alex-pang-2020-06-16.mp3

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:00:00] Lots of writers write in the super early morning and there is something about like the period between about five a.m. and nine a.m. where it's like the door to the subconscious is still a little bit open and it's possible to do work of a quality in those hours that is virtually impossible to do at any other time. And so this is why you see even people like Ernest Hemingway, who was this was an incredibly active guy, deep sea fishermen could drink with the best of them. But every morning he got up and he was at his desk by 6:00 in the morning, no matter how late he'd been up the night before. And having that routine was, he thought, really essential. For doing great work. And the judge by his output and that of lots of other great writers and scientists and mathematicians and other people, he was absolutely right. So routine's serve as a foundation for and support for creativity rather than an obstacle to it as we often tend to believe.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:01:15] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Artists Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas, and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours. You can register to attend by going to bitly.com/adsoh. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:02:16] Our guest today is a futurist who studies people, technologies and the worlds they make with an academic training in history and sociology of science. He blends history, anthropology and sociology, plus ethnography, interviews, historical case studies and literary analysis to understand users and their worlds for the past two decades. He's worked as a technology forecaster and futurist, helping companies understand new technologies and global trends and their strategic and business implications. He's the founder of Strategy and Rest, a consulting company in Silicon Valley and a visiting academic at Stanford University. He's also an author having written books such Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, The Distraction Addiction, and has written for Slate, Wired, Atlantic Monthly and Scientific American. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, author of Shorter: Work, Better, Smarter and Less. Dr. Alex Pang. Dr. Pang Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here today. I really, really appreciate having you here.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:03:14] Thanks very much. It's great to be with you.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:03:16] So if you wouldn't mind, Dr. Pang can talk to us a bit about your journey. How did you get to where you are today? What were some of the struggles he faced along the way? And how did you overcome them?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:03:25] Ok, first off, I think that this interest in the role of resting creative lives and the way that organizations can play a role in helping support that in their employees is one that actually has really deep roots. A very I studied history of science as an undergraduate, and the first class I took in that field was on called Invention and Discovery in the arts and Sciences. It was about kind of the psychology of creativity. And so it kind of set up the questions that I've been trying to answer in in my last three books, you know, and then I think that I really started to recognize the value of rest, both as something to cultivate in one's own life, but also kind of subject to investigate and to write about.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:04:13] When I started that, I started paying the price for not getting enough of it. I worked as a technology forecaster, as a futurist for almost 20 years now. And about halfway through that, I started reaching the point where I was sort of constantly on projects. I was traveling a lot and I was starting to feel myself burning out and had a chance to take a step back to spend some time at Microsoft Research Cambridge as a visiting fellow. And while I was there doing the research that became my book, The Distraction Addiction, about technology and distraction and Focus, I also realized that while I was about halfway through that I was getting all kinds of stuff done. I was reading a lot. I was having these great ideas, but I didn't feel like time pressured and overwhelmed the way that you always do here in Silicon Valley. That's just like part of the air. And it started me thinking that the assumption that we've all kind of inculcated here, all absorbed here, which is that overwork and burnout are essentially like the price of doing good work and that you have to perpetually be always behind. And you're kind of locked in this race between succeeding before you exhaust yourself. It may be that approach actually is completely backward and that we actually can achieve more for a longer period and do deeper work if we recognize the power of rest.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:05:33] And that that experience stayed with me, eventually became the subject of my book Rest, where I kind of investigated the neuroscience and the psychology that explained how it is that of rest turns out to be a really important ingredient in creative lives, how it sparks imaginative thinking and how it helps us not only be more creative but more creative for more of our lives. And then Shorter is about how organizations can take the lessons of the past and put them into practice, mainly by moving to things like four day workweeks or six hour days. So kind of taking what often is this kind of privileged way of working that is accessible to people who have a lot of control over their time or are already really successful and can kind of dictate the terms of their work and make it and kind of democratizing it and turning it into something that is not just good for people, but it's also good for organizations, is good for families, and ultimately is good for the economy and society. So that's the answer to how I got into all this and where I've gone with it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:06:36] I'm really excited to be getting into some of the topics that you cover in your books. But before I get to that, as somebody who is a futurist and a technology forecaster, where do you see technology headed in the next two to five years?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:06:49] You know, I think that the outlines of the major things that we're all going to be dealing with are fairly clear.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:06:56] We're going to see continued developments and things like artificial intelligence and Internet of things, sort of a kind of expansion of robotics and automation into all kinds of new areas. So I think that kind of represented at home by different sorts of smart objects, I think we're also seeing some really interesting stuff starting to emerge with stuff like autonomous and driverless vehicles, which are not so much about autonomous vehicles that carry people. But I think the really interesting stuff is starting to happen around stuff like free carriage, right around sort of automated delivery of small things, whether it is moving blood supplies around in hospitals in East Africa by drone, which is something that's already happening to automated robotic delivery of sort of pizza, packages to your home. So these are all trends that we're seeing already that are playing out and are continuing to do so. I think that the other thing that we're going to be another thing that is clearly going to become more important are technologies around kind of public health and public safety. And I think the coronaviruses revealed the degree to which we have accidentally designed a world that is as friendly to viruses as it is to humans.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:08:14] If you look at something like the open office, for example, part of the long tables, the common spaces, all that, lots of glass and stainless steel viruses turn out to love that. It's an environment that they can thrive in that recirculated air, common spaces that everyone's handling, conference rooms, collaborative centers. And so architects, urban designers, they're going to have to figure out how to use things like automation, remote work, robotics, et cetera, to redesign and reconstruct working space so that they are safer places to be. And I think connecting to Shorter, one of the things that I've been really interested in the last couple of months is how we can redesign time. How we can redesign Workday to meet those challenges as well. But I think that when you are looking at technology trends, it's often not the case that there is some completely weird thing that futurists know about, but nobody else does not. Very often the kind of the sort of broad picture is something that we all can see.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:09:11] The challenge is figuring out how it's going to play out in different industries or different parts of the world, thinking about how we can control and shape those technologies and their users so that they give us more flexibility, more autonomy, more freedom, as opposed to just eliminating our jobs or doing other bad things.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:09:29] So that's why I think all this stuff is going. 

Harpreet Sahota: [00:09:32] In this vision of the future that you have. What do you think will be some of the biggest concerns that society will be facing?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:09:38] So I think that public health has risen to public consciousness in a way that it doesn't usually, except for things like events like Ebola or SARS. You know, if you travel to Asia, you go through airports, you go thourgh public spaces. You had already seen changes in accessibility and transit and so forth that were a response to SARS in 2013. I think we're going to see the same kinds of things here in the States as well. So a really simple example is a dramatic increase in the use of infrared cameras and things to do temperature checks for people as they go in and out of buildings or other kinds of spaces to guard against people coming in who have fevers. I think that question's around sort of how to automate different kinds of industrial functions or transportation or so on are going to get even more urgent at a time when it looks like we're going to have to do some economic rebuilding. We are probably going to go into a recession and stay there for a while. And as we fight our way out of it, one option to increase productivity is to automate all kinds of stuff and just throw a lot of people out of work. But to create an economy in which Wall Street and the owners of the robot do even better.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:10:50] It's also possible to use those same technologies, though, to empower workers to augment their abilities to help them do work that is more valuable and more meaningful. And it is not cast in stone which way we deploy these technology. And so I think that that particularly in a time where we're probably going to be facing some substantial economic challenges, that's going to become another big thing that we're all going to be talking about. The third thing that I think that I would flag is issues around technology and equity and social justice. There were academics who for years have been talking about how algorithms, how predictive policing systems, facial recognition systems, how these unintentionally encode racial biases and presumptions about who is deserving of suspicion or who is who is a potential criminal, quote unquote. And I think that we we're at a point where it's really clear that these are things that we need to address because they have very big implications and negative impacts on a lot of us. I think that will be another another big area in which we have to figure out how to make technology better and how to make it work better for us.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:12:03] So speaking of how to make technology work better for us, what can we do now and perhaps going into the future to mitigate our distraction from technology?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:12:13] I think that there were a couple of big things to flag, and I think the first is that we live in a world that is designed to distract us and indeed that when we and we interact on a daily basis with products like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, that are not only designed to distract us, but make money doing so.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:12:32] They have armies of behavioral scientists who figure out how they can boost engagement just a little bit. So we face, I think, bigger challenges than any generation has in technology driven distraction. That said, I think it's also the case that as humans, we not only have a capacity to be diverted by these shiny, blinky, cool things, but we also have great capacities to focus and concentrate. To place our - to consciously direct our attention.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:13:00] And I think that even as we recognize that these technologies are trying to kind of tear that down, we always have the ability to make choices and build that and to build it back up. What that requires essentially is practice. It is about recognizing the ways in which these technologies are designed to capture and commodify our attention. Recognizing what's at stake. How much better our lives can be when we retain the capacity to focus and sort of being mindful about how we use technologies so that we can become more focused, more concentrated versions of ourselves we want. Rather than have our consciousness be pushed and pulled by devices and by service providers.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:13:45] So I think it's one of the things, one of the kind of encouraging things I have seen with a company is I've been looking at the ones that move to four day weeks is that they actually attack the distraction problem head on. Right. Distraction is actually a pretty big problem in the workplace. There are studies that show that between technology distractions, between people coming over and asking that one quick question that turns into a 10 minute conversation between meetings and other things, people actually lose between two and four hours of productive work time every day. So if you can get a handle on that stuff in the workplace, if you can make meeting shorter, you can be more mindful about how you use technology. You can go a long way to actually decreasing the amount of time that you spend at work without affecting your productivity at all. And you can learn things in the workplace about how to get a handle on this problem that you can then use in the rest of your lot everywhere else in your life.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:14:41] So thank you so much. Yeah, it's very interesting and I think I've suffered from that attention residue quite often. Switching between tasks and getting an instant message to focus. But I would love to get into Bucharest. Let's start at the top. What is rest and what's the problem with it?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:14:57] So the problem with rest these days is we don't we don't take it seriously enough and we don't get enough of it. I think that in addition to being to living in a world that's trying to constantly distract us, we also tend to work in places that assume that we ought to overwork. That overwork is actually kind of a badge of honor, that there is a sort of moral value to it, and that people who are successful work titanically.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:15:21] Long hours. I think our vision of success is of people like, say, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. People who are multibillionaires before they're 30, who work incredibly long periods, who motivate other people to do so, and as opposed to all vision of what kind of success looked like, which was you work your way up the ladder, you wait your turn, and then finally late in your career, you reach the C suite or you become CEO.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:15:50] These days it happens very fast or not at all. And so one casualty of that is a recognition of the value that Rest plays in both restoring our capacity to do good work and restoring our capacity to be creative, to do innovative things.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:16:05] However, there has been a huge amount of work done in neuroscience and psychology and organizational behavior and management that shows just how costly overwork is both for individuals and for organizations. That shows how beneficial regular breaks - Be they are regular shifts, be they vacations, sabbaticals, what have you - can be both for people and for companies. And I think body of work, including including my book, that explains the particular pattern that super creative and productive people develop or kind of discover that allow them to do really good work while working far fewer hours then than most of us think are necessary to do world class work.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:16:53] I think that the this is we live in a world that doesn't take work seriously, but we also live in a world that provides us with all the tools necessary to figure out how to harness rest and bring it back on our lives and use it as something that makes our lives better and makes our work better.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:17:11] It's kind of reminds me of like.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:17:13] A symptom of the hustle culture, where its glorified to work....

Harpreet Sahota: [00:17:18] Exactly. You know, and I think that it is not to say that there is not plenty of value and potential reward in working hard. Or in concentrating and focusing deeply on really significant problems. I think the problem comes when we treat the long hours kind of as an end in themselves. And when we as individuals or as managers assume that there's a correlation between long hours and overwork and productivity and accomplishment. The lines between those two things are not as not as well drawn as we think. And it's also the case that we know very well that overwork has really clear downside. That people who work long hours for a long period - or organizations that do the same thing - are more prone to burnout, to big mistake, to running into issues that actually make them less productive than they would be working 40 hours. And so I think that by recognizing that after a certain period, you know, that overwork is actually deeply destructive and counterproductive is something that lots of us kind of recognize in principal. But our challenge to actually put into practice. And so I think that one of the things that both Rest Shorter do. Or make the case for that. And especially in Shorter, explain how we can how we can redesign our time, redesign our work so that we avoid all of the problems of overwork while getting the benefits of a focus, focus and rational hard work and high productivity.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:18:54] Anders Ericsson has this concept of deliberate practice, of deliberate restitch. I found to be fascinating. Can you just describe what deliberate rest is and how do we incorporate that into our life.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:19:07] So the idea of deliberate rest actually also comes out of that Anders Ericsson study of violinists and sort of how they practice. What Ericsson found was, I think as lots of people who've read either his work or Malcolm Gladwell ten thousand hours rule essay found that top performers practice regularly.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:19:27] It takes roughly ten thousand hours or so to become really good at something. But also they practice differently than just kind of ordinary, ordinary performance. They tend to be more focused on what they're practicing. They get more feedback. It's a more targeted thing that is aimed at specific improvements in performance as opposed to trying one more try one more time to do the same thing that you already know how to do. One of the other things, though, is that Ericsson found was that not only the top performers practiced differently, they also rested differently. They actually slept more than average performers about an hour or more per day because they took naps in the afternoon. And while they did not spend as much time in doing leisure activities, they were better able to account for their time and to explain their hobbies. And that made me realize that not only were these people practicing deliberately, they also were resting deliberately. So more broadly, the idea of deliberate rest is that it is possible to incorporate periods of rest, hobbies and what I call into your daily routine and into your life in ways that both increase your capacity for work, that help you become more creative and and also does help you have a better life. So that's what the idea of deliberate rest is.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:20:42] So a lot of folks in Data Science space we do a ton of studying research, knowledge discovery, a lot of knowledge work and intellectual work. Very different from the work that a violinist as or an athlete does. So why is it that rest is important for those of us who don't use our bodies or tactile kind of appendages, we use our brains?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:21:01] Well, first of all, I would say that most cognitive work is actually more physical than we realize. Both in the sense that when you talk to philosophers of mind, one of the things you learn is that there is a kind of physicality to cognition that we engage constantly, but we tend not to think about. So the philosopher Alva Noe, who is, I think at New York University. Noe has a book about action in perception, where he talks about vision and perception being, you know, being very active thing. Right. It's not our eyes aren't like cameras that simply absorb information. When we look at stuff, we're actually interacting with the world, interacting with our subjects a lot more than we realize. More broadly, I think there's a physical dimension to cognition. That means that it is embodied and sort of makes demands on our bodies that bring it somewhat closer to the sport, or to manual labor than we might realize. The other thing is that while we tend not to think of it this way, but, you know, the work of doing stuff like talking to people, being on Zoom calls, this actually is kind of cognitively and physically draining, even though if you compare it to like the real work of like doing construction or being an electrician or something like that.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:22:13] It never really quite feels like work. And I have certainly spent my life thinking compared to what my uncles do, that this is not real work, but in fact there is irreducible physical component to cognitive labor. And so what that means is that our capacity to do that kind of work is actually enhanced by developing our our physical abilities, developing our stamina, and that the more that we do that, the better we are able to do the hard work of creative thinking and deep thinking that I think that so many of us strive to do. So that's why we should pay attention to that. That's why we should think of cognitive work more as a kind of embodied physical thing than we normally do,

Harpreet Sahota: [00:23:02] Is this this physical aspect of cognition, is this the default mode network of the brain that you talk about?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:23:07] Yeah, the I mean, the default mode network is connected to that partly.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:23:10] I think the default mode network is mainly something that neuroscientists study and have been kind of fascinated with over the last 20 or so years. Really briefly, the default mode network is the set of brain patterns that activate. When we kind of relax our attention, we don't think about we don't we don't think about anything at all. We kind of zone out. And it feels like when we do that, that our brains are kind of slowing down. But in fact, they're not. It's just they switch into a kind of different gear. And what's fascinating about that is that the parts of the brain that are that kind of link up together and get active when we when we don't think about anything at all are the same parts that are associated with creative thinking, with visual thinking. And that this and what we suspect is that this is why this is the kind of physical mechanism that explains things like spontaneous memory or a spontaneous discovery. We've all had that experience where you're trying to remember something like, you know, who is the actor who is in that movie and that TV show and that other thing. You can't you can't remember who they are. But five minutes later, you're doing something else and all of a sudden their name pops into your head. That's the default mode network continuing to work on problems even while our attention has moved somewhere else. And it seems that the same network operating kind of at a deeper, more profound level is also the same thing that's at work when Einstein comes up with a special theory of relativity. Or Picasso comes up with the idea of painting from multiple perspectives simultaneously. It's the same. It's the same basic physical mechanism that go operating at the level of the kind of everyday memory, the everyday aha moment to the most profound. That's the default mode network at work.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:24:58] And I think this is something Data scientists can relate to because we've all had those moments. We're working on a really big, gnarly problem and then we step away for a while, maybe go home and wash the dishes, take a shower, and then it just comes to us. That's the default mode network at work. Awesome.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:25:13] Absolutely. And that's something we often think of. That is something that's like totally mysterious, but it's actually something that it's not something that you can control, but it is something that you can learn to harness better.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:25:24] And one of the great lessons that I learned in the course of writing, Rest, was that a lot of really great scientists and artists and writers can craft their day partly to give themselves time to rest, but to rest in ways that give their default mode networks, their kind of subconscious, their creative a subconscious plenty of time to work on problems that they haven't solved.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:25:47] And so the great example of this is people who will construct routines, daily routines, where they work really, really hard on problems for three or four hours. Don't answer the phone, no interruptions, no nothing. And then almost immediately after that, they go for a run or go work in the garden or do something else that is physical. It's different, but it's not very cognitively demanding. And in that period, you kind of your your subconscious, your default mode network continues working on the problems that have just occupied your conscious attention. It gives your sort of creative subconscious time to work on these without your conscious intervention and to explore possibilities, to explore solutions that know that have eluded your own focused effort. That's the phenomena that we have.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:26:34] When you're blocked on a problem and you go for a walk and you come back to it and two minutes later you've got the answer right. Because your default mode network has been working on it that whole time. Well, it turns out you can build a whole routine around that to help you be more creative, to help you be more focused, to solve problems faster and to get back the energy that you actually spend in those really super focus area so that you can work better. You don't burn out and you still do really cool work.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:27:09] What's up artists! I would love to hear from you feel. Free to send me an email to the theartistsofdatascience@gmail.com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me know what you don't love about the show. And let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register like going to bitly.com/adsoh. I look forward to hearing from you all and look forward to seeing you in the office hours. Let's get back to the episode.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:27:51] So how can we convince our boss that all we need is a solid four hours?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:27:56] Right. I would start with the Data. Right. I mean, of the studies of the cognitive cost of multitasking, of meetings, of interruptions that bind those two to four hours of every day, get lost. I think also that we all we all recognize the how much more we can get done in two or four really focused hours and in like eight or 10 distracted. And finally, that this is not just an individual problem. It's not just a challenge of, like, self-discipline.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:28:28] We often think of these kinds of psychological or cognitive things as just issues between our brains and our AIs and our keyboards. But in fact, there is an important social dimension to attention, to cognition and to creativity. And if you do things like set aside particular times of day in the workplace where you don't have to answer the phone, where you have permission to be heads down and a little antisocial, you can actually get an enormous amount done. And I don't think there should not be a manager anywhere who is against the idea of people being able to focus and get stuff done, because fundamentally, that's what offices are supposed to do, despite the fact that they're often designed to do exactly the opposite.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:29:11] So what are some horrible ways that people are resting and we should probably stop resting that way? And how can we replace those with better ways of rest?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:29:20] You know, I would phrase it not so much in terms of horrible ways that people are resting, but in terms of like misconception. And so I think that we often think of rest as totally passive and leisurely. It involves sitting on the couch with a remote in one hand and like a bag of salty snacks in the other. But it turns out that the most restorative, most creatively stimulating kinds of rest are actually a lot more physical and active. Things like exercise, long walks, working in the garden kind of physical activity is often more restorative and it is also psychologically engaging, but not so engaging as to prevent us from being able to mind wander and to kind of explore ideas even while we're out on the out on the the running path or hiking trail. Another aspect of the rest that we overlook is that rest is actually a skill. Rest is something that we can get better at. It's a bit like like breathing, it's breathing. It's completely natural. It's something we do without thinking about. But if you're an athlete or if you're a singer, you can use you learn to pay attention to your breath so that you can run faster or you can project to the back of the auditorium. Rest is the same way, I think that we we can we can learn ways of incorporating it into our daily schedules. We can we can learn to pay attention to those kinds of activities or hobbies that turn out to be more restful than others and that provide us with a greater amount of detachment and in our creative and psychological renewal.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:30:55] So I think those are the things that I think we need to recognize about rest on how to do it better. Now, I think that the four people who are really intensively focused on their work, people who really like their work, the challenge for them is very often to find something that is as engaging as their work. Winston Churchill talks about this in a book called Painting as a Pastime, where he says that war for politicians, for people who are accustomed to action, that you can't just tell them to do nothing. You have to give them an alternative to their regular work. For him, it was paint. And I think that people who are super successful and super busy, who have engaging hobbies, find ones that are as cognitively challenging as their regular work, but in a very unusual but in a very different kind of area. So lots of executives and lots of scientists, for example, are rock climbers or mount climbers. And for them, climbing is either like it's sort of like management or it's like science. For scientists, it's like science in the sense that you're engaging with the natural world. You are taking a big problem and you're having to break it down into a whole bunch of little parts. There is a technical aspect to it, but of course, it's far more physically engaging than anything you do in the laboratory and. It's also it gets you out into the world and at the end of the day, you've either reached the top of your climb or you haven't. The satisfactions.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:32:21] The rewards come very quickly. And so it's everything that they like about doing science without the frustrations and in a very compressed time scale. I find when I talk to people about what about their hobbies and what they like about them, they all report the same thing, which is that there's this important cognitive dimension to it. So it's kind of like the best parts of their jobs. At the same time, it's in a very different kind of context and the rewards come far more quickly. The final thing is that there's often some very personal dimension to it. It's something that's almost kind of autobiographical. So people might be into restoring cars because they come from a family that was that was in the cars they grew up around them. Or likewise people who were into scuba diving or model making because they had close friends who did that or it connects connects them back to some family tradition or some earlier part of their life. And so all of those things together serve to turn these hobbies into things that are super engaging, that can actually compete with their day jobs and can provide another outlook that reminds them of what they like best about their work, so that when things are really challenging, you have the resilience to push through and to continue against the odds to do good work.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:33:42] Really interesting. I think that speaks to one of the reasons why I like golf so much is because it reminds me of the gradient descent algorithm in a sense. So you've touched on this a little bit in our conversation. I want to dig a little bit deeper. So how does having a daily routine help us be more creative? How does that help us be more productive?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:34:04] So. Well, it depends partly on the daily routine.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:34:08] If you do a lot of self-destructive things, you're not going to be as creative. But a good routine built in, I think, built in time for focused work and progress, number one.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:34:18] And why that's important is that our creative minds seem to do better when - with these routines. Stephen King has this line about how the muse will descend if it knows that you're working. And we have this idea that - this kind of romantic idea of creativity - that holds that you get an inspiration and you kind of rush to the to the keyboard of the blackboard. And 18 hours later, you come out with a concerto or finished theorem or whatever.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:34:48] In reality, most creative work operate in the opposite way. You start work, you get into a problem, and then once you're really into it, that's when the muse appears and the serious advances, the breakthroughs start to happen. And so creative work very rarely is a game of gigantic leaps and bounds, punctuated by long periods of doing nothing at all. Most sustainable creative work actually proceeds much, much more reliably, much better if it's embedded in a set of routines that support it. Well, I think the other thing is that humans - we have daily rhythms. Right. And and one of the really valuable things we can do is learn to pay attention to those so that we match up the times when we are at our most potentially creative to the times in our schedules where we're doing the most heads down, super focused work. This is one reason that lots of writers write in the super early morning. And there is something about the period between about five a.m. and nine a.m. where it's like the door of the subconscious is still a little bit open. And it's possible to do work of a quality in those hours that is virtually impossible to do at any other time. And so this is why you see even people like Ernest Hemingway, who was this was an incredibly active guy, deep sea fishermen could drink with the best of them. But every morning he got up and he was at his desk by 6:00 in the morning, no matter how late he'd been up the night before. And having that routine was, he thought, really essential for doing great work. And to judge by his output and that of lots of other great writers and scientists, mathematicians and other people, he was absolutely right. So Routine's serve as a foundation for and support for creativity rather than an obstacle to it as we often tend to believe.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:36:44] Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I've done some research and reading on routine's and creativity myself. And ever since I started to implement a very strict regiment into my daily schedule, I found that my creative activity has gone through the roof. Granted, now my routine is kind of been thrown for a loop because of this whole covid situation and the new baby upstairs, huh?

Harpreet Sahota: [00:37:04] Yeah, but have you by any chance read Robin Sharma's book, the five a.m. club?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:37:08] No, I haven't. No, it sounds like something I should I should check out, though.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:37:12] Yeah. He's got this this concept of the 20/20/20 formula where you're up at or up by five a.m. and 20 minutes you work out, 20 minutes you meditate, 20 minutes you read. And you have that structure in place and then go about your day. And it's it's like you see says something about something similar to what you just said, how those early hours in the morning, there's a special magic to that time. I'm down here in my basement every morning by 4:30a.m., 5:00 a.m. Like you said, it sounds counterproductive. It's a man like it seems like it's an obstacle to being creative. But really the obstacle is the way I like the way to creativity is by having structure and rigor in place. Thank you for that.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:37:50] So the let's jump in your book shorter. So you talk a lot about design thinking in the book. I think the whole framework of the book is it's pretty much based on design thinking. Would you mind quickly touching on what design thinking is and maybe what that framework?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:38:03] Sure.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:38:04] Well, design thinking is it's a it's a kind of way of thinking about and solving problems that develop in Silicon Valley here in the 1960s and 1970s. And in contrast to, let's say, industrial design or more conventional kinds of product design, I think the hallmarks of design thinking are, number one, that it involves a lot more attention to attention to users throughout the process. You try to engage with them earlier, listen to them. You also in this connects to the second thing kind of sort of offer them the opportunity to, like, play around with prototypes very early on, see what they do with them, and then you kind of iterate and improve the product based upon based upon what you see. You give them another version 2.0. They play with that.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:38:53] You see you get feedback from that and then you do another release and on and on.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:39:01] In a way, a lot of software product development is a kind of is a sort of build on design thinking in the sense that there is this naturally iterative quality driven largely by user feedback. And then so there were a couple -and in Shorter one of the reasons that I talk about design thinking or use it as a framework for structuring the book is that a number of the companies I look at are design firms or software firms that are led by people with design backgrounds. And so when they were talking about the journey that their companies went on, they kind of naturally fell into the design thinking framework as a way of explaining what it was that they were doing and what stages they went through. And so the most important parts of it were the the sort of iterative phase of where ideational phase of looking at how your company and how your time is organized right now, working through what you imagined would be necessary to make make a four day week work instead of a set of five days thinking through the different scenarios of what could go wrong, how you deal with it, and engaging everybody in the company in that exercise and then doing a lot of prototyping where you allow people to experiment with different ways of holding meetings, of using technology, automating processes and thinking about what parts of their job they can outsource, what stuff they can automate, and what things require really dedicated focus time. And then testing the sharing, the sharing, the results of these different little experiments so that they become best practices across across the company.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:40:41] So, for example, there's software and design firm in Copenhagen called IIH Global. Where they have run something like three hundred different experiments on everything from the kinds of snacks that they have in the kitchen, high carb, high sugar versus high protein, and trying to measure the effects that that difference might have on people's productivity. To experiments with using technology in meetings, to using outsourcing certain certain functions to assistance in the Philippines or automated scripts. And these are things that individuals will try for a while and then collect some data on, share the results with everybody. Sometimes really successful things get adopted widely by everyone. Sometimes they get discarded and and if they're discarded, then the experiment doesn't work out, then you try something else. But I think that that that spirit of continuous iteration, a product of kind of brainstorming, prototyping, testing and then going back and improving is the key thing that you see in these companies over and over again.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:41:45] It's a key thing that you see in how people talk about their work, that they take a very experimental kind of a kind of approach to it, a very sort of Carol Dweck. It's a very kind of growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, one in which you can learn from your failures. You're not afraid to try new things and to experiment and to see what doesn't work. In order to get a better handle on what does. And then I think that the other important thing about the design thinking approach is that we are we tend not to think about time as something that we can design. Most successful design projects are no object or services, right? So the Apple Mouse or the Palm Pilot, but it turns out that it's possible to design our days that design meetings to design processes using very much the same tool. And we can do so with the same kind of prototyping experiment test mindset. And we can get improvements that are in how we spend our time that are just as significant as improvements in the products or the services that we use. So that's a long answer to why hang the design thinking all of this around the kind of design thinking frame.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:42:54] How can this framework then help us work better, smarter and less so?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:43:00] I think that I have looked at more than one hundred companies now. Across a variety of industries that have moved from five day weeks or more to four day weeks to six hour days to 30 hour weeks or even 25 hours. And what I'm seeing them do is - like I said - they all take this kind of iterative, experimental approach. One that often is pretty data driven. But they all do a fairly common sort of thing, just focusing on the knowledge workplaces rather than the nursing homes or garages or factories. The first thing is they make meetings a lot shorter. They go for standing meetings almost all disappear, and other meetings go from a default of an hour to a default of like 15 or 20 minutes.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:43:41] They also tend to get smaller and they're more focused, right. No meeting occurs without an agenda. And you have the minimum number of people necessary in the room to make a decision or to get an update as absolutely necessary.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:43:59] Another thing that they will all do is they think a lot about how to design the day to have those to build in and to protect those periods of really deep focused work. And then the other thing is that they they all learn to use technology in a more productive way. So what that means is outsourcing less valuable, more routine kinds of tasks and figuring out how to use technology to augment their highest value added, most creative kinds of work. So a really simple example is a company called Farnell Clarke, which is an accountancy in the UK. There were early pioneer in cloud based accounting, which is using cloud based accounting software that is shared both by the accounting company but also by clients. What this allows is for easier input of basic financial data, but it also makes things like tax reporting, tax filing much simpler. Right.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:44:54] That's that's no longer a thing that takes weeks and weeks of time but can be done in days, which frees accountants up from doing a lot of routine stuff. Kind of routine filing. To being able to do stuff like looking at bigger patterns in spending, investment, talking to clients about doing more kind of advisory service stuff, which is just stuff that is more which is more interesting to them, but also more valuable to clients.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:45:21] So that's one example of how the how a company is use technology to simultaneously reduce the amount of time that they spend working for increase the value of the work that they do. And this is something that plays out in different ways. And different companies, not all of them are looking for those opportunities to outsource or automate the less important stuff while augmenting their ability to do the really creative stuff.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:45:51] The final important thing that they do is they do all the stuff together rather than individually. As I said before, we often think of productivity and creativity as like these individual psychological things. But they have this really important social dimension to them. And the companies that do this best, that are most successful at shortening their working hours without sacrificing productivity or profitability or creativity are ones that see that attention is social, that creativity is social, and that by solving problems of things like distraction for everybody, you get results that are far, far superior than the ones that come from me just trying to maximize my own utility or you just trying to maximize yours.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:46:36] So that's the stuff that I see or the particular things that I see companies doing. And they are and they're trying a variety variety of ways to do that, going through ideation and prototyping and testing in order to make all that stuff happen.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:46:55] So so what would you say is the biggest difference in terms of leadership mindset, leadership mentality between companies that are innovative, taking on these shorter workweeks and companies that switch to maybe a pseudo shorter workweek in the form of a four four day, 10 hour work week?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:47:10] I think probably the single biggest difference. Is that they think differently about time and the relationship between time and productivity. They do not see working longer hours as as a sign that things are going well, but rather they see over working long hours as sort of pathologies. They're indicators that something is broken in the company that needs to be fixed. I think that another important thing is that they see they they also think differently about their people. All of them are trying to create more sustainable places to work where people could have very long careers in contrast to the way that many of their competitors work, which is to bring in a lot of young people, work them to death and then discard them after several years. I think the idea that reigns in these companies is that you may be doing something very, very different 10 years from now, but you will be here in 10 years and you will be able and you will be a lot better at what you do.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:48:09] Now, part of that improvement in quality will be that you can actually do the work in less time.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:48:15] Right. As one as one founder put it, one of the things I realized is that anybody can sit in a chair for 12 hours a day. You give anybody enough time to solve a problem and they can solve it. The person who really impresses me now is the person who doesn't need 12 hours to solve a problem, but can do it in six and be out of here. That's the person who that's the person I want to hire. And so I think that that what happens with these people is that they they essentially rewire the relationship between the time and expertise and productivity and come to see overwork not as a good thing to be encouraged, but a bad thing that they want to re redesign out of existence. So that's that's how that's how they differ.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:49:02] It's almost like maybe 50, 60 years ago when you're working in a factory, there might have been a linear relationship between the amount of hours you work and the output you produce. But as we're shifting into this knowledge economy, there's no longer that kind of linear relationship between time in productivity out right now.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:49:19] And indeed, you know, the relationship between time spent and output, even in factories was not as not as ironclad as we think. Basically, people could work in factories, could work overtime for periods of a few weeks, and then you start getting tired, you start making mistakes, you start to burn out, and your productivity would fall to below what it was when you were working 40 hours. There was this was discovered in things like optical factories and munitions factories, places where small mistakes really, really matter. And what they what we've known for more than a century is that you can sustain periods of like 70 hour weeks for about maybe four to six weeks or so. You can get a burst.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:50:01] But after that, you're back to where you were, same productivity levels as when you were working 40 hours with the added benefit of people getting sick and burning out.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:50:13] So but I think that it's even more true today. Basically, intensive periods of focused work be periods of long semi distracted work. Knowledge work is a little bit more like high intensity interval training than like running a marathon. It turns out that intense-ivity turns turns out to be a better route to higher performance and better results than the long, long grind.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:50:42] So I know some companies, they opt to do flexible time instead of shorter hours. And that's not really the same, is it?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:50:49] No, it's not. And traditionally flexible work, flexible hours have had some some organizational organizational challenges around them.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:50:58] I think a lot of people, the sociologists who've looked at this, talk about the flexibility, stigma and which is that, first of all, in organizations where long hours are a badge of honor, flexible work inherently looks kind of suspicious.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:51:15] It's also problematic because when you're working flexibly or when you're working from home, the person who is doing so often has a kind of subtle obligation to do extra work in order to stay visible to their managers, to stay in contact with colleagues or project heads. And so they end up actually working as much or more as they would when they were just in the office. At the same time, they also encounter the kind of enduring suspicion of, well, why is this person not around when the rest of the team is here every night after dinner? And so in many organizations, flexible work turns out to be more turns out to be challenging for everybody in ways that nobody intends. It'll be interesting to see in the future after all of us, after so many of us have had. That's with working from home, with flexible work, whether the stigma around flexible work starts to ease or not, I certainly hope it does, but it is very different from shortening work weeks for everyone, because when you shorten work weeks for everyone, there is no stigma around people working less.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:52:30] Now everybody gets to do it. Everybody shares the challenge. Everybody shares the benefits.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:52:35] And so it makes it a very different kind of proposition than when it's just one person or a couple people do it.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:52:44] Thank you for that. So last formal question for jumping jump into a quick lightning round here. What's the one thing you want people to learn from your story.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:52:54] So, you know, I think that the single biggest thing is I would say take rest seriously. That rest is not something that you get when you finished your work. It's not something the world gives you these days.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:53:08] We're never finished and the world always has one more thing for you. So we have to carve out time for rest. We have to defend that time and we have to take rest itself seriously. We have to recognize that this you know, this actually does have value, both in the immediate run and on the long run for us, for our employers, for our families, for the world. If there's one thing that I could convince everybody of, it would be that.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:53:36] All right. So let's jump into a quick lightning round here. What is your favorite way to rest?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:53:40] I go on walks with my dogs. I've got two of them. And it's, you know, it's my favorite way and it's their favorite way.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:53:46] So if he could put up a billboard anywhere in the world, what would it say and why?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:53:51] You know, I suppose it would be take rest seriously for the for so for the reasons I just I just just outlined.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:54:00] So what something you believe that other people think is crazy.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:54:04] You know, a year ago I would have said that believing in the possibility of a four day week was the thing. I think there's still a lot of skepticism around it. But fortunately, people are taking it more seriously. There are at least more willing to hear the argument for it.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:54:21] So but there are still plenty of people who think it's crazy. So I will I will stick with that, that the four day week is possible right now and your company can do it at it at virtually no cost to you with benefits both for you and your and the organization and your bottom line and your clients and your employees.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:54:48] It's a win win all around.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:54:50] So you've done a lot of great research in your books for neuroscience, kind of understanding the nature of the human mind. What would you say is the most bizarre aspect or quality of the human mind that you've come across?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:55:03] You know, I think the default mode network is the strangest and most wonderful thing. The fact that we can we think see this see these functional areas switching on in the time it takes us to blink. We literally that's how that's how that's how fast the road they turn on is really incredible. And more broadly, it's a reminder that there is an incredible amount of stuff going on in our brains that we are not really aware of. We have this vision of ourselves as conscious agents fully engaged in the world, and that is just now it really is just not the case. There is so much else happening even within our own minds that know that we are not in that we're not in control of sometimes in very good kinds of ways that make our lives a lot more interesting than we than we can ever imagine.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:56:04] So what's an academic topic outside of Data saying that you think every data scientist should spend a little bit of time researching on?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:56:11] You know, I think everybody should spend some time looking at the psychology of creativity. The stuff is both really, really interesting. But if you want to get better at whatever your job is, it's worth spending some it's worth getting into.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:56:25] What's the number one book you'd recommend our audience read and your most impactful takeaway from it?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:56:30] You know, obviously, other than my own books, I would nominate Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:56:35] It is a life changing book and as an explanation of a mental state that I think every, you know, every smart person experiences and probably wants to experience more of.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:56:53] And as an explanation of why this is so rewarding and why it makes our lives great. It is.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:56:59] I think without peer, it's a great book.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:57:01] There's that Mindset, Flow plus Smarter, Better, Faster by Charles Duhigg. I read those three books in succession and my life has never been the same since the.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:57:12] They are all great.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:57:12] So if you could somehow get a magic telephone that allows you to to contact 20 year old Alex, what would you tell him?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:57:18] Probably buy Apple. I think that the the challenge the challenge with advising your younger self is that a lot of the really important things we learn, we learn the hard way we have to. I think we have to make some kinds of mistakes in order to become the people, the people that we are.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:57:39] I suppose actually, the really serious thing I would advise is have kids earlier. I think that there is almost nothing that you do before you become a parent that is as significant or as life changing as as what comes after. And also the more energy you have, the better, because children are wonderful in many ways, but they are also vampires and they will suck up every ounce of time and attention and energy that you have. And so when you so that's that's the that's the other good reason for having them early rather than later.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:58:15] As a thirty seven year old brand new father myself, I wish to myself that. Yeah.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:58:20] So what does creativity have to do with being a good scientist?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:58:23] Well, you know, I think let's turn it around and say how good a scientist can you be if you're not creative?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:58:29] The serious answer is that creativity is implicated in every part of science, whether you are going after a gigantic world changing problems or whether you are solving the really little ones. An awful lot more of our lives involve creativity and creative problem solving than we acknowledge. And I think that likewise, there are many kinds of work that we don't think of as involving creativity.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:58:57] Whether it is bagging groceries or installing plumbing or wiring of a house can actually involve a lot of sort of solving tons of little problems and solving them in ways that allow us to get a little bit better at doing them the next time or that require a degree of imagination and sort of an kind of conceptual leaving that not visible from the outside, but which is still essential for doing that work.

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:59:24] So that's so I would say that you want to be creative because it's something that you're going to be using every single day and every single hour of know of your work.

Harpreet Sahota: [00:59:34] So what song do you have on repeat right now?

Alex Pang, Phd: [00:59:37] I have been listening constantly to the new Bruce Bruce Hornsby album, Absolute Zero. Hornsby was known and he was probably most popular in the late 80s for songs like Mandolin, Mandolin, Rain and The Way It Is, kind of which now are sort of easy listening to sort of a piano dominated songs. And the thing is, there are lots of people who, once they reach the kind of stage in their careers, Hornsby, are just like they're playing the same stuff over and over again. Hornsby, in contrast, in this new album, is working with experimental musicians of Boniva with like this avant garde string quartet. And he's taking his old you can still hear distinctive elements of the Hornsby sound, but they're like deconstructed and broken up in really amazingly interesting ways.

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:00:31] And for me, for someone who grew up not only with Hornsby's music, grew up in the same basically the same neighborhood as him, to hear this stuff processed in this wildly new novel way is is both interesting, really personally and a great reminder that you can you can continue exploring things, deepening your skills, the pushing, pushing into new areas, no matter what stage you are in your career.

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:00:59] So absolute zero. 

Harpreet Sahota: [01:01:01] Definitely have to check that out.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:01:02] So what's the best advice you've ever received?

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:01:04] Best advice I've ever received from my mentor and maybe be yourself. Only more so, though, which is how he advised me to sort of approach approach interviews. So the other the other the other great piece of advice is write every day.

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:01:20] I think going back to that idea of creativity, being, you know, being something that is supported and sustained by routine, I think the practicing every day is the way that we get really good at just about anything. So where can people find your books? Rest in short order and distraction? Addiction are everywhere. Books can be found at your local bookstore, Amazon, the library, if you will, of all those places.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:01:48] So that's how key people connect with you. And where can they find you online?

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:01:52] Sure. So I am on Twitter and Instagram and @askpang. The Instagram is mainly pictures of the dogs and then company website is strategy.rest.

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:02:05] So Rest became a top level domain a couple of years ago. Very happily for me. So.

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:02:11] Strategy.rest, and it's also where not only is there stuff about workshops and keynotes and links to interviews or podcasts like these, but also samplings of the research that I'm continuing to do, looking at companies, schools, other kinds of organizations, governments that are moving to four day weeks or other kinds of shorter work weeks after paying.

Harpreet Sahota: [01:02:33] Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be on the show today. I really, really appreciate having you here. Thank you.

Alex Pang, Phd: [01:02:39] Oh, thank you. It's been a great time.