Mark: Okay, Michelle. Five-word review for a book about doing nothing. Michelle: My anxiety just called HR. Mark: Perfect. Mine is: "The busiest people need this." Michelle: That’s a fantastic summary of the paradox, isn't it? The people who feel they have absolutely no time to read a book like this are the ones who should be first in line. Mark: That perfectly captures the tension in Pause by Robert Poynton. And Poynton is a fascinating character to write this. He's an Associate Fellow at Oxford's Saïd Business School, but his secret weapon is improvisational theatre. He teaches executives to be more creative by, essentially, learning to pause and react. Michelle: An improv guy teaching CEOs to do less? I'm already hooked. That feels like the whole point right there. It’s not about being lazy; it’s about being more responsive and present. Mark: Exactly. He lives off-grid in a solar-powered house in Spain for part of the year, so he embodies this philosophy. He argues that our entire culture is built on a misunderstanding of what it means to be effective. We think it’s about cramming more in, but he suggests the real magic happens when we create space. Michelle: Okay, so where does he start? Does he just tell us to throw our phones in a lake and meditate for eight hours? Because I tried that, and the lake filed a restraining order. Mark: He actually starts with a much more surprising idea. He says the solution to our frantic pace is not to simply 'slow down.' He points out that people have been complaining about the world moving too fast for centuries. He quotes a French writer from 1908 saying, 'Everywhere life is rushing insanely like a cavalry charge.' Michelle: Wow, 1908? And they didn't even have TikTok. What was he so stressed about, the unbearable speed of the telegram? Mark: It just shows that the feeling is timeless. Poynton's core argument is that we don't need to fight speed. We need to change our relationship with it. And the key to that is the pause.

Michelle: That’s a great way to put it. Changing our relationship with speed. So, how does he illustrate this? Because in theory, it sounds lovely, but in practice, my calendar looks like a game of Tetris that I’m losing badly. Mark: He tells this incredible story about his friend, Chris Riley. Chris lives in Oregon, and every year he flies over five thousand miles to a remote part of Spain for what they call a "Reading Weekend." Michelle: A five-thousand-mile flight for a weekend of reading? That sounds both incredibly extravagant and deeply appealing. What happens there? Mark: That’s the thing. Almost nothing. He and a small group of people gather in an old house, they read books, they talk, they walk. There's no agenda, no deliverables, no key performance indicators for relaxation. It’s just unstructured time. Michelle: I can feel a lot of our listeners getting hives just thinking about that. Unstructured time? What does that even mean? Mark: Well, Chris had the same reaction at first. Poynton shares a quote from him about his first time there. Chris said, and I'm paraphrasing, 'I spent the first twenty-four hours just watching my own anxiety levels rise, because I wasn’t working on anything.' He felt this intense pressure, this guilt, that he should be doing something productive. Michelle: Oh, I know that feeling. It’s the Sunday Scaries, but on a Spanish vacation. You’re in a beautiful place, and all you can think about is the emails you’re not answering. It’s a particular kind of modern madness. Mark: Exactly. But then, something shifted. After that initial wave of anxiety, his mind started to settle. He began to have ideas he wouldn't have had otherwise. He started solving problems he didn't even know he had. The weekend became, in his words, a pivotal point that gives shape to his entire year. He gets a fresh perspective on his own thinking. Michelle: So the pause wasn't empty. It was actually incredibly full. It just wasn't full of the usual noise. Mark: Precisely. Poynton uses this to make a crucial point: the idea of stopping can be simultaneously attractive and terrifying. We crave it, but our brains are so conditioned for constant input and output that we panic in the silence. We've been taught that if you're not moving, you're falling behind. Michelle: Okay, a reading weekend in Spain sounds amazing, but for most of us, that's a fantasy. How does this apply to someone with a 9-to-5 and three kids? You can't just check out for a weekend to find yourself. You're lucky if you can check out to go to the bathroom by yourself. Mark: That's the perfect question, because he addresses this directly. He tells another, much smaller story about himself. He was taking his sister and her husband on a mountain walk he’d done hundreds of times. He was powering ahead, focused on getting to the top as quickly as possible. Michelle: As one does. The mountain is the goal. Conquer the mountain. Mark: Right. But he noticed his sister and her husband kept stopping. They were looking at the view, pointing out flowers, just taking it all in. And he had this sudden, jarring realization: he had completely forgotten the point of the walk. It had become another task on his to-do list, 'Climb Mountain,' instead of an experience to be enjoyed. He was so focused on the destination that he was missing the entire journey. Michelle: I feel personally attacked by that story. That’s me with everything. It’s how I read books, how I watch movies, even how I play with my kids sometimes. It’s about getting to the end, not being in the middle. Mark: And that’s the trap. Poynton says we live with this mantra of 'never a wasted moment,' but the cost is enormous. We miss the view. We miss the connection. We miss the life that's happening in the spaces between all the tasks. The pause is what allows us to actually see the view. Whether it's for a weekend in Spain or for thirty seconds on a mountainside. Michelle: So the scale of the pause doesn't matter as much as the quality of the attention within it. Mark: You've got it. It's about creating a gap between stimulus and response. A gap between the start of the walk and the summit. A gap where a different kind of thinking, a different way of being, can emerge.

Mark: And that's the perfect pivot, because Poynton argues this isn't about grand, spontaneous gestures. It's about architecture. It's about designing small, almost invisible structures that create that gap, that create that space. Which brings us to the practical side of this. Michelle: I like the word 'architecture.' It feels intentional and solid, not vague and fluffy like 'just relax more.' So what does this architecture look like? Are we talking about building a fortress of solitude? Mark: It can be much, much smaller than that. He gives this brilliant example from a filmmaker friend, David Keating. When they're on a film set, everything is ready—the actors, the lights, the camera. The entire crew is holding its breath, waiting for him to yell 'Action!' Michelle: The tension must be incredible. Mark: Exactly. And right in that moment of peak tension, Keating sometimes does something very strange. He just waits. For two or three seconds. He says nothing. And he says in that tiny, almost imperceptible delay, the entire energy of the room shifts. Everyone, not just the actors, exhales and re-focuses. It’s a shared, collective pause that brings everyone into the present moment. He calls it powerful. Michelle: Wow. That’s a two-second pause that changes the quality of a multi-million dollar production. That’s not a luxury; that’s a tool. It’s like a mental gear shift for an entire group of people. Mark: It’s a perfect example of what he calls a micro-pause. It costs nothing. It takes almost no time. But it’s a deliberate design choice that has a massive impact. It’s not about the amount of time; it’s about the intention. Michelle: Okay, I love that. The two-second pause is something anyone can do. But what about bigger-picture stuff? How does this apply in a more strategic setting, like in business, where the pressure to move fast is even more intense? Mark: For that, he brings up the legendary CEO of General Motors, Alfred Sloan. Sloan was running GM during its heyday, and he was terrified of 'yes-men.' He knew that if he proposed an idea, everyone would just nod along because he was the boss. Michelle: A classic problem. The emperor’s new clothes, but for corporate strategy. Mark: Precisely. So Sloan designed a pause into the system. The story goes that at a major board meeting, he presented a big decision and then asked, 'Gentlemen, I trust we are all in agreement?' Everyone around the table nodded. Total consensus. Michelle: And most CEOs would celebrate that and move on. Mark: But Sloan did the opposite. He said, 'In that case, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.' Michelle: Hold on, he postponed a meeting because everyone agreed? That is so counter-cultural it’s almost revolutionary. He was actively manufacturing dissent. Mark: He was architecting a pause for critical thinking. He knew that instant agreement was a sign of lazy, passive thinking, not genuine alignment. By forcing a two-week delay, he created a space where people felt not just permitted, but obligated, to challenge the idea. He was designing a culture of productive friction. Michelle: That is fascinating. So we have the two-second pause on the film set, which is about presence, and the two-week pause at General Motors, which is about perspective. They’re both intentional designs to break a pattern of automatic behavior. Mark: You’ve nailed it. And that’s the core of the 'how-to' part of the book. It’s not a list of 101 ways to relax. It’s a call to become an architect of your own time. To look at your day, your week, your meetings, and ask: where can I design in a small, intentional gap? A moment to breathe before a call. A five-minute walk between tasks. A rule that you don't check email for the first hour of the day. These are the structural supports that allow a different kind of life to be built.

Michelle: This is all making so much sense. It reframes the whole idea from something you earn—like a vacation—to something you integrate, like breathing. So if there's one big idea we're supposed to walk away with, what is it? Is it just 'take more breaks'? Mark: It's deeper than that. It’s about what a pause actually is. We tend to think of it as an absence—an absence of work, of noise, of activity. But Poynton, drawing on his improv background, sees it as an active presence. It’s an opening. He quotes the author Dov Seidman, who said something that just stopped me in my tracks: 'When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings, they start.' Michelle: Whoa. Say that again. Mark: 'When you press the pause button on human beings, they start.' Michelle: That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The pause isn't stopping. It's the moment you start to really think, to really feel, to connect with yourself, to see the bigger picture. The constant busyness is the trance; the pause is the moment you wake up. Mark: Exactly. You start to access what he calls your 'other minds'—the intuitive, creative, contemplative parts of yourself that get drowned out by the relentless hum of the 'rational' mind that's just trying to get through the to-do list. You start solving problems you didn't know you had, just like Chris Riley on his reading weekend. Michelle: So the challenge for everyone listening isn't to book a trip to Spain, but maybe to find one place today for a two-second pause. Before you send that email, before you answer that question from your kid, before you react to that annoying comment. Just... breathe. Mark: That’s the entire practice right there. Find the gap. And don't see it as wasted time. See it as the most productive moment of your day. It’s the moment you actually start. Michelle: I love that. It’s a small act of rebellion against the cult of busyness. And it’s something every single one of us can do, right now. Mark: Absolutely. We’d genuinely love to hear what you discover in that space. Find us on our socials and share one moment where you chose to pause this week. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.