Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:01:36: Introducing Rob

00:02:02: Barriers to pausing

00:02:52: Plastic pausing

00:05:18: Impact of a reluctance to pause

00:09:17: Busy is the new lazy

00:11:26: Rob's experiences of pausing

00:13:56: Pausing between work and home

00:17:17: The scanner exercise

00:23:12: Rob's pausing advice

00:25:51: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Today is one of our Ask the Expert episodes and you're going to hear me in conversation with Robert Poynton, who is the author of a book called Do Pause. 

Together, we're going to be talking about how punctuating your days with very short pauses, and thinking really practically about what it means to create some space, can actually increase our performance and improve our impact and our sustainability.  In our Squiggly Careers, where we know we're going to be working for longer and we want to keep going and keep growing, I think pausing is a really important part of that.  It's actually something I really care about, and care about being able to do it in a way that works for everyone, whether you're someone who has to commute a lot, whether you're someone who is working at home, how do we make sure that we create a way of working that means it works for you and works for your work as well? So, Robert is brilliant, he's really insightful, full of useful ideas.  

He's definitely practised what he's preached, as well as sharing his words of wisdom with us as well.  So, I hope you enjoy the conversation and I hope it prompts you to think about maybe how pausing could work in your day.  And maybe it's something you even want to think about as we head into 2025 and we start to set some learning goals for next year.  So, I'll be back at the end to say bye, but for now I hope you enjoy the conversation. Rob, welcome to the Squiggly Careers podcast.  I'm really looking forward to our conversation together today.

Robert Poynton: Me too, Sarah.  Thanks very much for having me.

Sarah Ellis: So we're talking about pausing today, and I wanted to start with what gets in the way.  From your work with people and from sharing your book with people all across the world, we were talking about how actually it's been translated into different countries, into different cultures, what stops us from pausing most commonly, do you observe?

Robert Poynton: Well the easy answer to that is the kind of everyday insistence of daily life, and the cheap answer, if you like, is technology.  But actually, I think those are symptoms.  I think the deeper cause that stops us is really a kind of belief system, a belief that more is always more; a belief that to get on, you have to go further faster; a belief that stopping is somehow dangerous or precarious.  So, I think it's that kind of nest of beliefs which are reinforced and which do emerge from a kind of modern technological society that really make it difficult for us to pause.  And what's interesting about that is, it is a belief system so it's something you can change or shift or question, a mindset if you prefer.  If you just kind of take the old saying, "More haste, less speed", that can remind you that this is an old idea, that people have always known the value of stopping.

Sarah Ellis: One of the things that really struck me as I was reading your work is you described the pause as a 'plastic concept', this idea of it's quite elastic and pauses can look and feel very different.  I sometimes think when we are imagining pausing, we think it has to be a really radical rethink or redo of how we're working, whereas I felt like you were encouraging us to explore pausing in lots of different ways.  Perhaps you could bring that to life for us a little bit, so when you were thinking about this plastic aspect of pausing, what might that mean?

Robert Poynton: There are many different ways you can pause, many different durations of pause.  So, a pause might be time to take a breath before you enter a room or pick up a phone.  And that can act as a reset, act as a kind of clearing, even a short space of time.  It could be the opposite extreme, it could be a year off, like Stefan Sagmeister, the designer, who closes his business down for a whole year, not just to take a break or have a rest but to seek new sources of inspiration, which for somebody highly creative is very important. 

So in his case, he'll travel, he'll go different places, he'll make himself subject to other form of stimuli; and everything in between.  So, everything between a moment on a threshold and a whole year's sabbatical.  And so, that affords us the chance to think about how do any of us individually, for what we need, want to punctuate our time?  Do we want to stop for just a breath?  Do we want to have a screen-free Saturday?  Do we want to not do emails after 8.00 at night? 

There's any number of variations that you can explore. I think also to think of this not as a formula, it's not even that you have an individual formula, it's very much right here, right now, in the middle of whatever you're in, what would be a useful way to just break it up in kind of interesting ways that over time?  So, you might, I don't know, screen-free Saturday might be a practice you adopt, and that might then wear thin or wear out, it might not work for you anymore, you might need something else.  So really, it's an invitation to constantly kind of reassess your relationship with time and to think that time is not a treadmill, we're not machines, it's not about more, more, more and not every unit of time is worth the same.  So, a little pause, you might think, "What's the point of doing two minutes?"  Well, you'd be surprised.  So, don't underestimate how short a time, in the form of a pause, can be incredibly useful and powerful.

Sarah Ellis: And one of the things that stuck out to me is that sometimes I think we are reluctant to pause because we think it's going to make us less productive.  We almost don't give ourselves permission to pause because we're like, "Well, I need to keep going".  And you use this lovely phrase where you said, "Pausing doesn't slow us down, it can actually make things flow faster", and I really liked this idea of flowing faster, because I think you gave an example in a book where you talked about if you pause a machine, it does completely stop; whereas actually, if we pause, we're not stopping, we're actually just switching our attention and our focus to something different, a pause for thought, a pause to ask a different kind of question, a pause to just walk for three minutes to walk and think.

So, when people are thinking about, "Why should I care?  What's the payoff for pausing?" have you noticed that when people start to do this, they actually see the kind of impact in terms of how they feel at work, but also the outcomes of the quality of their work perhaps?

Robert Poynton: Yeah, I mean I think that's absolutely, crushingly obvious if you look at the world around you.  The absence of pause is quite literally killing people.  It's what leads to burnout, the idea that we should push on, do more, never let up, be always on.  That is both inhuman and impossible and it will degrade the quality of what you're doing. 

When you're tired, you don't think as clearly if you're doing a thinking job.  If you're doing a physical job of work, when you're tired you get clumsy, you make mistakes.  So, I think it's evident that in the absence, and the emotional- and physical- and stress-related cost of that never pausing is huge. The other thing that's really important here is there's a reason why in medicine in field hospitals in the 19th century, they invented triage.  So triage, for those that aren't familiar with that term, is a French word, and it means that triage is what you do when injured soldiers are coming into a field hospital and you spend some time not treating them.  You spend some time with your limited resources checking who needs treatment most urgently.  And while you do that, people will suffer, maybe even in the case of the field hospital, die.  But overall, once you've taken an assessment of who to treat first, it's much more effective.  In the language you're using, much more productive. 

So, if you're busy, busy doing, doing, doing, how do you know that what you're doing, if you never stop to question it, is worth doing, or is the best thing to do, or that the circumstances haven't changed?  If you never look up, you might be going the wrong way. So, the cost of not pausing is legion, and as we were saying before, the virtue of pausing is, it doesn't mean stopping altogether, it just means creating a little parenthesis, a little interregnum, a moment of reflection or space where other stimuli, other questions, other directions, other ideas can occur to you. Or, you can connect with other people who might supply those ideas or questions.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, because one of the phrases that you talk about in the book is this sort of, we all say we're busy, we expect people to respond to how you're doing with busy, and you sort of provoke us to consider whether actually that's potentially a bit lazy.  And actually, I do agree, because I think if we are just always busy doing the same things in the same way, you're very much sticking with the status quo, and that is rarely what we need.

Robert Poynton: If you take the analogy of media, not all media, you know, social media but broadcast media as well, you can never consume it all, you can never read everything, you can never do anything.  And the same is true with all the tasks we could do for ourselves or we could think of.  It's much, much quicker to write a list or buy a book than it is to actually do the thing on the list or to read the book.  And so, we're deluged, we'd be overwhelmed if we literally tried to do everything.  So, if you don't pause to consider what your priorities are, you're still setting priorities because you can't do everything, you're just not doing it very thoughtfully.  

You're being deluged by this stuff and doing what's most at hand. The phrase I'm using is, "Busy is the new lazy".  And what I mean by that is not that you're not making effort but, "Busy is the new lazy", means it's lazy thinking.  You're not consciously choosing to assess what needs doing most, what needs doing first, what maybe doesn't need doing or you're doing for just habit or inertia that doesn't really need doing any more, what you could let go of.  You know, you can't do it all.  So, some way or another, you've got to make a choice.

Sarah Ellis: And I think it was the World Health Organisation where you reference this in the book, around this idea of speed bumps, which I liked, because I think sometimes physical objects remind us to behave in a certain way.  One of the inspirations I took from the book was, what speed bumps could I add into my day in a ritual-rhythm-type way, that just sort of forced me to slow down.  Because I suppose I think, "Oh, a speed bump forces you to slow down", you sort of have no choice unless you want to wreck your car. 

And so, actually I was asking a group that the other day.  I was like, "What would a speed bump look like that would force you to just go, 'I am just going to pause to do something different, or at least change my pace a bit'?"  And people were talking about small things like, "I can't remember the last time I didn't eat my lunch at my desk".  So, they were like, "Maybe just taking a lunch break". Or I said, "I'm a big fan of walking".  So, I pretty much go for a walk every single day.  And I do that, to be honest, less for physical rewards, more for mental rewards. 

And so I said to them, "When was the last time any of you went for a walk during your work day?"  And it was, "Never", no one had ever done it since the pandemic.  In the pandemic, they had, because I think it was that forcing function of, "I've got one chance to".  But since the end of the pandemic, they hadn't.  And I was like, "Oh, that's so interesting". 

And I think it's often because, as you described, we sort of forget that we have these choices available to us that you have to decide, you sort of have to take ownership for these speed bumps, or however you want to think about these pauses, because nobody's going to force you to do this, I don't think, whether you're in a massive company or whether you're like both of us, working for yourselves, you have to decide pausing is important enough to make it a priority. I just wondered from your perspective, having written the book and kind of dived into it, what does this look like for you?  Were you already doing this brilliantly and that's why you wrote the book?  Or, have you done some new things as a result of considering all the different practical ways you can make this happen?

Robert Poynton: I was doing a lot of it already.  I've lived most of my life in Spain actually, and so that culture in rural Spain as well is much more attuned to that.  So, my wife always teases me about how totally unjustified it is for somebody that wasn't born in Spain to be so completely committed to having a siesta after lunch every day, which I will do religiously.  When I'm working at the Saïd Business School here in Oxford, I will even find a quiet corner to have just a 5-minute nap in a 40-minute lunch break. 

So, it's that important to me.  So, that's always there.  I've got a 25 year old meditation practice, which is naturally an interregnum or a pause of some kind, and I'm surrounded by people who, let's say, move at a different rhythm and give a different importance to things. So, in rural Spain when you meet with somebody, you're going to have a conversation.  The conversation is not going to be about anything new, you're unlikely to learn anything, you're probably going to say the same things you said last week.  But there's a sort of recognition that that moment of social interaction is worth something in its own right, as you stop and see the other person and are seen by them.  So, for me, there was a lot of that already integrated, which I think was what kind of alerted me to the value of it.  I think though that there are there are new things.  I mean, some really mundane things, how do you create speed bumps?  Well, I work at home, and I put the printer in a place which is not convenient, it's not right next to me.  I don't print that many documents, it's true, but what it means is there's an interregnum to go to the printer.  So, in a way, I'm sort of forcing myself to take a tiny miniature walk.

 And in that little space, there's a new kind of pause.  Thresholds of any kind are very interesting and useful, so just before you start the car, just before you come home, as you go through the door if you've been out. What's interesting here is the force of habit is part of what you're referring to.  Habits are great because they support you in things and reduce your cognitive load so you don't have to think about them.  But at the same time, every now and then, to question or interrupt those habitual patterns of behaviour and as it were, to form a new habit of interruption or of the speed bump, can actually help you.  So, if every time you grab your car keys, you just take a breath, then that will start to become integrated in a positive way.  So, you kind of want to both interrupt habits, but also use habits to your advantage.

Sarah Ellis: You referenced, you'll have to remind me of his name, I think he was a CEO who listened to some jazz at the end of his day in the office, is that right?.

Robert Poynton: That's right, that was Tom Hockaday here in Oxford.  So, he ran the university's technology transfer business for about ten years, Isis Innovation it's called, and he would play the Dave Brubeck track.  He would shut his office door, so fair enough, he had an office, he was the boss, he could do that.  Not everybody has that, but you could do it in headphones.  And he'd shut the office door and he'd play Take Five and he would take, as it happens, the particular version he listened to is five minutes and eight seconds long, so it's almost perfect.  And when I asked him about that, he didn't say he did it for any particular reason.  He did it to introduce that space, a space between the office and home, so that he didn't, as he said, bring work home with him, sort of carry it unconsciously with him.  And sometimes, an idea about something he had to do the next day would occur to him in that little space, something he'd forgotten.  Sometimes he would just daydream, sometimes he would think about how he was going home and who he was going home to and how much that mattered to him. So, it wasn't that it was another task, it was an empty space which according to the day, according to the moment he would fill, but became a productive habit.  I imagine after a while, he got bored of Dave Brubeck, and probably changed the track.  But anyway, you know it, a song is a good length of time, long enough but not too long that you can do that.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and I think the reason it made me consider some of my pauses is I often work at home, probably at least 50% of the time, and so me in the evening, then seeing my 7-year-old, looks like walking downstairs.  I think when you naturally have a commute or a walk, it sometimes creates that moment of pause and you do potentially pause, not always, you sometimes rush in the door, but if you can take a deep breath and then be ready for the 7-year-old.  Whereas I sometimes think, where I would benefit from pausing is actually in that moment where I then think, because my work has a lot of variety, "I am done working now and I am now here for my 7-year-old". 

Again, something would help me I think before I walked down those stairs!

Robert Poynton: Yeah, I mean I think that's right.  Post-pandemic and with more people working at home, that interregnum, that sort of parenthetical space of the journey to work, whatever medium of transport you used, sort of evaporated for many people.  And one of my favourite stories about that is a friend of mine who'd changed jobs just before the pandemic, and he always used to cycle to work.  And so what he did is he went to his biking machine, which was in the garden, I can't remember what they're called, but those stationary bikes, and then in his mind, do the journey to work.  And then one day, because he'd just changed jobs, in his mind he went the wrong way.  And so what he did, which was really funny, is he didn't kind of go, "Never mind, I'll just arrive".  He then had to cycle back in his mind to where he'd gone wrong, and then cycle to the new office, and then he arrived with this jokey story about, "I'm sorry I'm late, I went the wrong way to work". So, a very silly idea, but just the notion of even if it's just a moment or a single song track, or a cup of coffee or cup of tea where you don't think about anything, you don't have a pen in your hand, you don't have your phone in your hand, you just look out the window, how might you create a domestic transition so that walking down the stairs, maybe you walk down the stairs really slowly, like really slowly, one step at a time, a kind of walking meditation.  But none of that happens unless you give it importance and recognise its value.  That's the important thing.

Sarah Ellis: And one of the exercises that I did immediately kind of live as I was reading it, my favourite books are always books that end up with lots of notes in and I'm afraid your book has been scrawled all over, so it doesn't look very pristine any more, was you describe it as the 'scanner exercise'.  And so, we are now going to attempt to talk about an exercise that I think is quite visual, in an audio way for our listeners to kind of bring this to life.  And so, the way the scanner exercise works, or certainly the way that I interpreted it, having read it, and you can tell me if you think this is right and how you'd build on this, is that you can reflect back on any period of time.  So, you might start with yesterday, you might look at last week, but you could also zoom out and think about in the last year, and you're almost visually trying to look at the pace in terms of how you spend your time, how much space do you have and how much speed do you have, and what does that look like.  And I think you use circles for space and lines for speed. Actually instinctively and intuitively, straight away, that made sense to me.  I could look back over my yesterday and I knew straightaway what felt like speed and what felt like space.  And to your point, space didn't mean I was staring into space, but it did mean I'd chosen to make myself a nice coffee rather than an instant one, because that was going to take five minutes longer.  It did mean choosing to maybe slow down in a conversation with somebody.

 Rather than, "Oh, I've got a list of five things we need to talk about", actually asking somebody how their holiday was.  For me, that represented more space than speed.  And I know a few people have started to have a go and I don't think everybody found it quite as instinctive as I did, and so I just wondered whether you could describe it a bit more for people, because everyone was so keen to have a go at this.  And I was thinking, well for me, it clicked immediately, but I think some people find it hard to work out, "How do I categorise speed versus space?"  So, yeah, perhaps we could talk about it a bit more, because I love it as an exercise.

Robert Poynton: Sure, and credit where it's due, the original idea for this notation came from Adam Morgan, my friend Adam Morgan at Eat Big Fish.

Sarah Ellis: Oh, we love Adam, he's been on the podcast.

Robert Poynton: I've repurposed it for a completely different application, but this idea of this contrast between speed and space came out of some work we did together.  So, yeah, I think the key is to not think about it.  I think that people struggle when they try and engage their rational mind and their ultimate analytical mind, and the ultimate problem there is...

Sarah Ellis: Maybe that's why I always found it easy! Robert Poynton: Well perhaps, perhaps.  It's when people think it's like filling in a calendar or a diary where you can go, "What was I doing at 11?"  It's not about that.  You might draw a day, let's take yesterday.  It's not like you have to decide of eight characters, which ones are ones and which ones are zeros.  You might draw 15 zeros in the morning, or circles, because it felt very spacious and you didn't have any calls or commitments and you were able to go for a walk, or do whatever you felt like.  And then, you might do three short strokes in the afternoon which represent a series of calls, one in each.  So, the thing is to not be too analytical not to think it through. How do you decide what to put?  You have to get in touch with your feelings, it's about how it felt.  And speed and space are the headlines, but four stops on the tube just sort of in a drowsy, early-morning state might feel very spacious and expansive, and a morning of intense activity might fly by.  So, you're trying to catch yourself not thinking and you're trying to use your hand to draw something that you can then look at and go, "Oh, yeah, that feels like that".  Then, the options you have once you've got some kind of picture is to then say, "Do I like how that is?"  

Because again, I think the thing that trips people up is they think there's a right way to do this.  There really isn't.  There's just your way to try and get a sense and a feel for how your time is working for you and whether you want to change it. So, the other thing, the other clue to actually filling this in is, do it quickly.  And if you don't like what you've done, or you get stuck or you get locked up, just screw up the paper, throw it away, start again.  Don't sit there and agonise over it, just try and do it in a kind of fast, felt, sense way.  And then engage your thinking mind when you look at it and go, "Do I like that?  Does that feel good?  Is that how I want it to be?"  If you get really stuck, try a different period of time, try a shorter time or a long time, because you can do it, as you said at the beginning, Sarah, for a whole year; you could do it for an hour.  And like most things, if you just try it a bit and practise a bit, you'll find your way there.  But at the same time, if it's really locking you up and you're really struggling with it, it's probably not for you, so don't worry about it, do something else.

Sarah Ellis: A couple of my friends who talked to me about it, they are probably some of the smartest people that I know.  And I wonder whether they were trying to do it right, because they were asking me, "What's the right way to do this?  Would that be this or would this be this?" whereas I think I probably just felt my way, and just like you said, did it quickly and very instinctively as I was reading.  I was like, "Oh, I'll just look at yesterday and I'll just look at last week".  So, I think there's some good advice there.  I think I found the zooming in and zooming out interesting, because sometimes you might be happy with yesterday, but then actually you might be less happy with the last three months that might then prompt some changes.

Robert Poynton: And two other things you could do mechanically to help that.  One would be, do it with your non-dominant hand, so if you're left-handed do it with your right hand, if you're right-handed do it with your left hand.  It's just lines and circles; you can manage that.  And if you get really stuck, then enquire into the stuck-ness, so where is it you're getting stuck, what are you getting stuck about?  Don't worry about completing the exercise, because who cares, nobody's watching.  Maybe it's value or virtue is it's going to show you where to look, "Why am I so stuck on this?" and get curious about that and see what that yields.

Sarah Ellis: Well I loved it, and getting lots of people to try it out in workshops, and people are actually really enjoying experimenting with it.  So, two very smart brains, you and Adam coming together.  I hadn't realised also the connection with Adam, so that's great, and doesn't surprise me either.  Are there any other pieces of advice that you would like to leave our listeners with?  So, having spent lots of time diving into pausing and also practising it for yourself, is there anything we've not talked about today where you think, "If there's one other thing that I'd really like to leave the Squiggly Careers listeners with, it would be…?"

Robert Poynton: I don't know if we've touched on this already, maybe we have, but it seems to me that, "The unexamined life is not worth living", to quote Socrates, that even unless you pause in a Squiggly Career, not just in terms of the day-to-day productivity -- I spoke with someone this morning, for example, who talked about how when the pandemic hit and she got a chance to take some distance from her work, she realised she hated it and she hated her boss and she had to make a change.  And she did and she has flourished enormously since. 

So, I think that the idea that pause isn't just about squeezing out more, that mentality in a way is what leads it to be difficult.  There is something about the depth and quality of time that's available to us to just take, and it doesn't need to be much, but to give ourselves the credit of taking a little bit of time to consider what really matters to us, and to open up those spaces so that we can pursue other avenues, get a new perspective on ourselves, ask ourselves the bigger deeper questions. So, I think a Squiggly Career is, by definition, going to have turning points, whereas action and activity tends to keep you going in the same line.  So, if you want to make those interesting arcs, I find it very difficult to imagine how you will do that without some pause.  So, there's quite a lot at stake here and there's quite a lot to be gained and there's quite a lot of creative opportunity to be had, like a bit of yeast in bread.  You don't need much, but without the yeast the bread becomes heavy and lumpen and dull.  That's how I think of pauses, they're the yeast.

Sarah Ellis: Well I hope this conversation has been a pause for people.  I know that lots of people listen to the podcast and they do see it as a pause in their day, maybe as some space.  Sometimes people are out walking with their dogs or they're just listening while they're having a coffee.  So, I feel like we've perhaps gone meta on pausing.  We're pausing on pausing today.  We've talked about pausing, hopefully while people are pausing, and maybe we've convinced some people as well to just try out pausing, or maybe give yourself permission to pause in a new way.

Robert Poynton: Fantastic.

Sarah Ellis: But thank you so much, Rob.  I loved the book, I really enjoyed the exercises in it.  I think I was already an advocate of the pause, but even more so now.  So, thank you so much for sharing your ideas and your insights so generously with us today.

Robert Poynton: Not at all, it's been a pleasure.  Thank you.

Sarah Ellis: Hi, everybody, it's Sarah again.  I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Rob, and it's inspired you to think about adding some pauses into your day.  Always send us ideas if you've got people that you'd love us to talk to on the podcast.  It's helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  But that's everything for this week.  We'll be back with you again next week.  Thank you so much for listening and we'll be back with you again soon.  Bye for now.