Every day, we wake up, we go about our day, and then we go to bed. In that span of one Earth rotation, we hope to and frequently achieve our basic needs. And, many of us want to do more. This where an understanding of chronotypes and how it impacts your productivity can help! Most people know about night owls, and maybe about morning larks (or, “early birds”) and hummingbirds. But, in this cast, we discuss two books that talk about chronotypes and optimal daily productivity in some unique ways.

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In this Cast | Chronotypes and Optimal Productivity

Ray Sidney-Smith

Art Gelwicks

Francis Wade

Show Notes | Chronotypes and Optimal Productivity

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

The Power of When by Michael Breus, PhD

Bear, Lion, Wolf, and DolphinRelationships, Fitness, Health, Sleep, Eat and Drink, Work, Creativity, Money, and FunThe Power of When Quiz (to determine your chronotype)

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Dan Pink

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Dan Pink

How to determine your chronotype via core body temperature:

“You want to have a fairly accurate temperature reading. A lot of the ear digital thermometers are ones that are quite helpful. What you’ll start to see, again you’ll start to see these differences in core body temperature rising and falling. With my lions, their core body temperature has a tendency to rise one to two, sometimes two and a half hours earlier than my normal folks, my bears. If you wanted to, right when you wake up in the morning, you could take your core body temperature, and then right after maybe 90 minutes take it again and then about 90 minutes before bed and then right as you’re going to bed. What you’ll slowly start to discover is that your core body temperature changes at very different points in the daytime and the earlier in the day that your core body temperature makes these changes, the earlier your chronotype is.” (Source)

The Temperature Test (from The Power of When by Dr. Michael Breus)

Ultradian rhythm

Being a Morning Person Isn’t the Key to Productivity. This Is

Podcast episode: Lions, Dolphins and Bears, Oh My! With Michael Breus – #344

ProdPod: Episode 69–Day Reset

Coffee nap

Raw Text Transcript

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Francis Wade 0:25

Francis Wade,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 So welcome, gentlemen to the show. Today, we're going to be talking about Chronotypes, Chronotyping, and the construct of ideal daily schedules for optimal productivity. And what I'd like us to do is to define Chronotypes for our audience. And we're going to be talking about Chronotypes and ideal daily schedules through the lens of actually two books. The books are the power of win by Michael Bruce. He's a PhD sleep psychologist, and Dan pink, many of you know that Dan pink from his other books, but he recently came out with a book called when the scientific secrets of perfect timing. And I feel like the two books really blend well together, they both talk about common typing, and they're talking about how to set up ideal schedules for for having a productive life. And I think they work well together. And you gentlemen can tell me if I'm, if I'm wrong. But let's let's get into first, the construct of a chronic type. Can anybody describe for our audience? What is a chronic type? What What does it What does the concept of a Chronotype mean?

Francis Wade 1:38

I think of a crowd tap as a preference for doing certain activities at certain times. And the way the I believe the book has it structured is it focuses on when you're at your sort of most alert, your most able, when your thoughts are flowing freely, freely when you can produce your best work. And different people have different preferences or contacts for the specter when they can do their best work. So for example, I'm am so obviously a morning person, it's it's painful to anyone who ever watches me who happens to be an evening person. Because it, it's almost as if I turn off, I literally turn off at about eight o'clock, and I become totally useless. Maybe seven. Definitely, not the best family. For me, best time for me is the early morning, which that's about five o'clock, and goes terrible. 1011 sort of degrades during the day, and then after that coffee at about one o'clock so they can sort of last and still be productive. But it's all a matter of sort of managing myself. Around my time. The Best Times for me, where do I miss work? I think knowledge of a corner type knowledge of one's quantum type leads a person to better manage his or her own internal state.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:05 And I would only add to that to kind of clarify for folks that you use the word preference. And I think that it's important to understand that our Chronotypes are ours are set biologically, we lean into these Chronotypes, the research has unfolded for us to give us a picture that most of this is based on our sleep. And when we sleep. And therefore what happens in the time opposing that sleep. Some of the famous Chrono biologists that people who've studied the rhythms of our, our days, right, so Kronos, you know, covering the rotation of the sun, and of that is the rotation of the earth. Each time the Earth rotates, we have a day, right. And so our whole construct of understanding this is based on mostly the circadian rhythm, but to some extent, the old trading rhythm. And so the difference between that is that the circadian rhythm is our rhythm throughout the day of our metabolism. So our metabolism, increases in the morning, has a bit of a dip, and then increases again, mid afternoon, usually, and then finally starts to subside as we make our way toward sleeping hours. And our old trading rhythm is actually a cyclical 90 minute, up 90 minute down energy pattern that falls along the metabolic or the circadian rhythm pathway. And so keep that in mind that this is there's a lot of this that is just biologically set. And it's something that was interesting to me. And I want to get your thoughts on this gentleman, which is in the power of when Dr. Bruce brings up a new perspective on chronic types. So the the customary Chronotypes that were developed by German quantum biologists basically had the morning Lark and the night owl, as you talked about, Francis, you are a morning Lark. And if I understand things, aren't you are as well, very much. So yeah. So in that vein, we have, we have the morning Lark, and we have the night owl. And then those are actually more unique than the vast majority of people 60 to 80% of people are hummingbirds, as they call them, neither morning large nor night owls. And, and so Dr. Bruce thought, well, in his sleep psychology practice, he wasn't seeing that he was actually studying insomniacs, and people with severe sleep issues. And so he got interested in figuring out, well, does this really make sense. And he came up with a new paradigm, which has four different distinct personality slash Chronotypes. So these aren't really purely Chronotypes, these are actually a lot of personality plus Chronotypes. And that immediately made me kind of suspicious to the whole construct. But ultimately, when I looked at the book as a whole, I really found there to be a really strong argument for it. And so he has these four pieces, the bear, the lion, the wolf, and the dolphin. And he chose to use mammals in his sleep paradigm has his chronic typing paradigm, which I think is appropriate, since humans are mammals. And, and so he goes on to talk about bears being traditionally what we would consider the every person hummingbirds, people who are neither morning larks, no night owls. Then he talks about lions, the traditional morning, Lark, Wolf, which is traditionally the night owl. And now this new, other Chronotype that he's called dolphin. And these are the folks who traditionally have sleep issues. And and this is near and dear to my heart, because upon taking the power of one quiz, which you can take on his website, I'll put a link to in the show notes. But if you go and take the quiz on on his website, you can figure out which of these Chronotypes you are, it's actually another test in the book that he talks about where you can actually take your temperature throughout the evening, starting, I think it's 7pm. It's every hour, you take your temperature, I'll have to look it up in the book, I'll put it in the show notes. But you know,