USA Today Bestseller
The highest-performing teams don’t have fewer distractions. Their leaders put better systems in place for overcoming them.
Pause offers a new approach to productivity for leaders whose teams are being asked to do more with less.
Drawing on original research with leaders at more than 150 companies—including Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn—you’ll learn how to triple your team’s focus and create the conditions for brilliant work.
“I wish every leader read this! It’s so hard to focus on priorities. I work for a large engineering company and they don’t take the power of distraction seriously. I got this book and with in a week my team was spending at least 25% more time on the right project. This is really useful book. I recommend to anyone leading a team of professionals.” -JPE, Barnes & Noble review
Pause has been featured in:
FINANCIAL TIMES
Forbes Inc.
BIG THINK PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What Readers are Saying
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“Shawn Vanderhoven names something every overwhelmed professional feels but often can't articulate: the invisible wake of digital detritus that managers mindlessly create for their teams. PAUSE is a sharp, research-backed argument for why the best leaders tap the brakes—and a clear guide for how to do it without losing momentum. Read it before your next meeting, and then cancel half the meetings on your calendar.”
Daniel H. Pink
#1 New York Times bestselling author of DRIVE, WHEN, and THE POWER OF REGRET
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“You can’t get your team’s attention if you yourself are driven to distraction. Vanderhoven gives you the tools you need to focus on the things that matter. Essential!”
Kim Scott
New York Times Bestselling Author of RADICAL CANDOR: BE A KICK-ASS BOSS WITHOUT LOSING YOUR HUMANITY -
"I've spent years writing about the power of questions. But for good questions to make a difference, there needs to be space to hear them. This book helps you create space and time to have more impact."
Michael Bungay Stanier
International Bestselling Author of THE COACHING HABIT: SAY LESS, ASK MORE & CHANGE THE WAY YOU LEAD FOREVER -
“This book isn’t just a theory. Shawn did the work to find out what leaders are doing to lead great work instead of driving teams to burnout.”
Liz Wiseman
New York Times Bestselling Author of MULTIPLIERS: HOW THE BEST LEADERS MAKE EVERYONE SMARTER
Claim Bonuses For A Limited Time Only
Claim your launch bonus by sending your receipt to:
offers@thewisemangroup.com
What you learn:
Walk through the messaging habits that quietly wreck a team's focus, and identify which ones are yours
Build your own distraction inventory, the specific interruptions you're creating for other people
Learn how to run that same inventory with your team without anyone getting defensive
Outcome: You'll leave with a distraction inventory and one change you can make before your next meeting.
60 minutes live with Shawn
What you will get:
Access to the 60 minute live Escape Email Hell Virtual Workshop
With Jam, you can run workshop exercises with your team and facilitate a book group
Plus, Jam will act as your development coach, helping you get the 360 feedback you need to learn what pauses your team needs from you
Outcome: Get the feedback and coaching to build new team habits long after the workshop
Claim your launch bonus by sending your receipt to:
offers@thewisemangroup.com
A field guide for leaders drowning in demands but on the hook for results.
You’re leading in an environment that eats focus for breakfast. A boss addicted to speed. The pressure to adopt AI and do more. Nonstop collaboration. Your team’s talent and time is slipping between the cracks. You need high-quality work on the big projects, but the gravitational pull of busyness makes it nearly impossible.
So you turn to productivity books for answers. But individual productivity hacks don’t survive the first meeting on Monday. You look to leadership books, but organizational overhauls are too big for most managers to pull off. You’re stuck in the middle, and it's maddening.
The productivity problem isn’t individual. It’s social.
No personal productivity system can overcome a workplace designed to interrupt you. Pause is the way out. Most productivity advice focuses on the individual. Pause focuses on the environment leaders create around them.It puts the solution at your fingertips. Every chapter comes with ready-to-use tools and step-by-step practices you can bring to your team right away. Early readers are calling it one of the highest-utility books they’ve ever used at work. You’ll learn how to slow down strategically so your team can go faster on what counts. Our research shows that leaders who know how to Pause triple their team’s focus on priority work.
And right now, the stakes are higher than ever. Adopting and leveraging AI is paramount. But learning new tools requires the cognitive bandwidth your team simply doesn't have. With Pause, you’ll create the space your team needs to leverage AI instead of it becoming just another demand.
Pause was written for leaders who are done with busyness and ready to create the conditions for brilliant work. If you're a knowledge worker, middle manager, or senior executive ready to get extraordinary results, this is your book. And if you're leading Gen Zers, it's especially helpful: these practices build the kind of trust and clarity their generation needs to thrive.
The pressure to do more isn’t going away. But your team's best work doesn’t have to disappear into the noise. Pause gives you back what busyness stole. And then some.
Download a Free Chapter
Take the Quiz
How Distracting Are You?
Most leaders don’t realize they’re one of the biggest sources of distraction on their team. Take the two-minute quiz to discover your digital wake, uncover your Digital Distractor, and begin replacing the messaging habits that steal your team’s attention.
About the Authors
Shawn Vanderhoven is the bestselling author of Pause and leads the executive development practice for senior leaders and rising talent at The Wiseman Group. He is also a collaborator on the New York Times bestseller Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (Second Edition).
As a Partner at The Wiseman Group, Shawn co-designs executive development strategies that help leaders amplify their organization’s most valuable asset—its people. He has advised leaders at organizations including Amazon, Alphabet, Adobe, Capital One, Deloitte, McKinsey, and Salesforce.
Shawn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Anne. His work focuses on helping leaders create the conditions where people can do their best work.
Anne Vanderhoven is an author, researcher, and co-founder of the consulting firm UP. She studies how leaders create the conditions where people can do their best work and is the co-author of the bestselling book Pause.
She has a penchant for medieval and Renaissance history, especially the Black Death (hello, perspective). Fortunately, she balances it with a steady diet of comedians, so her family still invites her to dinner.
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