.