when

daniel pink

Chapter 1

I also just learned that timing is everything. Most people peak with positive and negative emotions alike in the morning, have a dip in the early afternoon and then another, stronger resurgence in the evening. It's a little later on weekends according to twitter analysis and self-report, but not fool proof because algorithms are bad at irony detection and social media personalities are often faux versions of reality.

We first understood the concept of the biological clock from the 18th century French astronomer Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan when he figured out a plant he had near his window (the Mimosa Piduca, which I'm totally going to get) opened its petals in the morning and closed them in the evening regardless of whether it was in natural light or snuffed in a closet. 

It's how we started learning about circadian rhythm and the human suprachiasmatic nucleus, of which is 11 minutes longer than a regular day. How our bodies bring our internal and external cycles in sync is called entrainment. 

When people are asked about their mood every hour of the day during a process Daniel Kahneman came up with called the Day Reconstruction method, the same rise fall rise pattern was found. We tend to rise into lunch because we socialize and dip in the early evening because of traffic. 

A look at earnings calls from companies shows that calls and stocks and companies do better when reporting in the am than the pm. 

People make better analytical decisions in the morning and better insightful decisions in the evening, because our inhibitions are lowered in the evening after all our alertness has worn off and we can step outside of logic and look at the pieces of an equation more creatively. 

A court study between an american defendant and mexican defendant showed this by concluding people split on delivering a guilty verdict regardless of race in the morning, but more likely to in the afternoon. Their alertness and inhibitions were down, so the automatic parts of the brain were in more control, making stereotyping stronger.

Other time of day studies can explain 20 percent of variance in human performance and cognitive undertakings. 

Another way to say all that is that inhibitory control is stronger in the morning and assists analytical problem solving while the flash of illuminance is aided when our guards are down in the evening. It's what’s called the inspiration paradox because our innovation and creativity our strongest when we feel weakest (in terms of our rhythms). Our capacities open and close according to a clock we don't control.

These effects obviously are on a spectrum according to what's called a chronotype, or our personal rhythm. Most of us fall in the middle, the 'third birds, whereas about 20% of us are early rising larks and another 20% are night owls. We can figure out what we are likely by just thinking about it or answering a short survey about the midpoint from when we go to bed and when we wake up during our free days.

People born in fall and winter are more likely larks and those in the summer and spring more likely owls. Kids are more larky, adults more owlish. Larks are more structured, owls more creative. Owls will make the reverse decisions in those court cases because their rhythm is essentially in reverse of the larks and third birds. 

To be our best we need to find our synchrony effect, matching type, task, and time. Regardless of type, we all experience the peak, trough and rebound sometime throughout our day.

Dan says to achieve the synchrony effect, measure your type. Then apply it to your life (i.e., assemble a brain-storming group in the afternoon when everyone is most creative).

Measure yourself for a week and see if your peaks and valleys are slightly off from the typical Gaussian curve of your identified chronotype. 

When you can't control your day, use awareness to combat the misalignment. If you're an owl, do a good deed or exercise before you need to meet to boost your mood. Work the margins by doing your heaviest lifting in the morning instead of attending to emails (or tabulating on a spreadsheet).

Suggest chronotype Fridays to your team to see if you can adjust productivity. Similarly, maximize your synchrony on weekends or holidays.

Exercise in the morning if you want to:

- lose weight (since we haven't eaten for 8 hours, our blood sugar is low, meaning morning exercise will use fat stored in our tissues to supply our energy instead of it using our most recent meal). Morning exercise can burn 20% more fat than post food workouts. 

- boost mood (since cardio and any exercise raises endorphins, something which we can benefit from all day, instead of waiting until the evening to then workout and sleep through some of the benefits).

- Keep to your routine

- Build strength (since testosterone, the hormone that helps build muscle, peaks in the morning).

Exercise in the late afternoon if you want to:

- avoid injury (since your muscles are warmer throughout the day and your wake up body temp is lower)

- perform your best (since lung function is highest in the afternoon and your circulatory system can distribute more oxygen and nutrients). Also a lot of olympic records are set in the evening.

- Enjoy the workout a bit more

And some tips for a better morning.

- drink water (because reasons)

- hold off on coffee for 60-90 minutes (since cortisol starts being produced when we wake and immediate coffee can weaken coffee's wakefulness effects). better to wait for the cortisol to peak so the caffeine can do its magic.

- Soak up the sun (the spectrum of UV light can help dampen sleep hormones and increase alertness hormones).

- Schedule therapy (since when cortisol is highest patients are more focused and absorb advice more deeply).

Chapter 2

Chapter two is all about breaks. And again, about the afternoon trough. A hospital will commit a crazy amount of mistakes more in the afternoon (7 hours after waking) than they will in the morning, to the tune of 3% increases in adverse patient effects, 50% reduction in polyp detection in colonoscopies, and writing more scripts due to decision fatigue. 

People according to a study using employee badges with hand sanitizers equipped with radio frequency transmission. All in all that breaks out to about 600,000 unnecessary infections, $12.5b in added costs, and 35,000 unnecessary deaths from caregivers not vigilantly washing hands in the afternoon. 

Some surgeons use checklists, also called vigilance breaks, where every briefly pauses before a high-stakes encounter to review instructions and guard against error.

Vehicle accidents peak in early morning and early afternoon, the latter of which is known to be the day's trough, as a worker's most unproductive moment comes at around 2:55 PM. 

Judges in the middle east grant pardons more in the morning than they do in the afternoon, but when judges get breaks, spikes in pardons occur in the afternoon as if they were behaving in their morning recovery phase. 

Some schools understand and appreciate that a break every hour would improve scores throughout the day and outweigh the time away from books and study. 

The overarching idea is that breaks break up the trough. 

So some tips and tricks:

- Short breaks can prevent habituation, help maintain focus, and reactivate goal commitment (the most productive 10% of users all have effective break-taking in common. High performers all work 52 minutes then offset with a 17 minute break).

- 5 minute walking breaks boost energy levels, sharpen focus and fight fatigue. 

- Taking a nature break is great, but even taking a break indoors amid plants is better than doing so in a green-free zone. 

We all know (from studies sponsored by industry) that breakfast is great. But the science doesn't really play out. Lunch is actually more important because it happens during the time of day when our mood is lowest, and most of us lunch in the same spot we work. Non-desk lunchers contend better with stress and show less exhaustion and more vigor than desk lunchers. The keys to a good lunch are autonomy - being able to choose your lunch experience - and detachment (from work stimuli). Get those two bad boys together and you're on your way to getting lunch's good graces. Long lunches are actually bad, so keep em brief. 

Napping is the last part of this chapter, and I actually just tried it out for myself. Took a 20 minute nap in my chair before finishing this chapter. It was great. Then I took two shots of tequila which probably masked the effects I was feeling for my first few post-nap minutes.

Anyway, napology 101, long naps induce sleep inertia, which can help post-nap energy for longer periods of time but also cause the immediate post nap experience to be laden with lethargy. 

So take a nap for 20-30 minutes, because it takes on average 7 minutes for people to nod off, and if you nap for 25 minutes there's no risk of sleep inertia. 

Coincidentally, it also takes about 25 minutes for caffeine to enter the bloodstream, so nappacinos are recommended, wherein the napper takes a coffee or caffeine supplement as soon as they lay down. People that do this perform better than those who don't nap and those that nap with no caffeine.

The siesta needs a resurgence, and in spain they tried to get rid of it with bad effects. We always romanticize the sleepless workaholics, but they've been fools the whole time. We need to nap. 

So the hacker side to this chapter suggests taking breaks every day,, and deciding ahead of time when to take them. We need a to do list alongside a break list. Start with 3 a day, and see what happens, because we know what gets scheduled gets done. 

The ideal time for a nap is between 2pm and 3pm, to track back the trough. Use your couch, shutter yours eyes and ears, and do your 25 minute nappacino nookie. It's also good to make it a regular thing, since just like medication we know this isn't a one-time fixer. 

Take a break the same way I used to suggest, with the 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. 

Hydrate with a smaller water bottle so you can get up more often to refill it.

Stand up for 60 seconds and shake your arms and legs, flex your muscles, rotate your core, and then sit back down. 

Yoga poses can happen right where yer at. 

As for being social, make a habit out of reaching out to someone new every day. Maybe send some gratitude or just catch up with an estranged hombre. 

Plan a regular walk with someone or sneak them off to coffee to talk about non work-related things.

Meditate. Even in as short as 3 minutes. Breathe deeply. It only takes 45 seconds. Jam out for a song or two.

As always, it's not always possible to do the ideal. So when you can't, use those vigilance breaks to remind everyone why they're there.

- Stop everyone and have them take a deep breath.

- Have everyone spend 30 seconds to update on their progress.

- Have everyone describe what they'll do next.

- Have everyone answer the question: what are we missing.

- Assign who'll address missing pieces.

Remember breaks are as important for kids as they are for us, and some 40% of US schools have cut them out or sliced them into lunch. Kids with breaks work harder, fidget less, and focus more.

Chapter 3

Here's the first part of the third chapter in When, on beginnings. I didn't read this chapter as closely as the first two, maybe I was tired. 

The chapter uses a few examples of education and how forcing pubescent owls into larkish timescales does secondary education a huge disservice. And adolescents sleep behavior is worsened overall by getting less of it, which has all the negative effects you'd imagine it would.

A study on 9k students over 3 years from 8 high schools that had simply changed their start time to 835a attendance rose and tardiness fell. Car crashes fell 70%. Graduation rates increased 11% and grades went up.

For post secondary education studies show 11a is the optimal start time, further detailing the cost-benefit ratio of changing start times. They cost the least and net the most. 

Sadly, today less than 20% of us middle and high schools adhere to these studies' recommendations. A key reason is because the infrastructure is set up to favor adults, including sports. Another reason is that people take when much less seriously than they do what.

Fortunately, although we can't always change the schedule, we're very temporal as a species and so its very easy for us to start over. Google has 82% more hits for the word 'diet' than average on new years day, 14% more at the start of a new week, and 10% more the day after a holiday. Gym attendance shows a similar pattern, indicating the fresh start effect we all undergo to re-engage. It disconnects us from our past's mistakes and leaves us confident as the new and improved us's. We behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervor to achieve our aspirations.

Temporal landmarks also force us into more system two thinking, where our decision making is less automatic and deliberative. Leaders can use this finding advantageous by re-spawning company objectives after a holiday.

The second part of this chapter discusses starting together, as in a cohort of workers who all enter the workforce during an economic downturn. Pink admits there's not a lot to be done about that.

He does use an interesting example to make his case with teaching hospitals. In the US its called the july effect, in the UK august killing season. It's when medical students first get set free from residency and cut their teeth on the lives of unsuspecting patients. 

Fatal medication errors rise 10% in this month. Surgery problems spike 18%. Dying in surgery, 41%.

To combat this cohort july effect, teaching hospitals have taken to inserting young physicians into a team where they have more support. 

Similarly, a program called Nurse-Family Partnership has nurses visiting new mothers, which reduces infant mortality rate, behavior and attention problems, and families' reliance on food stamps and other social welfare programs. 

A macro solution to this, Pink says, could be loan forgiveness tied to the unemployment rate. The goal being to recognize that slow-moving when problems have all the gravity of fast-moving what problems, and deserve the same response.

The tips here are to run pre-mortems, where before a project begins you imagine its 18 months from now and you're debriefing on why the project was a disaster. 

Politically, voters prefer the first name on a ballot. MBA selections are usually given based on primacy effects. 

"One of the best predictors of presidential success is how early the transition began and how effectively it was handled."

Take advantage of motivation spikes to balance out motivational troughs.

An american who weds at 25 is 11% less likely to divorce than one who marries at age 24. After 32, the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent per year for at least the next decade. 

Couples that had dated for more than 3 years were over 20% less likely to split once they exchanged vows. 

The more a couple spent on its wedding and any engagement ring, the more likely they were to divorce.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 is on midpoints. On how the collective wisdom on midlife crises is mostly bullshit, which i've been saying since childhood. 

People do have a dip that begins around the age of 36 and ends around the age of 52, so if you want to call that a crisis..

I'm sure there's disappointment of unrealized expectations, hopes high and scenarios rosy. But it's not a forever thing. We're adaptable. We adjust our aspirations and realize life is pretty good. 

It's interesting this phenomenon is found in apes too, begging the question as to how biological this midpoint may be over sociological. 

Jews who perform Hanukkah do this do, often vigorously following the candle lighting rules the first few days, falling off the wagon in the middle, and then relighting them on days 7-8. People's lowest adherence seems to be around days 5-6, dropping from 76% to 44%.

So adherence to standards follows the same shape as the u-curve of happiness throughout life. 

In this case it appears to be about signaling, because we want to show off our adherence. 

There's also something to be said on the biological front about how evolution paces along. We assume it paces evenly over time, but what we see in humans, in snails, in other species studied, is that there are peaks and valleys. Times of evolutionary dormancy and others of explosion, a phenomenon now entitled "punctured equilibrium." Periods of dull stability punctuated by swift explosion.

This is measured in humans by looking at project productivity. We do some meeting and greeting, some conflicting, some oh-shit we're out of timing, and then finish. There's lulls at the start and finish and most of the in between and then sprints of production.

The point is we don't march towards our goals at a steady pace. It's called the "uh-oh effect."

In projects this uh oh effect can usually be seen right after the midway point, which is why we innately come to see midpoints as psychological alarm clocks. 

A sports metaphor is used after between georgetown and north carolina basketball. There were situations on both sides. It was all very riveting. 

But some actually interesting stats did come out of it. 6 point halftime leads give teams an 80% probability at victory, but an exception is that teams behind by just one point are more likely to win. 58% more likely. 

The wisdom is that if you're ahead or far behind, your performance will pace evenly as it has, but if you're behind by just a little you'll put the pedal to the metal and over perform. 

The hacks here are simple and unprofound.

- Set interim goals.

- Publicly commit to those interim goals. 

- Stop your sentence midway through. This is the Hemingway technique, later dubbed the Zeigarnik effect, which basically says we have a tendency to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. It enables picking up right where you left off with a little more seamlessness. 

- Don't break the chain. This is just pretty much streaking. 

- Picture one person your work will help (adam grant)

Follow warren buffet and write out the 25 things you want to get done before you die.

Circle the 5 most important ones.

Throw away the other 20. 

Talking about the slump can help us realize that it's fine to experience some mid-career ennui. 

Mentally subtract positive events, meaning take something great that meant a lot to you, like the birth of a child, then list all the crazy circumstances that made that possible. Track it all the way back to before the first date. Track it to meeting your significant other and how lucky you were to have had all those variables collide in such a way that you're now holding your legacy. Remind yourself that life did go your way.

The last thing is about self-compassion, but not the resilience undermining kind. Start with something you regret and write out some specifics about how it makes you feel. Then in just 2 paragraphs, from the POV of a loving friend, write out what they would say to you about it. 

Chapter 5

This is the chapter on endings. And it starts, at the end, with a marathon. They talk about this concept of starting things at certain points in life and some researchers have coined a cohort of '9-enders,' people who are 29 or 39 or so on who are more likely to make up runners or other starters. Endings quietly steer what we do and how we do it.

9-enders overrepresent marathon runners by 50%. 29 y/o are twice as likely to run than a 28 or 30 year old. 49 year olds are 3 times more likely to run than 50 year olds. The suicide rate is also higher for 9-enders.

People are much more likely to cheat as a 9-ender too, as seen in the ashley madison scandal data. Because the approach of a new decade represents a salient boundary between life stages and functions as a marker of progress through the life span, and because life transitions tend to prompt changes in evaluations of the self, people are more apt to evaluate their lives as a chronological decade ends than they are at other times. 

NFL teams score more in the last minute of the first half than any other time. Clark hull lead behaviorism, which said humans don't operate much differently than rats in a maze.

This is why deadlines are effective. It's the fast finish effect. When we're near the end, we kick a little harder.

Endings also affect perception. People tend to rate short lives that end on an upswing (james dean effect) higher than those why live longer and end on a downswing, because the former is a more storied life which is what the human mind latches onto.

It's similar to the peak-end principle, where when we remember an event we assign the greatest weight to its most intense moment and how it culminates. It's called duration neglect. we downplay how long something lasts and magnify what happens at the end. 

We should take note that most evaluations are just evaluations of the end. Voters similarly make decisions this way, on the performance of the election year rather than the total of the term. 

People rate lives the same way. A criminal who reforms before death is viewed more positively than a good man who dies doing something bad. It's called the end of life bias.

People assume that people become more isolated in age and that's why their friend circle dwindles, but it's really just because people prune shallow relationships. "Socioemotional Selectivity."

People will be less likely to edit the more time they think they have left. 

The good news bad news dilemma always favors bad news first because we'd like to get the grim out of the way to end on a good note. Given a choice, humans prefer endings that elevate.

Poignancy is the way humans prefer endings (a mix of happiness and sadness). This is why all pixar movies have the protagonist achieving the goal he wants only to realize it's not what the protagonist needs.

For the hacks, it's interesting to see when people are third most likely to quit their jobs is on their third year anniversary. 

Divorce is most likely in march and august, march because the holiday masquerade is over and august because the the school year had ended. 

At the end of a work day, take the last five minutes to write down a few things you accomplished. Maybe send a nice note to someone. 

Write six-word memoirs. 

Always end a vacation on a high note so you remember it with more fondness. 

The last chapter is about synchrony, which I guess I'll write about in the last entry. It talks about time as a concept, and how Galileo was 19 and discovered the pendulums ability to keep everyone accountable to the same standard of time. 

Chapter 6

The periodocity of pendulum clocks created a new concept "the time." Public clocks appeared in town squares. This greased the wheels of commerce and social interaction. 

Chronobiology calls external time cues "zeitgebers," these environmental signals that can synchonize the circadian clock.

Roy Baumeister, psychologist, discovered that much of what human beings do is in the service of belongingness. Uniforms enforce this. 

You can see this in professional sports in touching, which is the most developed sense at birth, and preceded language in the hominid evolution. It increases cooperative behavior within groups, which in turn enables better group performance. We have an innate desire to feel in pace with others. Operating in synch expands our openness to outsiders and makes us more likely to engage in pro social behavior. 

The hacks include the mind meld, the pass the clap, the beastie boys rap, rattling off the sounds to lyrics someone sings.

Things we can do to foster this at work are to reply quickly to email, tell stories about struggle (self-deprecation) nurture rituals, and the jigsaw classroom (claims train).

Time has one of the most numerous meanings, as a verb or noun, in the english language. We think in tenses, especially with nostalgia, because it delivers two ingredients essential to well-being: a sense of meaning and a connection to others. 

There's also this weird connection with the language we speak, how strong it is with the future tense, and how likely people are to save for retirement and less likely to smoke. 

Something else to maybe induce synchrony would be three songs you recently listened to, an inside joke, the last social event you attended, and a recent photo.

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