Daniel Pink book talk: The Secrets of Perfect Timing

Good evening, everybody. Thank you, Maria, for that lovely introduction. Good to be here. Thank you for coming out on this cold and dark night, which could perhaps get even colder and even darker in 2 hours when the president speaks to us all. So, this might be the high point of your evening, folks.

I'm not sure.

All right, well, thanks for coming out. I really do appreciate it. And I want to thank— before I do anything else, I want to thank the folks at Politics and Prose. I was just talking to Brad— oh, there's Brad. I was just talking to Brad in here, and it just— Politics and Prose specifically, and independent bookstores in general, are just such an enormously important part of our community. And tonight is a great example of that. So what you can do is you can come into this great store, you can Talk about ideas. You can find great things to read. You've got a staff that has read all of these books that can give you guidance. And it's just— and in this world of— and I'm not gonna be political for the rest of this evening, but in a world of fake news and alternative facts, having quality writing, real facts, real evidence is really important for our democracy. So let's, before we go any further, Give it up for Politics and Prose. All right, enough.

That's it.

OK, now back to me. So it's a little bit peculiar here tonight because I— this book came out a year ago. And anybody read this book? Just— OK, a handful. OK, that's fine. That's cool. Anybody buy it? No, just kidding. So the book came out a year ago. And so this book is now in paperback. And one of the things that— and today is the day of the paperback paperback book published. And one of the things I like about paperbacks as a writer and as a reader is that, um, number one, it's cheaper. And so one of the things that's great about paperbacks is that people— there are a lot of people who don't get around to reading a book. A year goes by and suddenly the price drops considerably. That's great. I like getting books in people's hands. For me as a writer, my paperbacks live a very long time. My hardbacks don't always live that, that long, but paperbacks live a very, very long time. So I look at this as like sort of the The exciting birth of a second child here. You've got your first child, the hardcover, the one you put all your hopes and dreams into, and then you have your second child, you just let go and let her do her thing. So, I wanna tell you a little bit about— and the advantage here is that I've, you know, this book came out a year ago, so I've talked about it a little bit around the country. And so what I wanna do is— I have a pretty good sense of what people find boring. So I'm going to leave that stuff out, and instead tell you why I wrote this book, and then give you 5 ideas from the book that people over the last year seem to have responded to the most. And then we'll take some questions. Make sense? Everybody ready? OK, so I wrote this book, as Mariya said, I wrote this book in part out of frustration. I was making all kinds of timing decisions in my own life, things like, when in the day should I write? When in the day should I exercise? When should I take a break? When should I start a project? When should I abandon a project that's not working? And I was making these decisions in a very half-assed way. You can say half-assed at independent stores. So I was making it in a very half-assed way, and that frustrated me, 'cause I like evidence, I like facts, I like making decisions based on real things. And so I started looking around for guidance, and it didn't exist, and then I got curious. I said, I wonder if there's any research on this question of timing. So I probed around a little bit, and it turned out there was a huge amount of research on this question of timing. The trouble is it was spread across many, many, many, many different disciplines. So there was research in social psychology and in economics, and so those are subjects that I've written about before, but there was also research in microbiology, there was research in endocrinology, there was research in anesthesiology, there was this whole field called chronobiology, and basically 25 different disciplines, 2 dozen different disciplines were asking very, very similar questions. But the trouble is, is that like many academics, they weren't talking to each other outside of their discipline. So the economists didn't talk to the psychologists, the psychologists didn't talk to the anthropologists, nobody talked to the endocrinologists. Makes sense to me. And yet they were all asking very, very similar questions. What's the effect of time of day on how we feel and how we perform? How do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? And I felt if I went wide and deep into this research, And it took a while, it took 2 years to track through this research. If I went wide and deep into this research, I could piece together the evidence-based ways for people to make better, smarter decisions about when to do things. So that's what I tried to do. And so this book answers all kinds of, I think, really cool questions about the human experience. What time of day, so one question, when in the day should you exercise?

In the morning.

Very clear answer to that question.

Never.

Never. It's never, right. Are naps a good thing for us or a bad thing for us?

Good thing.

OK. We'll see. We'll answer some of these questions. Why does every pediatrician in America recommend that school start for teenagers no earlier than 8:30, and yet the median school time start for teenagers is 8:03 AM. Why is that? If any of you have kids or college-age kids, or— one of the best things you can do for your career earnings is graduate in a boom economy. One of the worst things you can do for your career is graduate in a recession. The effect of graduating in a recession shows up in people's wages 20 years later. That's how beginnings affect us. Is there really such thing as a midlife crisis? Nope. That's total BS. Something else goes on in the midlife. Maybe we can talk about that in a little bit. How do endings affect us? So things like this. Why are people more likely to run their very first marathon at age 29, 39, 49, and 59? How do endings affect us? And so I tried to do the whole range of things in this book. Talk about the day, talk about breaks, talk about beginnings, talk about midpoints, talk about endings, Talk about how groups synchronize in time, talk about how the very way we think about time affects our behavior. And so, let me just tell you the 5 things that I have found that people seem to respond to the most, that they find the most interesting. Your mileage may vary, but these are the 5 things that in general people seem to be responding to most. The first one is this: our cognitive abilities, number one. Our cognitive abilities Do not remain static over the course of the day. This is a really important point. If there's one takeaway in all of this research, it is this: our brainpower does not stay the same throughout the day. It changes over the course of the day, it changes in material ways, and it changes in predictable ways. And the difference between doing certain kinds of work at your daily high point and your daily low point is massive. It's massive, and we haven't reckoned with this, we haven't integrated this in most of us, into our own personal practices. And certainly, we haven't integrated it into the way we run companies. And so, the idea here is— well, I'll give you one more startling factoid on this. When we think about— OK, let's talk about statistical variance, because I know that always livens things up. So, we've got— imagine— I'm going to do an air chart for you, all right? So what we're gonna do here on this air chart is that we're gonna have on this axis over here is how good somebody is on the job, all right? Are they really good, are they a really high performer, all right? And on this axis is they're not very good performers. And we're gonna take basically a company your size and we're gonna plot little dots all over this thing, okay? So some people are down here, some people are up here, right? Make sense? Okay, and so the difference here is what's called variance. Got it? So how do we explain that variance in how people perform?

Whoa.

What's an explanation for why this person over here isn't nearly as good as this person over here? What's one reason for that?

Timing.

Go to the next one. What's another reason? Seriously, but think about it. IQ. IQ. IQ would be one. Native intelligence.

Education.

Motivation. Experience. Training. Social advantage, right? Well, what the research shows is that Time of day explains 20% of that variance. So think about that. That's a big deal. It doesn't mean that timing is everything, but it means it's a big thing. And one of the things that we know from the science of timing is the following, that we tend to move through the day in 3 stages: a peak, a trough, a recovery. A peak, a trough, a recovery. Now, most of us, about 80— 75 or 80% of us, move through the day in that order. We have our peak in the morning, we have a trough in the early to mid-afternoon, and then our mood recovers later in the day. About 25% of us, 20 to 25% of us, have what's called— have a different chronotype. They are evening people. They naturally wake up late and go to sleep late. Any owls in the audience here? OK, so I feel your pain, because most traditional offices are designed to basically crush the spirit, suck the very life out of people who are owls. And so owls tend to have their peak much, much later in the day. Now, what this means is that there's certain kinds of work where we're more— that we're better at at these different times of day. During the peak, which for most of us is the morning, that's when we are most vigilant. We're most vigilant. Vigilance is the key in all this research. Vigilance means you're able to bat away distractions. So during our peak, that's when we should be doing analytic work, work that requires heads-down focus, attention, and energy. The trough, early to mid-afternoon, that is a very bad time of day. It's not simply— you're not the only one who feels a little bit sleepy. You're not the only— if there's some pretty persuasive evidence of how poorly people perform at that period of time. I'll give you some more. Startling factoids, because I love startling factoids. Anesthesia errors are 4 times more likely at 3 PM than at 9 AM. Okay, statistical variance didn't liven you up as much as I'd hoped, so I'm gonna go to my backup. I'm gonna go to my backup, my backup idea: colonoscopies. Let's talk about colonoscopies. Doctors find half as many polyps in afternoon exams as they do in morning exams for the same population. Handwashing in hospitals deteriorates considerably in the early afternoon and mid-afternoon. So basically, seriously, if you learn nothing else from this, don't go to the hospital in the afternoon if you can avoid it, really. So if you look at— there's some really, really important research out of Denmark looking at a really robust sample of 2 million Danish standardized test scores, and it found that kids who take the standardized tests in the afternoon, who are randomly assigned to take the standardized test in the afternoon, score as if they've missed 2 weeks of school compared to kids in the morning. So there are, again, material differences in performance. The trough is that bad time of day. Later in the day, for most of us, the recovery period, again, which for most of us is later in the day around now, that's when we have this interesting combination where our mood is back up, all right? Our mood goes back up, but we're actually less vigilant. And that makes people a little bit looser, a little mentally looser, which makes it a good time for iterative kinds of things, brainstorming, and all that. And so basically, this is the first idea here, is that there is, in the science, even though it's very complicated and goes against every— goes through all these different disciplines, there is a recipe out there. We should be doing our analytic work during the peak, our administrative work during the trough, and our insight work during the recovery. And if we do that, we will get more work done and better work done, but the problem is, We don't do that because we don't— we're not intentional about timing. We're intentional about— how many people here today had a to-do list? That's intentionality about what you're doing. You have HR departments in your offices? That's intentionality about who you're doing things with. But when it comes to when we do stuff, we think it doesn't matter, but it does. It matters a lot. And so if we just make this small adjustment, and this book more than any book that I've written Change the way I do things. So, any other writers in the audience? OK, so the writers in the audience will know this. It's a phenomenon, it's a universal cosmic phenomenon about writing. The moment that you sit down to write, your butt hits the chair, your fingers touch the keyboard, at that moment, the universe begins conspiring to distract you. So you want to do your writing at your moment of least distractibility, which is your highest vigilance. So I basically reoriented my schedule so I now on writing days only do my writing during the morning, put— leave my phone aside, don't answer my email, etc., etc. So I focus my analytic work in that period, those 3 glorious hours where I'm okay, where I'm not as bad as I am other times of day. But most of us, and for me I did this for years and years. The first thing I did when I got into my office is what? Answer my email. Answer my email. So you get into your office, you're like— and it's a— yeah, I get into my office, it's like, oh, I got some email. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna clear the decks. Right? You wanna clear the decks, just clear your head. So you spend an hour answering your email, you feel good about that. But then it's like, you know, what, I don't know, for me, like maybe 9:30, 9:45, I'm getting a little hungry. All right? So I may want a bagel or something. So I go get a bagel. All right? Then I come back and it's like, oh, by now certainly something has happened on Twitter, so let me just check that out. And then like 4 ESPN highlight reels later, it's lunchtime and I haven't gotten anything done. And so I guess my high-level advice is don't do that, all right? Do the right work at the right time. Have your meetings at the right time. The way we schedule meetings in this country, in the world, is ridiculous. What's the only criteria we use when we schedule meetings in organizations?

Availability.

Availability. It's basically Outlook's job to figure out when people sync up. So we don't say, who's going to be at this meeting? Early people or late people? What kind of meeting is this? Do we need people to be locked down and focused and analytical? Do we need people to be creative? Is this simply a meeting about our food— our Petty cash policy? We don't do that. We say, hey, is Maria available? Is Jose available? And is conference room 3C open? And just think about how many— how much time and treasure we spend on meetings. So that's the first point. I'll be quicker on the next 4. Because I know you guys want to see that speech. Second one, breaks. Breaks. Easy on breaks. Number 1, breaks. We should be taking more breaks. We should be taking certain kinds of breaks. What the research shows overwhelmingly is that breaks are not a deviation from performance. They are part of your performance. Let me say that again. Breaks are not a deviation from our performance. They are part of our performance. All right? And I'm somebody who never took breaks because I somehow, even though I have truly zero connection to the Puritans in my lineage, zero, Zilch, nada, nothing in my lineage. Somehow, as an American, I have imbued this sort of puritanical view of work where powering through is not only the way to get more done, but it's also morally virtuous, right? Totally contrary to what the science says. Here's a way to think about it. Remember 15 years ago, or even 20 years ago? So Brad and Brad's wife, Lissa, the co-owner of the store, and I used to work together a long time ago. So go back 20 years ago. All right. 20 years ago, someone who pulled an all-nighter was a rock star in the office, right? I pulled an all-nighter. I was up all night. I haven't had— I've only gotten 3 hours of sleep. And I would— those people would always make me feel bad. You know, it's like, oh, I'm such a wimp. I'm so frail and feckless and not fully committed to this operation. Then what happened? The science of sleep emerged.

We—

what we realized is there was a science of sleep. It emerged and it hit public consciousness. So now that person who pulls an all-nighter or brags about going sleepless, we're like, dude, dude, dude. Dude, get some rest, man. You're hurting your performance. You might be hurting our performance because you're so sleep deprived. And I think breaks are on that same kind of trajectory, that we're going to know— we're going to understand how important breaks are. And the science also gives us some clues about the right kinds of breaks to take. We know about breaks. Social breaks are better than solo breaks. Breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on your own, even for introverts. I know, I was disappointed too about that one. Even— but it's true, even for introverts. Not surprising, moving is better than stationary. I think we know a lot more about that. Moving breaks are better than stationary breaks. What else? Oh, some incredible research on the importance of being outside. Breaks outside are much more restorative than breaks inside, even to the point where they've tested things that even having nature and greenery in view, if you're inside, is more restorative than just not having anything nature in view. But being outside is better than inside. And also, uh, there's a, there's a lot of research now, a lot of it's out of South Korea, on, on full detachment. So a break is not taking a walk outside with your pal and having your nose in your Instagram feed. Leave your phone behind and actually don't talk about work. And so I think that we would have a productivity boost in this country if every office people took Once an afternoon, a 15-minute break, 15-minute walk break with someone they liked outside without their phone, not talking about work. Easy. It's open. Every one of us can do this. My wife also works at home. I work in the garage behind our house. My wife works in the house. So you see how that worked. We said, gotta have a break today. We took a walk today, 4 o'clock, walked to the post office. So I know your lives are not as exciting as ours, but it's a good thing to do. So that's breaks. Naps. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

You good for naps? Naps. Here's the thing. Naps are really good for us, but naps are really good for us. There's a huge amount of research on naps, but the best nap of all is very, very short. Very short. It is about— the ideal nap is between 10 and 20 minutes long. Very short. If you go longer than that, if you nap longer than that, you begin to develop what's called sleep inertia, which is that groggy, boggy feeling you get. So I was someone, I never took naps. I never took naps because when I woke up, I felt terrible. You know, I felt like, oh, like fuzzy-headed. I also felt ashamed of myself. And the question that— what I discovered is that I was doing it wrong. 10 to 20-minute naps are the ideal. 10 to 20-minute naps are Zambonis for our brain, right? So all you hockey fans out there, you know, in the— after the first period, the Zamboni comes out onto the ice, smooths out all the nicks and scuffs that the first period has left. That's what, that's what short naps do for our brain. There's a turbocharged nap where you do the following. So I'll give you my practice on this based on the science. And there's some interesting, very interesting research on this with air traffic controllers. So these are people who have to be vigilant. And so forth. So this research comes out of a lot of air traffic controller research, a lot of law enforcement research on the ideal kind of nap. And the ideal kind of nap is this. I'll tell you what I do. I sit in the chair in my office, I put on noise-canceling headphones, I set my phone for the countdown timer for 25 minutes. Set the countdown timer for 25 minutes. Then right before I close my eyes, I have a big cup of coffee. Stick with me, all right? And I don't drink it to enjoy it. I just literally plunk ice cubes into it to cool down and just pound a cup of coffee. Timer starts at 25. By now, and napping is in some ways akin to meditation, the more you try to do it, the better you get at it. And so by now, I can usually fall asleep in 10 minutes, sometimes even faster. So 10 minutes. So my alarm goes off. At 25— after 25 minutes. If I fall asleep in 10 minutes, the alarm goes off in 25 minutes, I have a— class?

15-minute nap.

Very good. 15-minute nap. 15-minute nap. And so that's right in the sweet spot. Now, remember, I had that cup of coffee right beforehand. It takes 25 minutes for caffeine to enter our bloodstream. So at the moment that I'm waking up, no sleep inertia, Zamboni has worked. I hit it with a— I hit it with caffeine, and this is a technique, I kid you not, known as a nappuccino. And so the nappuccino is the most— I'm not kidding about this— the nappuccino is the most effective nap you can do. So that's naps. What else we got? We got breaks, naps. Okay, so I'm really into the— and I hope we get some questions on this— the episodic nature of things. I was really fascinated by how do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? Midpoints is one of the most interesting lines of research. Because they're typically invisible to us. But anything that has a beginning and an end, by its nature, has a midpoint. Certain kinds of projects and things like that. And those midpoints have this invisible effect on us. But let me give you one thing on endings. How many of you have ever said this to someone? I've got some good news and some bad news. Okay, anybody not said this to somebody? All right, I've got some good news and some bad news. So here's the question. When you're delivering good news and bad news, what should you give first, the good news or the bad news? Bad news.

Good news.

Bad news.

Okay, this is one of those questions where you actually have a 50/50 chance of getting it right, so. But, okay, so let me give you the argument. Here's what I have done for years and years and years. I always, always, always give the good news first. Here's why. Number one, it's uncomfortable giving bad news, right? It's uncomfortable to receive bad news, so you just wanna ease into it a little bit. 2, if it's really bad news, I want to establish like a cushion before bringing down the hammer. The other thing is that I feel like if I just start with bad news, people will just totally shut down. They won't listen to anything else. That's the argument. But forget about my argument here for a second. I want to ask you a very different question. This is a question that Angela Legg and Kate Sweeney asked in their research, which is this: when you are on the receiving end of good news and bad news, When someone says it to you, what do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news?

Bad news.

Let's see a show of hands. How many people want the good news first? How many people want the bad news first? Overwhelmingly, this is what the research shows. And so what we don't do— so here's the thing. I want the bad news first myself. I'm too stupid to extrapolate from my own preferences to assume that anybody else shares those, right? Overwhelmingly, what it shows is this, in a whole array of things on endings, a preference for endings with rising sequences rather than declining sequences, rising sequences rather than declining sequences. And this is a very, very powerful effect that in business should shape how a transaction ends. Like, I think a lot of commercial transactions, retail transactions, commercial transactions, um, you know, at the, at the consumer level, um, they end in a sort of perfunctory way. And actually, there's some very good research showing that people will encode the experience better, think of it more favorably, if the end has that sequence at the rising. A mundane example of this is at Nordstrom, where they come around and hand you the bag and address you by name. That's an effort to sort of make the ending more memorable. So these endings, so there's small hacks that we can do, but seriously, I've changed my mind and my practice entirely on good news and bad news. And that is, I always give the bad news first. Always give the bad news first. I'm so into it, sometimes I just give the bad news. Don't even give anybody any good news. So, number 5, and then we'll take some questions. All right, so this has to do with— I'll do it as a little bit of a puzzle. I'm gonna describe to you an activity, an activity, and I'm gonna describe— I'm describing an activity, and here are the benefits of this activity. And you try to guess what the activity is. This activity is, is boost people's mood. This activity actually can be a prophylactic against depression. This activity actually raises people's pain thresholds, so after doing it, they feel less pain than before they did it.

Exercise.

Exercise, good guess. Sex? Good guess.

A good joke.

Huh? A good joke. A good joke? Okay, laughter? Good, good guess, yeah. You don't have to raise your hand, you can just shout, yeah. Listening to music? Good guess. What is the activity?

Drinking coffee.

Drinking coffee?

Eating.

Somebody was very close. Who said singing? Tell me your— oh, right, hi, how are you?

Singing.

It's not just— remind me of your first name.

Sharon.

Sharon. It's not just singing, Sharon. It is singing in a group. What I just described to you were the benefits of choral singing. It's un-freaking-believable. I have a whole chapter on synchronization, how people synchronize in time. Choral singing, not singing— and I wanted to be careful on Sharon's answer here. It's not simply singing. It's not singing alone. Singing by yourself in the shower will not raise Your immunoglobulin levels. It's not solo singing. It's singing in a group. And there is something— some of the research on synchronization shows that when we synchronize with other people— and all of you, many of you gave really great answers. You see some of this in group dancing. Somebody mentioned dancing. You see some of it in your point about a joke. You see some of it in collective laughter, this kind of effect. You see some really interesting work on, believe it or not, on rowing, on rowing in teams, in part because a lot of colleges have rowing teams, so it gives— it's easy for the people who study this to find people to study. But you have people who row in a single boat— I don't know my rowing that well, but in rowing in a single boat where you can actually measure now how much exertion that person has, you know, it's kinetic energy or whatever, how much exertion that person has Expanded. Expanded, yeah, thank you. Has expended. I have a problem with verbs. Has expended, and you can measure that, but when you have the person basically with the same energy expenditure in a group, that person reports feeling less pain and less effort. Synchronization. When we synchronize with other people, there's something powerful about that. There's something powerful. It probably has an evolutionary basis. So if you're looking for an activity for the new year, you know, try something like that. Group dancing, group singing, group rowing. Doing things in sync with other people is an extraordinary benefit for us. It is basically— I don't think you can quite say that it's as good for you as exercise, but it's close. I do think you can say it's as good for you as meditation. It's an extraordinary thing, and when you see the research in kids, it's even more remarkable. One last study, then we'll take some questions. When you see research in kids, what you see is that when kids play synchronous games versus non-synchronous games— so a game like— one of the studies talks about this game called clap and tap, where you basically say to the teacher, you know, I mean, we could do it here, like you could follow me. I'm gonna go clap clap, and then on my thighs, tap tap. All right, so let's go. We'll do this together. Here we go. Clap clap tap tap. Clap clap tap tap. Clap clap tap tap. Now, what's interesting about this is that I just sprung this on you. I had no idea it was even gonna— I was even gonna mention that. How long did it take you to adapt to that?

2 seconds.

It's pretty amazing. We got 110 people here who immediately were synchronizing with no forewarning of any kind. When kids play those kinds of games versus just other fun games, afterwards, those kids are more likely to help the teacher. They're more likely to cooperate with the teacher. They're more likely to be open to playing with kids who don't look like them. That this synchronization, it's this interesting virtuous circle where synchronizing with other people makes us feel good. That makes us do good. When we do good, we feel better, so we become better at synchronizing, which feels even better than that, which encourages more of these prosocial acts, which— and so there's this beautiful virtuous circle of synchronization. So if you're thinking about a way to spend the New Year or something cool to do in the New Year, try Um, group singing, group dancing, group rowing, roller derby, whatever works for you. Let me stop there. There's so much good stuff in here, but I want to take some questions. So, um, what— thank you. What are your questions? We have about 20, 23 minutes for questions.

Have your researchers found that people change over time? Because for my first, I don't know, 20, 30 years, I was a morning person. Now, I mean, I was a lawyer, I was a doctor, now I do writing. And it used to be I was good at that in the morning, and now it's the evening. It would be much more convenient if I stayed a morning person.

That's interesting.

But I haven't.

Carol, that's interesting because what you're talking about, the answer to your first question is yes, people do change over time. The answer to your second part is that the kind of change that you experience is very different from the norm. So here's what we know. So this idea of a chronotype— are we larks, are we owls, morning people or evening people— that sounds kind of pop culture folkloric. There's a whole field of science behind this, man, called chronobiology that talks about our chronotypes. Are you a lark, are you an owl, or are you in the middle?

Oh.

The distribution overall looks like this: about 15% of us are very strong larks, morning people. About 20% of us are very strong owls, evening people. And about 2/3 of us are in the middle, what I call third birds. I know. So I just— seriously, I went through like 1,000 bird names and I just couldn't find anything that worked for that. So, and— but what we know is there are changes over time and you, Caroline, are very different. What we know is this: little kids, very larky. As anybody with little kids knows, they wake up early, start running around like crazy people right away, right?

Uh-huh.

Little kids, very larky. Around our mid-teens, there is a sizable move toward lateness, sometimes 2 and 3 hours. This is one of the reasons why school starts way too early for teenagers, and at some level, it starts a little late for really little kids. Like, we're getting the worst of both worlds in the way we— on our school start times. So in this period of intense owliness lasts from about the mid-teens to the mid-20s. After that, there is, in general, for most people—

10 years.

People who are not the 20% hardcore owls, there's a gentle descent into greater and greater larkiness. And so if you look in general, and you're the outlier on this, the chronotypes of people under 70 and people, say, over 65 are very similar. So we do change over time. Yours is interesting. But hey, don't fight it. Just go with it. That's the thing.

Yeah.

I mean, are you doing your writing in the evening now?

Yes, but I have less time in the evening than I used to have in the morning, so it's not that I've chosen it that way, it's that that's how it is. I mean, the ideas come in the evening.

Great. All right, well, at least you have ideas. That's more than most people.

Thank you.

Let's go to the next one. Josh, how are you?

Hey man, things are good. Yeah, he knows my dad.

And your mom.

Yeah.

And I know you.

Yeah, sure.

Anyway, I had a thought, which is that there's a saying people often give called, you know, you want to save the best for last. Yeah, meaning, you know, you want the 4th quarter of a game to be the most exciting.

Great point.

Yeah, it's a movie to be the most exciting. Do you agree with that? And if so, how might that influence your thoughts on the order in which we should give news?

Great point. Such a— it's a, it's a, it's a bigger question than you, than you, than you realize, because there— and there's a lot of research on that. There's even research in There's even research in, in the NFL, some big data research in the NFL. Let's say we divide up an NFL game. How many minutes in an NFL game? 48? 60? 60.

48 in a basketball game.

Basketball, yeah.

NBA game.

Yeah, so official minutes, right? Yeah. What minute from 1 to 60 do you think there are the most points scored?

The middle?

It's 29. It's not 59. And that makes sense because some teams are just trying to run out the clock or the game is over. But there are— I don't remember the exact figure, but in the 29th minute, there are often more points scored than there are in the previous 15 minutes cumulative because of that effect of endings. It energizes us. It gets us going. Now, on the idea of sequence, it's a really interesting question, Josh, because there's a lot of really interesting research on what's called serial, S-E-R-I-A-L, competitions. Serial competitions. So these would be things like American Idol, figure skating, but on the workplace, it could be things like pitching for business. All right, so, so pitch— so, so you're pitching, you're pitching for business, and you are one of, say, 5 or 6 people pitching. Um, do you wanna go first? Do you wanna go last? It depends. It depends, but there's a way to actually up your odds a little bit on this. So what the research shows is that if you, um, If there are not many competitors, you want to go first, alright? But the research also shows is that there are a lot of competitors, you definitely want to go last. There are a lot of people pitching it, you definitely want to go last. And there's some research— again, a lot of this research gets done because of availability of people and data. And so there's research on this in figure skating, because there's data on figure skating. And going last in figure skating is a monumentally valuable thing. People outperform. If you get slotted to go last, you outperform what you would do on the median. So if a lot of competitors, you go last. If you are the— if you are the challenger, like there's already an incumbent, you actually want to go first. Take that away from him or her. And so there are various ways to factor this in. You can't lock it down, but you can increase your odds. You can increase your odds. The way I look at it is this. If you use some— on this particular question of serial competitions and pitching and sequence, let's say that you're— I don't know. Anybody here in sales? A few of you are in sales. Okay. So let's say that you're reaching out and you're pitching for business. Ordinarily, let's say you have a 9% chance of getting the deal. If you get the sequence right, it doesn't lock it down. Maybe you just get an 11% chance of getting the deal. But that 2% difference, if it's something you're doing over and over and over again, that's huge. That can give you a big, big advantage, paying attention to the kinds of questions Josh is asking. Who else? Oh, Mark. It's like old home week.

Hi, Mark. Going back to the larks and the owls, suppose you were giving couples therapy to a lark and an owl. And let's say I'm the lark and my girlfriend Cheryl was an owl.

This is a hypothetical, right, Mark?

No, it's not remotely hypothetical. But she's not here, so I can take the answer to her.

Who's who, Mark?

Who's who? How do you reconcile those two?

Who's who?

I'm the lark.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. Which leaves her to be the owl.

It's, it's, um, yeah, it's interesting. It actually can be difficult to reconcile. So I think the first thing to do would be simply to recognize it and to know that, like, you're not getting up early because you're trying to avoid her. You're getting up early because that's when you get up early. She's not trying to stay up late because she's trying to wear you out by making you party until the middle of the night, or she might be, but no, she's probably not. That's just who she is. So I think that reckoning with that. What's interesting about what you're talking about is sort of like Caroline, is that the gender differences are reversed than what they typically are.

Oh.

And what you have is you have— what you have in general is that women on average are larkier than men. And that women— I wish I had this chart here. I don't. Let me see if I can draw it for you up here. It's basically if you think about straight couples, heterosexual couples of the same age, they often, very, very often have incompatible sleeping times because the woman has returned to larkiness faster than the man. So the man is actually owlier than the woman. And so, um, so that's for couples the same age. Men who marry much younger women, or younger women who marry much older men, they often have very compatible sleeping times. Take that for what it's worth. So on this, um, you know, I, um, I don't— I think it's, I think it's a, I think it's a hard problem to solve fully. I just think you have to acknowledge it and work around it and make compromises. I mean, I hate to sound like Dr. Phil, but this is, this is, um— I think that's the way to do it, because at some level, Mark, like these, these chronotypes, They're not that malleable. It's sort of saying— it's like, I'm not very tall. I wish I were taller. All right. What are you going to do? They're not that malleable. What I would do is try to figure out some kind of compromise and actually track it for a week or so and just see how much incompatibility there is.

Yeah.

Anybody else need couples therapy?

My name's Anjali, so I have practiced a little endocrinology.

Oh, nice. Okay.

So my question is, I don't know if you found this in your research at all or if you can speculate potentially, but just with like the bad news, good news paradigm, thinking about— I think that there's a fair amount of evidence And sort of evolutionary common sense, I guess, that we pay more attention to bad than good, and that bad is stronger—

Absolutely right.

Than good in many ways and many aspects of our life. So can you suggest something in terms of how that goodness-badness realm and the intersection of timing might work together to kind of enhance the strength of the good in our lives?

That's a great, great question. I actually don't know the answer to that. I don't know about the research, but you're right on the bad is— and you're right on the bad is more salient than good, always. I agree with you that it's an evolutionary explanation. We're evolving. It's like, oh, bad news. There's a saber-toothed tiger around there. I better get the hell out of here. good news. Oh, look at that pretty leaf, right? So it's less— the people who looked at the pretty leaf didn't survive. The rest of us who were freaked out by that saber-toothed tiger survived and we passed our genes into the generation.

Right.

What I would do is the only thing that I can think of is on this is some of the research on what's called processing fluency, right? So there's research on processing fluency. What kind of It's basically what kind of messages stick. And there's certain kinds of things that we know improve processing fluency, that get things to stick. And one of them is repetition. And this is actually— again, I was trying not to be political about this, but one of the most ingenious things Trump does is he repeats stuff. And there is this thing with repetition. Repetition increases processing fluency. Repetition Increases processing fluency. And what processing fluency does is processing fluency makes you understand it and believe it. So my hunch, and it's only a hunch, Anjali, is that a one-off of good news isn't sufficient. I think a one of bad news, because of its high salience, is sufficient, and then you can increase the processing fluency by repeating the good news or repeating different aspects of the good news. Other things that increase processing fluency are rhymes, Rhymes increase processing fluency in this really, really intriguing way. Alliteration can increase processing fluency. To some extent, lists can increase processing fluency. But on this one, I would say try bad, very salient, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good. See if that works.

Yes?

Thank you.

Hey, let me adjust this a little bit. So I'm just, I wonder your thoughts on Kind of, you know, this book being called Why, like, or When, sorry. Yeah, you're in the wrong store. I am thinking actually though about when versus why and your thoughts on that in terms of, I mean, you know, Drive is a book about, you know, purpose and that. And so trying to live a better life, is there certain situations where if you're trying to, you know, kind of think about your own situation, should I be thinking more about the why or more about the when? Is one more important than the other? Just, you know, that. Tell me your first name.

Brendan.

So Brendan, that's a very, very good question. And I think the answer is that it's both. And to my mind, what's happened is that the how and the what and the why we take seriously, but the when we don't. And so I don't see the when as a replacement for the why, but I see it as a co-equal of that. And the why is really important. There's a lot of really, really, really good research on this where if you tell people the— the purpose of doing something, they do it better. There's a really lovely study out of Harvard Business School where— of cafeteria cooks. It's one of my favorite studies, of cafeteria cooks. And what they did is they— typically you think about a cook in a cafeteria and the customers can't see the cooks. So they rigged up an iPad where in certain circumstances, the cooks could see the customers, the customers could see the cooks, they could both see each other. And what they were measuring, the dependent variable, what they were measuring was the quality of the food, not how happy people were on the job, but simply how did customers rate the food. And actually the quality of the food improved when the cooks could see the customers. And so because they realized, OK, why am I making this cheese omelet? I'm not necessarily solving the climate crisis or anything like that, but I'm doing something that's purposeful. So I would consider them co-equal.

OK.

Cool.

Yes.

Thank you.

Hi.

So as someone who is about to graduate in May, what can I do to sort of safeguard against— you said like basically when you graduate.

Yeah.

What can help me? Tell me your first name.

Madison.

Madison. It's a little late, Madison. No, no. You're actually in pretty good— so you're gonna graduate in May?

Yeah.

So what they did, this research is some really brilliant research, very, very complicated to understand. The math behind it is above my head. I had to bring in a research assistant to basically explain the math in this paper to me. They look at the unemployment rate. So right now, you actually have pretty good news because the unemployment rate right now is extraordinarily low. It's hard to imagine, although talk to me at 9:45, it's hard to imagine that the unemployment rate now is what, like 3.8? Somewhere around there? Anybody? Anybody from the BLS here? Any furloughed Bureau of Labor Statistics person here? So it's about 3.8%. That's really low, Madison. And so by May, even if it goes up a little bit, it's still gonna be pretty low. So you're gonna be in pretty good shape. The one thing that I would tell you is this, which is important to understand, which is the mechanism at work here, why this happens. Because here we know why it's happening. Here's what happens. Basically, getting a job, finding a career, is a matching exercise. You're trying to find your skills to match an employer's or customer's needs, right? And we very rarely get the match right, right away. It takes time for people to make the match. And so what happens is that people enter the labor market and it's not a great match. It's a mismatch of sorts. And what they do is they move to a better match. Alright? And one of the things that we know from Lisa Kahn's work is that the way that people's salary increases is often by moving jobs. So let's say you have— so you have a job. It's not a great match.

Move.

You move to another job. It's a slightly better match. You're earning slightly more. Then you move to a third job. It's an even better match. You're earning slightly more. Your salary is going to go up. And if there's high unemployment, you can't move. You're stuck. And so that has a cascading effect. So one piece of advice that I would give for you is actually graduate on time. You're on time, right? You're gonna graduate in May?

Yes.

You got all the credits?

Yes.

Filled out all the forms? Okay. And, um, and then, um, actually be conscious of that in the first, say, 6 or 8 months of your career, uh, of trying to find the match. And if in that early stage, if the match isn't right, don't be hesitant about moving, because when the economy turns down, as it inevitably will, it's gonna be harder to move, and that's gonna have a knock-on effect later in your working life. Yes, sir.

Hi. So I think the best business—

Tell me your first name. David.

And I'm losing my voice a little bit, so. I think the best business book I read was Drive, and I think that for me—

Have you read this?

Not yet. But I feel like I don't have to anymore.

Oh, then I have not done my job.

I know the 5 key things.

Go ahead, David. Yeah.

And I think for me, the best part of that book was the results-only work environment you talked about. I wonder to what extent the productivity during the day research that you've done here informs or complements that research on results-only work environment. Then secondarily, as a CEO, what would you do to take advantage of those 2 pieces of knowledge?

Yeah, so David is referring to something in a previous book called The Results-Only Work Environment, which is a practice that several companies have instituted where people don't have to be at work at a certain time. They don't have starting times. They don't have ending times. This is— under labor law, it's for salaried employees. It's harder to do with wage employees. So what they have to do is they have results that they have to deliver. So if you want to come in for 3 hours in the middle of the day and then go to a Nats game at 4 o'clock, you don't have to ask for permission. You don't have to do anything. You just go and do your thing. I think it is— I think— I haven't seen research on the intersection of those, but I think we can assume some kind of crosswalk between them because this is a very popular kind of policy for owls because they don't have someone forcing them to go to an 8 o'clock staff meeting. Those of you who are owls do not want that 8 o'clock AM staff meeting. It's torture. So you don't have to do that. You can do your work at 7 at night or 8 at night or 10 at night or something like that. So I think it's just another way of giving individuals a little bit more autonomy, a little more sovereignty over their work. And a dimension of that— so in Brendan's case too, if we think about what are the dimensions of work that we want some sovereignty over? One of them is what we do. One of them is who we do it with. Some of it is how we do it. But when we do it is actually material. Results-only work environments establish that. If I were a CEO or a boss of any kind, what I would— I guess the most important thing that I would do would be I would actually measure the chronotypes of my team, and there are various instruments out there to do that. There's a Munich Chronotype Questionnaire. There's a morning-evenings questionnaire, just to get a sense of that. What I wouldn't do is I would— I would not have— since most people are going to be more larks than owls, I would not have these ridiculous time-consuming meetings in the morning. I would leave people alone to do their work at the time they're best doing their work and push the meetings, push the administrative meetings toward the middle of the day and the more iterative meetings later in the day and not clog up people's time like that. The other thing that I would do as a boss is I would— this is really in modeling behavior— is that— I would not answer the email of anybody who sent me an email at— before say 11 AM or something like that. Just to say, you know, because what we— what you don't— one of the most deadly things that you can do in your overall productivity is to start the day by clearing out your email. And I know it feels really good. I know it feels like an accomplishment. I have been there, alright? I have been, you know, with the email clearance. High, right? Exulting in my chair, feeling good, right? And that is a false high. Boys and girls, that's a false high. And so I would do those 2 things.

Thanks.

How about, how are we doing on time?

We can take one more question.

One more, yes sir.

OK, my name's Ken. I'll get that out.

Thank you. Thank you for spotting the pattern, Ken.

I did. I remember reading some medical research about people, how they remember painful experiences and how the experience ends is very important in the memory. So I guess just thinking about it, listening while I listen to you talk, if you can game that to some extent, I think the— like giving a— the dentist that gives a sweet to the kid at the end of the procedure. But the sweet has to be— it has to be sort of part of the procedure, has to be part of the experience. to work, I think. But I think there's something there.

There definitely is in the study, and there's actually a lot of research on pain in this regard. And actually, I don't mean to bring up a colonoscopy study to close this because that would be like the worst ending you could possibly have, right? So I'm conscious of that. But there's a very famous piece of research on colonoscopies where people evaluated the pain, the discomfort of the colonoscopy And people whose colonoscopy ended painfully reported it as more painful than even ones that were painful throughout, but didn't end painfully. And I think that's a— I think, Ken, you have a good way of— I think it's a good way of wrapping this up. One of the things about this book is that it's— I feel like it's made me more aware. There's a— William James, who was one of the founders of modern psychology, Um, has this line that's haunted me since I read it in an essay, and he says, uh, most of us go through life only half awake. Right? And it always bothered me. It's like, am I going through my life only half awake? And I think that if you are awake to the dimensions of time and how it affects us, you can become more fully awake. Because if you think about it, we are temporal creatures. Alright? It's not as if we have a biological clock. What we know now from molecular biology and chronobiology is that we essentially have biological clocks in every cell in our body. We are essentially walking timepieces, and we are always moving through time. So again, I don't want to get woo-woo with you on the end, but here you go. This presentation began in the past.

It's gone.

All right? This presentation will end in the future. It's not here yet. And so we're temporal creatures moving through time, and if we're aware of that, we can be more intentional about it. And again, I believe in small wins and starting small. Maybe we take Ken's advice and say, be much more conscious of how we end the next meeting that we have, how we end the next encounter we have with a customer, how we end the next putting a kid to bed. And so I'll try to model Ken's thing here by thanking Politics and Prose once again for giving this incredible opportunity to talk about really cool ideas.

Thank you.

With really smart people, with really great questions. So kudos to Politics and Prose, and thank you all for— thank you all for coming out here tonight. Writing is a very solitary profession. I sit in my— I mean, most days I sit in my office swearing at the computer, all right? I now do that in the mornings rather than throughout the day.

But—

so it's very solitary. So it's— so all of you, by showing up here, by being engaged in these kinds of ideas, you all have Kept me in the writing business for like another 2 weeks. So, thanks for your time.

Congratulations.