When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink
* Opening story
The year was 1915, Captain William Thomas Turner, a seasoned 58 year old captain heard that U-boats were in the area. He didn’t perform evasive maneuvers or use top speed when approaching port. The Lusitania was struck by a U-boat torpedo and sank. 1200 people perished. We don’t know why the very experienced captain put the ship in harm’s way and in the path of the German sub.
The night before that captain didn’t get any sleep, and he was making decisions – analytical decisions, life-and-death decisions – at the exact worst time of day (early afternoon) and without a break. He made tactical errors.
• Overview
Timing is not an art, it’s really a science, . To further define timing, it’s when you make decisions or choose to do something, it does not mean luck or circumstance.
From simple daily decisions: What time of day to hold a shareholders meeting. To the significant: Financial investments, business decisions, when should I abandon a project that isn’t working.
Most people make their timing choices by default, not taking into consideration how timing can affect outcome.
The Freakonomics guys talk about if and when to quit vs. staying the course – opportunity cost. So sometimes even when you carefully deliberate over these decisions timing should be carefully taken into consideration.
If you could choose when to go run an errand, would you choose to do it rush hour or off-peak, during non-rush hours when traffic is light and stores are less crowded?
The purpose of this book is to help make timing decisions in a smarter, more evidence-based way.
* Circadian rhythm, Daily Timing
The concept of peak, trough, and recovery.
Chronotype, chronobiology, everyone is on a spectrum.
Most creatures on the planet follow a circadian rhythm or some kind of schedule based on time, most commonly on a daily cycle – flowers bloom, animals sleep, people eat. There are longer term cycles such as seasonal, and even longer timelines like career and lifespan.
Deciduous Trees And Shrubs add vibrant blooms in spring and summer, colorful foliage in fall and then drop their leaves prior to going dormant in the winter.
Research was performed to analyze the emotional content of 500 million tweets generated by 2.4 million Twitter users in 84 countries. Scientists found that there was a change in mood over the course of the day, starting with a peak in the morning, then falling into a trough by mid afternoon, and finishing with a recovery in the early evening.
We think that questions of “when” are less important than questions of “what,” “how,” and “who.” We squander our peak.
Focusing first on the biological clock, there are three types of people as the author defines them; lark, owl, & third birds.
Lark – morning people.
Owl – night owls.
Third birds – people who are on a sliding scale somewhere in-between.
If our biological clock gets skewed we could suffer affects such as jet lag, hunger, or performance variance (mental and physical).
During any normal day a person will experience a peak, a trough, and a recovery.
During the morning peak we perform analytic work more effectively. This kind of work includes mathematics, precision, and following rules. Most of medical, legal, and engineering work fall into this category.
What does one do in the early afternoon trough? Perform administrative stuff like answering emails, menial tasks, and things normally performed on auto-pilot. In the early evening recovery we are better at creative things because we’re in a slightly better mood and we’re less inhibited.
Performance in the trough of early afternoon explains the 20 percent of the variance in human performance on cognitive tasks.
Our moods and energy also follow the same pattern. Those of us who are strong night owls go in the reverse order where the creative peak is in the morning and
