Read To Lead: "Do Pause" by Robert Poyton

I started listening to Robert Poynton’s Do Pause: You Are Not a To-Do List at a time when I probably needed it the most. My life was in overdrive, and my daily to-do lists were way over-ambitious – ironically, I listened to the audiobook on the road as I went about my overscheduled life!

Poynton, who designs and facilitates programs, retreats, and workshops for corporates and individuals, opens the book with a reflective passage on the multiple meanings of pausing, like knowing when and how to pause to get people’s attention, to be productive, to be present, and how pauses can help you get timing right. The difference between pressing pause on a machine and a human, he says, is that when you press pause on a machine, it stops. When you press pause on a human, it starts. That space between busy and busy, he says, is where the real labor happens, and trying to live up to the standards of machines just means that we live in overdrive.

While it didn’t necessarily say anything I didn’t know – that we do our best learning in rest mode, and that pauses can jumpstart creativity and productivity – it did lay it out in a consumable, and frankly speaking, attractive way that made me reconsider not just big picture pauses (i.e sabbaticals, scheduled holidays), but how I slot breathers into my day-to-day life. It also served as a reminder that over-everything is not conducive to creativity or productivity, and it certainly makes for a much poorer quality of life.

With real-life examples from his retreats and improvisational workshops, and drawing on the arts to demonstrate the ways pauses can be meaningful, the book is a good reminder of how pausing can inspire creativity. And at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) has become pervasive, it is a good reminder that humans are not, and should not be compared to, machines.