REST | Shorter | Distraction Addiction

Harness the power of deliberate rest.

Rest reveals the hidden role that rest played in the lives and work of some of history’s most creative and prolific scientists, writers, composers, artists, and entrepreneurs. It uses recent work in neuroscience and the psychology of creativity to explain why deliberate rest helps us have new insights, discover approaches to problems we might otherwise overlook, and have more sustainable creative lives.

Rest has been translated into two dozen languages, and was reissued in a new paperback edition in 2024.

The research on rest, creativity, burnout, and sustainable careers continues to advance; join my Substack to keep up with the latest.

Put the 4-day week to work for you.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter and Less— Here’s How (Public Affairs, 2020) and Work Less Do More: Designing the 4-Day Week (Penguin Business, 2023) provide an overview of the global 4-day week movement, and show how companies use design thinking to redesign time. (I also read the audiobook of Shorter.)

Excerpts of the book were published in the Wall Street Journal, Guardian, and elsewhere. It’s been translated into half a dozen languages, ranging from Korean to Icelandic. Most important, thousands of people have had their lives transformed by the 4-day week. You can too.

Reclaim your attention in a distracted world.

The Distraction Addiction (Little, Brown, 2013) explores how humans coevolved with our tools, and naturally use them to extend our physical and mental abilities; how today’s social media and smartphones exploit and redirect our capacity to treat technologies as parts of our extended selves; and how we can redesign our relationships with our media to help us be more focused and mindful, not perpetually distracted.

The Distraction Addiction’s “insights can directly inform how we go about reconfiguring our relationship to connectivity—how we manage our love affair with our phones and rearrange how we use our computers. We owe it to our sanity to do so, and we’ll be happier, saner, and more productive for it.” (ELLE Magazine)

Learn the power of rest

Work and rest are not opposites; they’re partners. I show how busy people create space for rest, and how companies create it at scale.

Work more sustainably

Born out of my own experience with burnout, and my years as a strategic consultant, I show how we can build routines, careers and companies for the long run.

Be more creative

Our best ideas don’t always come when we’re grinding away; I show how you we can harness our creative subconscious to solve problems with less struggle.

What Reviewers Say

My books have been reviewed in the New Yorker, New York Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere.

“You’re holding some terrific advice in your hands on the virtues of walking, napping, and playing. Pang has written a delightful and thought-provoking book on the science of restful living.”―Clive Thompson, columnist for Wired magazine and the author of Smarter Than You Think

“In his important new book, Pang calmly and meticulously shows us how the best, most creative work, and the most meaningful and joyful lives, are built on the skills, not of mindless busyness, but of deliberate rest, deep play, and taking time to think. A game-changing book for the weary modern world.”―Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time

Rest is such a valuable book. If work is our national religion, Pang is the philosopher reintegrating our bifurcated selves. As he adeptly shows, not only are work and rest not in opposition, they’re inextricably bound, each enhancing the other.―Arianna Huffington, New York Times Book Review

Get the Books

Rest, Shorter, and The Distraction Addiction are available wherever fine books are sold.

Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less

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Shorter: Work Better, Smarter and Less– Here’s How

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The Distraction Addiction

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Other Writing

Articles

“Rest Takes Hard Work,” Time Magazine (24 January 2024)

“UAE joins the global movement for a shorter workweek,” Gulf News (Dubai) (13 December 2021)

“To Safely Reopen, Make the Workweek Shorter. Then Keep It Shorter,” The Atlantic (30 April 2020)

“Why companies should say goodbye to the 996 work culture,” South China Morning Post (20 April 2019)