Review: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

Pink's When is a concise review of the difference timing can make to outcomes - whether they be life or work related ones.  Although some ideas will be familiar to many readers eg circadian rhythm - what might be new is how to get best out them.

Unfortunately for you, reader of this blog, my review will be rather longer as I really got a lot out of this book.

Pink fondly imagines that this might be the beginning of a new genre - "when to" rather than "how to" and I think he may be onto something there.

Most chapters helpfully finish with a set of tools and tips quirkily labelled the Time Hacker's Handbook. Most of the tips were new to me, a few not so much.

To start with I skimmed the contents page - making notes on questions I wanted answered like:

Does everyone have the same circadian rhythm of a peak, a trough and a rebound?

It seems they do, but your chronotype affects when they occur and even which way around they occur. For example, most people who are larks or third birds then to rise to a peak of performance during the morning, hit a trough early afternoon and then rebound from late afternoon. Night owls are different as they spend the morning in recovery, have a trough in the afternoon and reach their peak late evening.

Our moods and happiness tracks these same rhythms. Apparently, the difference in performance between a peak and trough can be the equivalent of drinking up the legal limit of alcohol.

Can you control the length of them?

I may have missed it, but I couldn't see anything that suggested you could. Breaks and optimising the types of task you do may help maximise what you get from them though.

Can you optimise the tasks you do in each period?

For non-night owls, it may be better to do more analytical tasks in the morning and those requiring more insight (and less inhibitions) during our troughs. In short, innovation and creativity happens when we are not at our best.

Avoid important decisions in the afternoon. Negotiations and other critical decisions should probably happen earlier in the day.

How long should a break be for maximum return on investment?

A sleep break should be 10-20 minutes to avoid groggyness and can be enhanced with a strong dose of caffeine beforehand - a nappuccino. The theory is that it takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to kick in and so you should awake feeling ready to go.

What does starting right look like?

We are all familiar with the idea of the new year's day resolution, but it turns out that lots of days of the year can act in a similar way - as a spur to starting afresh. Here are some of them (Pink identifies 86 of them):

• First day of each week
• First day of each month
• First day of each new quarter
• Birthdays

But you can also engineer them by choosing other milestones eg if you work at a company, the anniversary of a new product launch.

Other suggestions that Pink makes including the idea of a pre-mortem ie picture the project being a complete disaster in 18 months time. You now ask yourself (and your team if you have one) - What went wrong? and try to anticipate how you can avoid those mistakes.

When you should go first?

It turns out that anytime you are not the default choice, in a situation with few competitors or in an election, and in job interviews with strong candidates - you should go first.

In more uncertain situations eg when you or the person making the decision doesn't know what they want/expect - you should go later.

When we reach a midpoint, how can we activate the mental siren to motivate us earlier?

From experience, I know the mid-point of a project is often where there's a lull in motivation - and sometimes a rush of blind panic as you figure out have the time has been wasted and now it's time to buckle down and do this thing!

Midlife: When the universe grabs you by the shoulders and says, "I'm not fucking around, use the gifts you were given."

Brene Brown

Some of this seems to do with framing. For work in a motivated team, it can be helpful to describe progress as slightly behind where they need to be. For a less motivated team, then focussing on progress made to date can be more helpful.

I particularly liked the tips on how to get out of midpoint slump and re-energise yourself:

• Set interim goals - and make a public commitment to them. 
• Find a way of pausing an activity mid-way through eg in the middle of a sentence if you are writing. 
• Create a way of recording a chain eg x on a calendar
• Imagine one person who will be helped by what you are doing (love this!)
• Mentally subtracting positive events from your life, It's a Wonderful Life style, and then being thankful for what did happen. 
• Find a mid-career mentor

What does a good ending well look like?

Endings come in lots of different forms - an end of a project, an end of a job or an end of a life.

A sense of an ending tends to result in a focus on what's really important - meaning - and that can result in some ruthless pruning of relationships, tasks etc - as well as one last big push.

Often meaning comes with a tinge of sadness or poignancy.  As Pink says, "The best endings don't leave us happy. Instead they produce something richer - a rush of unexpected insight, a fleeting moment of transcendence".

“Every Pixar movie has its protagonist achieving the goal he wants only to realize it is not what the protagonist needs. Typically, this leads the protagonist to let go of what he wants (a house, the Piston Cup, Andy) to get what he needs (a true yet unlikely companion; real friends; a lifetime together with friends)” 

John August, Endings for Beginners

What can activate team synchronisation?

Pink gives some useful, but likely familiar guidance on team formation (some of the activities are definitely worth checking out). He very much subscribes to Tuckman's model of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing.

He also suggests that the following elements can help:

• Chat & gossip
• Touch
• Shared language
• Visible markers that set them apart eg clothing

Why does tense matter in language?

This was odd and fascinating but it turns out that how language deals with tense makes a difference to the behavioural habits of speakers.  Speakers of languages, like English, which make strong distinctions between past, present and future tend to be less likely to save, exercise more regularly than speakers of languages which are weaker like Mandarin.  It wasn't clear what the reason for this was.

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

Groucho Marx (maybe)

What I'm doing as a result of this book

As something of a lark, I've been trying to shift my more insightful work and reading to the mornings - and staying off social media/email. Meetings, creative stuff and brainstormings I try to do in the afternoon.

I drink very little caffeine anyhow, but have shifted my daily green tea to the early afternoon and I won't feel guilty if I have a 10 minute nap around that time or bum around in email/admin tasks either.

I'm also trying to build a late work day habit around:

• Typing up what I've achieved (2 mins)
• Planning next day (2 mins)
• Sending someone a thank you (1 min)

I've been trying this for around a week so far and it feels pretty good.  

Verdict: A strong candidate for my non-fiction book of the year.