[Don’t be a hot mess in 2018! Get your shit together with this week’s special feature, the “Get Your Shit Together Issue!” We think this story will help….—eds.]
There’s only one way a book about timing can properly begin—with the famous quote from Miles Davis: “Timing isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.” That’s how Daniel H. Pink kicks off When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, and the rest of the book follows with similar straightforwardness. It’s a collection of predictable if not quite obvious truths, clearly presented and researched, about how time affects our lives in virtually every facet. When is the follow-up to Pink’s previous books on management and career effectiveness, and it lives in a somewhat nebulous shelf space: not quite self-help, not quite pop psychology, not quite behavioral science, but a conversational, TED Talk-y amalgam of all three.
It’s significant that Pink didn’t call his book The Art of Perfect Timing; putting “Art” in the title would suggest there’s something magical about the cyclical patterns of time—that access to its tricks are restricted to only a small handful of gurus and self-help hackers. Pink’s approach is meant to be ground-level and accessible to all, even as he crunches out the scientific backbones of his studies, including data and statistics—even graphs!—to back up his findings.
Turns out our internal clocks—those circadian rhythms—have more control over us than our conscious brains might suspect. Pink fills the first chunk of When with ways to approach the workday, recognizing that some of us are morning people (“larks”) and others night owls, while most of us fall in the middle. (And those patterns change with age, perhaps due to our biology—children are larks, teenagers follow night owl patterns, and old people gradually evolve back into larks.) Workdays usually begin with productive mornings and then dip in the afternoon, which makes the second half of the day a bad time for most people to get significant work done.
If there’s one takeaway from When, it’s just how bad afternoons can be.