Last week, during a conversation with my team about book recommendations, I brought up another great book by Daniel Pink: When: The scientific approach to perfect timing.
If you haven’t heard of Daniel Pink, you should watch his ‘The Puzzle of Motivation’ Ted Talk. In my opinion, a masterful speech that includes:
A powerful opening, which establishes a framework utilized throughout
You heard the phrase Timing is everything. And for most of us, timing is based on intuition and guess work.
For a slim book, ‘When’ brims with a surprising amount of insight and practical advice. I highly recommend you read for yourself. This post is a quick overview but this is not going to do its justice.
There’s one quote in the book that summarizes the whole thing for me and it’s this:
"We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what.”
Pink starts the book by explaining that we all experience the day in three stages:
So our alertness in energy levels increase in the morning, they decline around noon and then they ascend again towards the end of the day. About 75% of us experience the peak, trough and rebound in that order and we will get to the other 25% in a little bit.
For this 75%, research shows that analytical tasks should happen during that morning peak stage, and that during the trough is when we should work on creative analytical tasks where we are most innovative and creative when we are not at our best.
So what about the other 25%?
Pink refers to people as being in three different chronotypes. He calls them:
• Owls - As you can image are late starters
• And Third Birds - kind of somewhere in the middle.
He describes that 75% as being comprised almost solely of larks and third birds. Owls make up that extra 25%. So this can be due to genes or it can also be due to age, for example: teenagers are often owls as you probably know, and older generations are more “larckey” in nature.
So whereas Larks and Third Birds typically experience their day as a peak, trough and rebound, Owls are a bit different. Owls experience their day as recovery, trough and peak.
To summarize we all experience something like a peak, a trough and a rebound, and that trough is the most dangerous time of the day.
Pink even goes through research that suggests that you should never get an appointment at the hospital during the afternoon trough period, which is crazy. There’s a few other stories and again, I recommend that you read this book. But how can we combat those troughs?
The author gives us some suggestions for that too. He says that we need to take breaks, and if you are looking for the ideal of a restorative break, consider a short walk outside with a friend during which you discuss something other than work.
Another insight is that lunch is the most important meal of the day and it helps us combat those troughs that we experience and the most important thing: Don’t eat at your desk (he calls this the ‘Sad desk lunch’.
Oh wait, there’s more: if you are anything like me, you love a good nap. Research shows naps are super valuable. Listen to this quote:
“Done right naps can be a shrewd response to the through and a valuable break. Naps deliver two key benefits:
• They improve cognitive performance
• And boost mental and physical health
But you need to limit the time of the nap to prevent, what he calls, sleep inertia, which is when we wake up feeling really groggy and gross. We should only take naps that are between 10 and 20 minutes.
Dan recommends a great technique called the ‘nappuccino.’ Ideally after lunch, you have a coffee, then set your timer to 20 minutes. If it takes you seven minutes to fall asleep, you’ll wake up a little later, fully refreshed and with the caffeine just kicking in.
Over the course of the rest of his book he talks about:
It turns out that beginnings are much more important than we realize. For example: the school start time for teenagers and college-age students (the owls) should be later. Some studies even suggest that start time should be as late as 11am for optimal performance with those students. Right now the average start time in the US is 8am and that can have an impact on grades and performance…really interesting data.
Can cause a slump where we lose interest and we get tired, like when we are in the middle of something where it feels like the end is nowhere to be seen and you’re just struggling alone. But they can also cause sparks, where we become more motivated and propelled forward.
Our lives follow a general slump, for example, in the late 30s and early 40s and we are actually statistically at our slumpiest in our early 50s but then we rise up again later on in life to get to a point where we are actually in the happiest point of our life.
There are three ways to turn an slump into a spark:
Be aware of those midpoints. It will help you get out of it.
Imagine that you are behind but only by a little bit that we can catch up. It really propels us to move forward.
Pink talks particularly about nine enders, so people who are 29, 39, 49 and so on. Apparently there’s a disproportionate number of nine enders who take on things like first-time marathons and things like that.
We see the end of a period of life and we want to make sure that we are achieving so definitely a food for thought.
“At the beginning of a pursuit, we are generally more motivated by how far we’ve progressed. At the end, we are generally more energized by trying to close the small gap that remains.
I know it’s true for me but I’m wondering if it’s true for you as well? It definitely resonates with me.
It’s also interesting that in that age-old debate of do you want the good news or the bad news first. There’s a fairly definitive answer based on research, and that’s that you should always give the goos news last. Given the choice, humans prefer endings that elevate.
Hopefully by now I convinced you that time is not an art. Timing is really a science. And we can use that science to make better decisions.
