When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

Positive affect—language revealing that tweeters felt active, engaged, and hopeful—generally rose in the morning, plummeted in the afternoon, and climbed back up again in the early evening. Whether a tweeter was North American or Asian, Muslim or atheist, black or white or brown, didn’t matter. “The temporal affective pattern is similarly shaped across disparate cultures and geographic locations,”

The main point – that our mood changes in a predictable way over the course of a day – is interesting. But so is the methodology. One of the promises of Big Data is that it allows us to see patterns like this – which are invisible to the eye but reveal important patterns lurking beneath the surface.

“[A]n important takeaway from our study for corporate executives is that communications with investors, and probably other critical managerial decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day.”11 Should the rest of us heed this counsel? (Campbell, as it happens, typically held its earnings calls in the morning.) Our moods cycle in a regular pattern—and, almost invisibly, that affects how corporate executives do their job. So should those of us who haven’t ascended to the C-suite also frontload our days and tackle our important work in the morning? The answer is yes. And no.

This study blew me away. Intensely-focused, well-prepared, profit-seeking executives are as subject to these diurnal patters as the rest of us. What’s also interesting is that the findings were so powerful that this group of academics, people often loath to offer tangible advice, issued what amounts to a warning cry.

First, our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change—often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others.

If there’s a single mega-point to Chapter 1, it’s this: Our brainpower changes in significant and predictable ways over the course of the day. I wish I’d learned this decades ago!

“Perhaps the main conclusion to be drawn from studies on the effects of time of day on performance,” says British psychologist Simon Folkard, “is that the best time to perform a particular task depends on the nature of that task.” The Linda problem is an analytic task. It’s tricky, to be sure. But it doesn’t require any special creativity or acumen. It has a single correct answer—and you can reach it via logic. Ample evidence has shown that adults perform best on this sort of thinking during the mornings. When we wake up, our body temperature slowly rises. That rising temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness—and that, in turn, enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate, and our powers of deduction. For most of us, those sharp-minded analytic capacities peak in the late morning or around noon.17

This is why I now do all my writing in the morning – turning off email and not bringing my phone into the office. At the moment a human being sits down to write, the entire universe begins conspiring for ways to distract him or her. That’s why it’s crucial to write when my vigilance is a highest – which, for me, is before noon.

Alertness and energy levels, which climb in the morning and reach their apex around noon, tend to plummet during the afternoons.18 And with that drop comes a corresponding fall in our ability to remain focused and constrain our inhibitions. Our powers of analysis, like leaves on certain plants, close up.

One of our most productivity-destroying behaviors is answering email first thing in the morning. That’s hard to resist, I know. But for many people, postponing the email until the trough period is a game-changer.

The answer goes back to those sentries guarding our cognitive castle. For most of us, mornings are when those guards are on alert, ready to repel any invaders. Such vigilance—often called “inhibitory control”—helps our brains to solve analytic problems by keeping out distractions.22 But insight problems are different. They require less vigilance and fewer inhibitions. That “flash of illuminance” is more likely to occur when the guards are gone. At those looser moments, a few distractions can help us spot connections we might have missed when our filters were tighter. For analytic problems, lack of inhibitory control is a bug. For insight problems, it’s a feature. Some have called this phenomenon the “inspiration paradox”—the idea that “innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms.”

Lots of advice from so-called time management experts tell people to do their “most important” work in the morning. But that’s not what the science says. The science says the best time to do something depends on what it is you’re doing. For many tasks, being mentally loose and somewhat unfocused – which, for many of us, occurs in the late afternoon and early evenings – can be a huge advantage.

What ultimately matters, then, is that type, task, and time align—what social scientists call “the synchrony effect.”

Again, one of the problems with traditional advice is that it says that one size fits all. That’s not what the evidence shows. Individual patterns vary. So it’s important to observe one’s own behavior and find the type-task-time alignment that works for you.

In short, all of us experience the day in three stages—a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And about three-quarters of us (larks and third birds) experience it in that order. But about one in four people, those whose genes or age make them night owls, experience the day in something closer to the reverse order—recovery, trough, peak.

A suggestion: Take a week and instead of organizing your daily schedule by hours, organize it into these three categories: Peak, Trough, Recovery. Create three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first, list the analytic tasks you’ll do during the peak. In the second, list what the administrative tasks you’ll do during the trough. And in the third, list the insight tasks you’ll do during the recovery. It’s a simple way to be more deliberate about doing the right work at the right time.

after analyzing its own data, DeskTime claims to have discovered a golden ratio of work and rest. High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes. DeskTime never published the data in a peer-reviewed journal, so your mileage may vary. But the evidence is overwhelming that short breaks are effective—and deliver considerable bang for their limited buck. Even “micro-breaks” can be helpful.

In many ways, naps are Zambonis for our brains.

It’s weird, but I’ve always been fascinated by Zambonis – the giant vehicles that come out between the periods of hockey games and smooth out the ice. I always thought Zambonis make a good metaphor for . . . something. And at long last, in my sixth book, I found that something – naps!

Our preference, whether we’re a patient getting test results or a student awaiting a midsemester evaluation, is clear: bad news first, good news last. But as news givers, we often do the reverse.

The chapter on endings was one of my favorites. And this finding is a reason – in part because I’ve long been guilty of this mistake. I prefer to receive the bad news first, but I always gave the good news first. I’ve now changed my ways.

I used to believe that timing was everything. Now I believe that everything is timing.

William James, one of the creators of the field of psychology, once warned that too many of us go through life “only half awake.” Understanding the role time and timing play in our lives – and getting better at observing our own behavior and acting with attention – can help us become more fully awake.

Time and timing are endlessly interesting topics that other authors have explored with skill and gusto. Here are six books, listed in alphabetical order by title, that will deepen your understanding: 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (2010) By Laura Vanderkam We each get the same allotment: 168 hours each week. Vanderkam offers shrewd, actionable advice on how to make the most of those hours by setting priorities, eliminating nonessentials, and focusing on what truly matters. A Geography of Time: Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist (1997) By Robert V. Levine Why do some cultures move fast and others slowly? Why do some abide by strict “clock time” and others by more fluid “event time”? A behavioral scientist offers some fascinating answers, many based on his own peripatetic adventures. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (2013) Edited by Mason Currey How have the world’s greatest creators organized their time? This book reveals the daily habits of a range of creative powerhouses—Agatha Christie, Sylvia Plath, Charles Darwin, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, and 156 others. Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired (2012) By Till Roenneberg If you’re going to read one book about chronobiology, make it this one. You’ll learn more from this smart, concise work—organized into twenty-four chapters to represent the twenty-four hours of the day—than from any other single source. The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (1983) By Edwar...

WHEN, an instant New York Times bestseller, is also now available in paperback! If you're in the Washington, DC, area, join me tonight (Tuesday January 8, 2019 at 7pm at Politics and Prose Bookstore) to kick off the paperback tour and learn how to apply the ideas in WHEN during the new year.