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Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Why the secret to productivity isn’t longer hours

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang noticed that he got more done on sabbatical than at work. His latest book is about the benefits of rest and shorter working days Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is a consultant in Silicon Valley and a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He writes about technology and its cultural impact. His latest book, _Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less_, is an empirical argument in favour of more limited working hours and greater understanding of the benefits of active rest as a means of raising creativity and productivity. WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO WRITE THE BOOK? I’ve been working as a technology forecaster and a consultant in Silicon Valley for about 15 years, and a few years ago, after lots of long projects and multitasking and travel, I started to feel the classic effects of burnout. My first response to this was to try to fit more into the day, to try to work harder. But when I was on sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, I found that in three months I got an enormous amount of stuff done and did an awful lot of really serious thinking, which was a great luxury, but I also had what felt like an amazingly leisurely life. I didn’t feel the constant pressure to look busy or the stress that I had when I was consulting. And it made me think that maybe we had this idea about the relationship between working hours and productivity backward. And [we should] make more time in our lives for leisure in the classic Greek sense, not playing a lot of video games. Continue reading...


READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.theguardian.com