WHEN Not to Just Do It...

As birds go, I’m a morning lark as opposed to my daughter, who is a night owl.  I rise at 5 am every morning and try my best to stay awake after 9 pm so my wife doesn’t take my drowsiness personally.  She is also a night owl.  There are reasons for this type of behavior.  Daniel Pink has written an accessible--pop science--account of why there are night owls and morning larks and thus why we should pay more attention to the “WHEN” of when we do things.  As the other Byrd’s have told us, “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose, under Heaven…”.  But really that wasn’t the Byrd’s since they clipped the phrase from Ecclesiastes 3. And Daniel Pink clipped the concept from the Bible to give us his NYT’s best seller, “WHEN”, his fourth book.  This is an enjoyable romp through what we have always suspected about the value of time...and why we shouldn’t force our night owls to wake up and get their day started.  Society in general is not actually made up of night owls or the morning larks.  As a species we are more like daytime chickens. Evolutionarily speaking, we’ve only had  a few thousand years to evolve into a world of artificial light.  Like chickens, we can only see in the daylight, so what’s up with early mornings and late nights?  For hundreds of thousands of years homosapiens have risen with the sun in the east and gone to bed when it disappears in the west...just like chickens. Thus we could all learn a lot from a chicken's schedule by mimicking their behavior and time patterns. They stay safe from predators and work hard. They even adjust for daylight savings time.  But that’s a different story.

In his book, Pink has aptly captured the science surrounding when our human bodies perform the best given what we’ve known for years to be the rhythm of our physiology. Typically we choose to ignore these cycles by forcing ourselves to do things that make us wake up on the wrong side of the bed...like setting an alarm clock. Only night owl’s need alarm clocks--like my daughter which they mostly ignore when it goes off. Morning larks wake up au naturel (don’t worry I’m talking about time, not attire). That’s me saying that, not Pink.  Pink is searching for a formula to better “hack” your own body into optimal performance by staying attune to your highs and lows of energy and mental acuity during the course of the day.  For instance, if you force high school students into class early, when their brains are not awake, they will underperform.  Also, if you force these same kids to do analytic work during their off peak hours, say math in the afternoon, they will underperform.  He’s talking about our kids, for the most part, but everybody does better if they are attuned to this cycle of optimal performance.  Between chapters  he presents his formula for how to hack your own body  to sync up with it’s internal performance clock. This is a useful self-help tool if you haven’t already discovered how to do it through self observation.

Not only should you do this yourself, you should help your kids through the selection of optimal “WHEN”.  Also, we should be aware of the people around us and when they are at their optimum performance if we need them for something. For instance, the right time for elective brain surgery is not during the late afternoon.  If you are going to select for that type of procedure pick a surgical lark and go in the morning.  Pink uses the example of colonoscopy and how mistakes are made during the procedure when it is performed later in the day. Typically, that exploration is done in the numerous colonoscopy sweatshops that freckle our country.  If you’ve ever been to one of these medical locations it looks and feels like an assembly line...customer after customer.  As it turns out, and this is not contained in Pink’s research, there are not enough doctors performing colonoscopies in this country to accommodate the American Medical Association’s advice for everyone over the age of 50 to have an annual colonoscopy.  Further, if everyone chose to have their procedure done in the morning, where the doctor was at his best, the number of available colonoscopy lifeboats would be reduced by half, or the same ratio of lifeboats available on the Titanic.  So schedule your colonoscopy early in the day  so you don’t have to take that afternoon lifeboat. As an aside, here's a helpful tip for those in need of a colonoscopy.  It turns out some doctors prescribe drinking a gallon of water with a full bottle of Miralax in preparation for your procedure.  If your doctor prescribes the standard gag inducing cocktail of magnesium citrate and water tell them to bugger-off and go find a doctor who will prescribe the Miralax solution.  You will be much happier.

As a self help book “WHEN” is a must read...at least the first four chapters.  He establishes his case for the rhythm and performance of our bodies which is pretty much an open and shut case.  It’s undeniable and you should adjust your schedule to do important things, like making critical decisions, at the right time for you.  It’s easy, once you identify your peaks and lows.  Then he walks through how to complete a project, any project, that has a natural ebb and flow starting with the natural excitement at the beginning, moving through the waning of interest and the slog of slow motion in the middle, and finishing at the end of the activity with a flourish.  All of this makes perfect sense and is as practical as any management/self-help book I have found.  Mapping your highs and lows into this type of schedule really works.   I’ve already adopted some of his techniques for getting through the slog of the middle zone.  So many things go unfinished when we encounter the mountain before us as we climb through this ugly place. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” meaning it takes a lot of work to get through this middle zone.  Thus in my mind, most of us might actually be geniuses if we could get the 99% of the activity completed.   Edison was a night owl, by the way.  Pink tells us that...it’s odd that he left out Edison’s most famous quote since it fits perfectly.

In the final section of the book, Pink takes a hard left turn and drives into a story about the delivery of Dabbawala lunches in Mumbai, India. As most of his stories go, he spins a good yarn and tells these anecdotes with very accessible prose.  However he’s no Gladwell when it comes to defining the “So What?” of his story. Gladwell is the master of answering that question.  Alas, “WHEN” will not, and cannot, become a household word as a result.  Also, try doing a Google search on the word, “when”.  It’s a bad choice...but perhaps that’s his editor's fault.  I digress.  The story of the Dabbawalas has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the book.  Totally weird.  In  this chapter he calls “Syncing Fast and Slow” perhaps he is attempting to call out to the guardian angels of Daniel Kahneman?  Pink is clearly an acolyte of the Nobel Laureate, having mentioned Kahneman several times.  But in the end, the chapter heading and the story of the Dabbawalas just doesn’t sync (no pun intended) with the topic of “WHEN” to do something important..  

I can just imagine the writing slump Pink was going through during and decided to use his new found tools to move through this depression.  Then he finished with a flourish as he had the excitement to write the story of the Dabbawalas--which he used to add meaning to his story.  He even included pictures...which was weird. Well look, it’s a good self-help book on time management and motivation.  It doesn’t have to have eternal meaning.  It’s interesting that Pink claims he has adopted some of his new found perspectives having researched this book and put those insights to use.  He came to believe he had been doing things wrong most of his life...which is a bit confusing as he has been a productive and prolific writer this being his fourth book. He already had skills that worked and many of the reviews I have read claim some of his earlier work is superior.  I’ll have to give another one of his titles a go just to see for myself.

This is a solid book, certainly the first four chapters. His writing style is conversational which makes it easy to read.  His wife, apparently from his acknowledgement, read the book aloud cover to cover...which has always been the best way to write something and make it easy to read.  Four stars for a solid book.  I have to subtract one star for a finish that I simply didn’t understand. I thought I was reading a different book.  But when it comes to the bulk of the material on “WHEN” to do, or not to do, something...don’t just do it.  For the important stuff, pay attention to the time of day when you are at your optimum and save other times to slog through the mountain in the middle of life.