Afford Anything - The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, with Daniel Pink

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

#188: In May 1915, a renowned 58-year-old sea captain, Captain William Thomas Turner, made a series of questionable decisions. He was the captain of the Lusitania, a ship with 1,959 passengers, sailing from Manhattan to London. The first World War was taking place around them, and Captain Turner knew he needed to move swiftly to evade German submarines. His ship approached England; land was in sight. They had almost made it. Yet for reasons that will always remain a mystery, around 1 pm on May 7th, Captain Turner slowed the speed of the vessel to around 18 knots, slower than the 21 knots that they needed to outpace the threat of submarines. Around 45 minutes later, he executed what's called a "four-point bearing," which forced him to pilot the ship in a straight line rather than a zigzag course, which would be better for outmaneuvering torpedoes. At 2:10, the ship was ripped apart by a torpedo. Nearly 1,200 people were killed. Since that fateful day, historians have pondered why he made those two decisions, simple choices which may have permanently altered the lives of thousands. Today's podcast guest, Daniel Pink, has an unusual theory. He believes Captain Turner may have made those sloppy choices because it was the afternoon. Daniel Pink is the author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. In his book, he makes the case that the time-of-day in which we take actions -- early morning, mid-afternoon, or nighttime -- makes a bigger impact than we realize. Our energy and attention unfold in waves, with a rise, then a drop, then a resurgence. The secret to perfect timing isn't simply a matter of managing daily routines, however. Daniel Pink also shows how this pattern emerges over the span of a natural human life, with the choices we make in our sunset years more prone to editing, to curating, than the choices we make in our younger years when time feels abundant. Senior citizens may have smaller circles of friends, he says, not due to loneliness but rather because they're editing their circles down to the few people who matter most. He discusses how midlife is a fascinating point in which our brains signal that we've squandered half of our time. These midpoints can act as either a slump or a propellant. He talks about how we appreciate things more if we believe that they're ending. In one study, researchers gave five Hershey Kisses to subjects; they asked the subjects to rate their taste and enjoyment. When the researchers handed out the fifth Hershey Kiss, they told half of the subjects "here is your fifth chocolate," and they told the other half of the subjects, "here is your final chocolate." The ones who were told that they were receiving the final chocolate rated their enjoyment of it more highly. How much does timing affect our lives? How do we manage our days, and our decades, with a stronger awareness of the way that chronology impacts our mood, energy and priorities? Daniel Pink answers these questions in his book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. He talks about it on today's show. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/188  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything. You just can't afford everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. There is an inherent opportunity cost to every choice that you make. And that doesn't just apply to your money. It also applies to your time. Timing is everything and everything is timing. And that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode.

My name is Paula Pan. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Today, New York Times best-selling author Daniel Pink is on the show. to discuss the scientific secrets of perfect timing. Dan researched how timing affects our decision-making. How do we make smarter, better decisions, knowing what we know about time, both time of day and phase of life?

As it turns out, there are certain times of the day and certain phases of life in which a particular action might be more or less suitable. There's a lot of research, a lot of talk around what to do. And there are many philosophical and spiritual discussions about why we do what we do. But few people ever discuss when. So in today's interview, we're going to talk about when. Here is New York Times bestselling author Dan Pink to discuss when to do things and when not to do things.

Hi, Dan. Hi, how you doing? I'm great. How are you doing? I'm good. You wrote when to describe how everything is timing. And in ways that are subtle and often unrecognized, the timing of things, including if something happens in the morning or in the evening, affects oftentimes the outcome. First, what inspired you to go down this line of thought? Frustration more than anything else.

I was making all kinds of timing decisions in my own life, everything from. I'm a writer. So when in the day should I do my writing? When in the day should I exercise? When in the day should I do my phone calls? One of the day should I answer my email to even things broader in scope. Like when should I start a new project? When should I abandon a project that's not working?

And I was making these decisions in a pretty sloppy haphazard way. That frustrated me. And so I wanted to make him in a better way. Looked around for guidance. That guidance pretty much did not exist. Just out of curiosity, I started looking at the science of this. because the last few books I've written have been basically, you know, taking scientific findings and trying to make them relevant to people's lives. And it turned out there was a huge amount of research on this question of timing that gives us clues about how to make these decisions in a smarter, better way.

One of the stories that you tell at the beginning of the book is about the sinking of the Lusitania. And you make the argument that it might not have sank if it had happened at a different time of day. Can you tell us about that? The reason I started with that story is that in the decisions we make and how we explain events and how we create strategies, either at a individual micro level or at a broader organizational institutional level, we focus on what we're going to do, we focus on how we're going to do it, we focus on who we're going to do it with, but we give when stuff happens the short trip. And that's a mistake because, as I said, you know, this incredible body of science tells us

that WEN plays an enormous role in, as you said at the top, in a variety of outcomes. And so when we think about the story of the Lusitania, which was a ship that was sailing relatively early days of World War I from New York to the United Kingdom, ended up being downed by a, sunk by a German, U-boat a German submarine. And there's been a lot of research, a lot of writing about this, about whether there was a conspiracy, whether they didn't give enough warning to the boat captain because they actually wanted the boat to sink so it would draw the U.S. into the war. But if you actually unpack this thing, looking at it in a less dramatic, less conspiratorial way, one of the things that happened was that the captain of this ship, the Lusitania, made a couple of very bad decisions. And he made these bad decisions at a certain time of day.

And it turns out that that's the time of day when our performance is absolutely almost, in almost all cases, when our performance is at the lowest. He also did it having not gotten any sleep the night before. So in some ways, you can re-explain the thinking of Lusitania in less geopolitical conspiratorial terms and explain it more in basically a sleep-deprived guy making the decision at the worst time of day. The big idea here in all this research, at least at the start of it, is that, and to me it might be the most significant takeaway from the book, is that our cognitive abilities, our brain power does not remain static over the course of a day. It changes. It changes in pretty significant ways. It changes in fairly predictable ways. And factoring that into our decisions can allow us to make better decisions and reach better outcomes.

So what are, quote-unquote, good and bad times of day? What are the times of day in which our cognitive abilities peak and decline? Well, some of it depends on what kind of cognitive work we're doing. So there's some nuance into this. And another factor in this is what's called our chronotype, which is basically, are you a morning person or an evening person? That is not folklore. That is not pop psychology. There is a incredible body of research in a field in a field called chronobiology,

showing that we have different propensities. Some of us wake up early and go to sleep early. Some of us wake up late and go to sleep late. Others of us are in the middle. So what we have to do in order to figure out the right time of day to do something is line up three factors. One of them is, what kind of task are you doing, and what time of day is it? So when we think about a chronotype, the distribution looks something like this. About 15% of us are very strong morning people, Larks.

About 20% of us are very strong evening people. Al, but two-thirds of us are in the middle, third birds. And an overly simplified way to look at this is owls and non-owls, late-night types and the rest of us. In general, about 80% of us move through the day in this order. Peak trough recovery. We have a peak early in the day, early-ish in the day, general in the morning. We have a trough in the middle of the day early to mid-afternoon, and then we have a recovery

period late afternoon and into the evening. That's about 80% of us. About 20% of us, people who are owls, much, much more complicated people. The thing about owls is that they reach their cognitive peak much, much, much later in the day, early evening, mid-evening, late into the evening. First of all, you have to figure out what your chronotype is, and then you have to figure out what kind of task that you want to do. And what we know is the following. Let's take about this idea of the peak, the drop, and the recovery. During the peak, that's when we are most vigilant.

Now, what does it mean to be vigilance? What it means to be vigilant is that that's when we are able to bat away distractions. And that makes the peak the best time to do analytic work, work that requires heads down, focus, and attention. Writing is a good example of that. Doing an audit is a good example of that. Crunching numbers is a good example of that. Things that require focus and attention and undistractability or at least less distractibility. We're better up doing, we do better on those kinds of things.

during our peak. 80% of us have our peak essentially sometime in the morning. 20% of us, though, have it much, much later in the day. During the trough, that's the worst time of day. There are all kinds of bad things that happened during that period. And the numbers on this are just overwhelming. You see big problems in health care. You see an increase in medical errors in that time period. Problems in anesthesia. You have a decline in hand washing in hospitals during that period. You actually have some pretty disturbing evidence of juries and judges making different decisions in that time of day. You have a decline in many kinds of test scores for kids during that time of day. It is a, you have an increase in car accidents.

I mean, it is not a good time of day. And so what we're better off doing in that period is our administrative work, things that don't require massive brain power, answering our email, filling out our TPS reports, whatever that might be. I just heard a podcast about the 20th anniversary of office space, which is this year, which reminded me of that. Now, the recovery period, again, is a very interesting period. Remember, most of us go through the day, peak, trough recovery, peak in the morning, trough in the middle of the day, recovery late afternoon and early evening. If you look at the data on this, what it shows is that during that recovery period, we are less vigilant than early in the day. That's important. We're less vigilant. However, we're actually in a pretty

good mood. And that combination of enhanced mood and decreased vigilance makes it a good time for things requiring some amount of mental looseness, brainstorming, iterating new ideas, solving what social psychologists call insight problems. So forgive this very, very long-winded answer, but we have to line up all these things. What's your chronotype? What kind of task are you doing? And what time of day is it? And so in general, what we should be doing is doing our analytic work during the peak, our administrative work during the trough and our insight work during the recovery. When we think about performance, I know your audience is interested in that, not only the performance of their portfolios and their finances, but just their overall performance as a

human being. What we know is that think about variance in performance. And let's take on the job. Let's say have a company with 1,000 people, okay? And you have ratings of how good these people are at their job. There are all kinds of explanations for why some people would be better at their jobs than other people, right? Some people work harder than other people. Some people are more conscientious than other people. Some people are smarter than other people. Some people are more social advantage of, you know,

all kinds of things. What this research shows is about 20% of that variance in performance can be attributed to time of day. That doesn't mean timing is everything, but it means it's a freaking big thing. What's frustrating about this is that the evidence is not only rock solid, but it's also super clear. And it gives us some very, very good guidance on what to do. at certain times of the day. One of the surprising findings of your book, one of the things that surprised me, was discovering that the majority of the population are those third birds. You always hear about the larks and the night owls.

The third birds don't seem to get as much attention. No, that's true. It's a great point. And it's, you know, in some ways it's how, you know, we love these binary assessments of human beings. I mean, I think it's analogous to say introversion and extroversion. When you look at introversion and extroversion, what it really is. is a spectrum, it's a scale. And so when you actually map out people's levels of introversion and extroversion, what you find is that, yeah, some of us are introverts, but strong introverts,

but not a huge number. Some of us are strong extroverts, not a huge number. Vast majority of us are what are called ambiverts somewhere in the middle. And it's somewhat true with this third bird thing, although the distribution is a little bit more skewed to early. The way that these chronotypes are configured, like I test as a third bird leaning towards. the larky side of it. But the real outliers here are owls, people who hit their peak really late in the day. What frustrates me is that you have 20% of the population, 20% of the talent pool that traditional organizations are simply not accommodating. And in many organizations are driving out this pool of workers. So for the people who are listening to this,

who would identify as those night owls, what can they do? What actions can they take to try to implement what they've just heard, to implement what they've learned about doing analytic work at your peak and insight work in your recovery, how can they apply that to their lives if they are currently in a traditional 9 to 5 framework? I think it's really, really hard to do that, which is one reason why you see a lot of owls becoming self-employed or doing their own thing. I think that the way to do this is to talk to your boss and tell her or him, you know, when it is you do your best work and see if there's any way that the office can accommodate you or try to look for jobs where they prize the results

rather than the inputs, where they think that someone who isn't at her desk at nine o'clock in the morning is a slacker, not knowing that that person is going to be cranking at eight o'clock at night. What I really want, though, is that at some level, I don't want to put the onus on the individual who's an owl. I want to put the onus on the organization. The question we should be asking is, what are organizations doing to accommodate all the talent in their office? And what the organization should be doing is saying, okay, some of our team are al's, here's what's going to happen. I'm going to try to not make them come to eight o'clock staff meetings. I'm going to allow them to do their heads down work at seven at night or eight at night or nine at night.

And I'm not going to, you know, monitor them or criticize them if they don't come into the office until 10 in the morning or 1030 in the morning. What we should be doing is accommodating our organizations and our structures so that they are open to owls rather than forcing owls to try to change their behavior because it's really, really hard. These chronotypes, they change over time because of age. But in general, they're pretty fixed characteristics. So it would be like, I mean, I mean, this is a stupid analogy. But imagine you had an office where the office thresholds between rooms or doors were only like five feet tall. And you had a bunch of people in the office who were over five feet tall. You can either tell those people to duck every time they have to leave the room.

Or you can say, wait a second. I think we've built this office a wrong way. We should probably have higher thresholds. And that's sort of how I feel about it. The owner should be on the organizations. And not in this kind of ooey-gooey-touchy-feely way. It's because we know that when people are able to do the room, right work at the right time of day, their performance goes up, period. This is a strategic move on

the part of organizations, not something that is designed to, oh, we have to accommodate everybody, but then take the hit on productivity. It's the exact opposite. We should be doing this. It's a positive productivity move. One of the takeaways that I got from reading your book was that I should schedule every doctor's appointment, every surgery, anything that I want to schedule, I should get that first appointment in the morning. Was that the proper thing to have learned? I actually think that's pretty good guidance. I'd say the evidence of changes in performance, especially in hospitals, in the afternoon, are terrifying.

I mentioned anesthesia errors. Anesthesia errors are four times more likely at 3 p.m. than at 9 a.m. I mentioned hand washing. Handwashing in hospitals deteriorates considerably in the afternoon. If you think about colonoscopies, doctors find half as many polyps in afternoon exams as you do in morning exams for the same population. If you look at the prescribing of unnecessary antibiotics, much higher in afternoon appointments than in morning appointments. So that's what I do in my family. So I actually think it's a lesson that I derive from it.

I will do something like a routine teeth cleaning maybe in the afternoon. But when it comes to actually anything of real significance, there's no way I'll do it in the afternoon. So one of our daughters, about a year and a half ago, had to have her wisdom teeth taken out. she had to undergo general anesthesia for that, there is no way she was having that procedure in the afternoon. No way, period, full stop. No way any kid of mine is going to go under general anesthesia in the afternoon based on the data that I've seen. Wow, that's strong. Yeah, I mean, if you have discretion over, you get hit by a bus at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I'm not going to say to my kids, okay, just wait until the morning before we go in. But if you have

discretion over it, over, like, you know, what's an important doctor appointment or something like that, that's the lesson that I've taken from that. Now, you mentioned that your chronotype also changes throughout the course of your life. And the ideal example is if you think about the sleep wake cycle of a three-year-old versus a 75-year-old versus a teenager. I mean, you can see these drastic differences in an individual's life. Can you walk us through how those change? Sure. If you look at little kids, kids say under 10 or 11, especially really little kids.

Little kids are very larky. They wake up early, they go to sleep early. Around the mid-teens, most people end up with a fairly marked shift toward lateness, sometimes two hours, three hours, where you have teenagers who, you know, a few years ago might have gone to sleep at 8.30 or 9. Now they literally can't go to sleep. Their bodies have changed. They literally cannot fall asleep at 8.30 or 9. They have to go to sleep at 10.30 or 11. So the big move toward lateness for most people between the mid-teens and the mid-20s, most of us begin over time moving back to greater and greater larkiness as we age, except for that cohort of, you know, one out of five of us who are just naturally hardcore owls. And then in general, you mentioned like somebody who's 75 and somebody who's three. If we take somebody who's 75 and somebody say who is like seven, their chronotypes in general are going to be very similar. And you also have some difference based on gender. To oversimplify a bit, men tend to be, in general, owlier than women. And certainly in their post-mid-20s return toward larkiness,

women tend to return to larkiness faster than men do, which is one reason why you have some interesting phenomenon among heterosexual couples of the same age. So if you have a straight couple of the same age, in general, again, it's not going to be true in every case. In general, their sleeping patterns can sometimes be, can often be incompatible with a woman going to sleep a little bit, you know, 45 minutes or so earlier than the man.

Are there any theories about why this changes over the course of a person's life? There are, I don't know how many are true. One of the explanations for this change in the mid-20s especially, and again, it's a guess. We don't have evidence of it. It's an evolution-based argument. So let's go back to the time that human beings are evolving. Take a youngish man, sort of late teens, interesting. the 20s, in general, that's when men are at the peak of their strength. And so at the time where we

were evolving, when there obviously was not electric light and there were predators everywhere, young men who were able to stay up that late were more likely to survive and therefore pass their genes into subsequent generations. And they were more supported socially because they played a important communal role because these hourly young men were able to protect the community while the community was sleeping. Again, that's just a notion that there's an evolutionary explanation for it. I think what's interesting about this, and one of the things that I think it's really, really important that you're hitting on Paula is that, you know, we are biological creatures here. Our sleep and wake cycle is determined in part by our chronotype.

It's also determined in part by external cues, in particular light and dark. For much of the time that human beings have been human beings, we didn't have a way to illuminate the dark. When it was dark, that was it. There wasn't a heck of a lot else to do. So if you think about how our brains and bodies evolved, they evolved in a world where you couldn't necessarily fight back against dark. Do you know if this changes among populations who live near the poles that have increased amounts of both light and dark in summer and winter? I don't know. I imagine there is some kind of research on that. The one thing that we do know is that our general biological rhythms are longer than 24 hours. So it's something like 24 hours and 11 minutes. And so if you actually

remove these light and dark cues, which some chronobiologists have done by literally putting people like underground, eventually their whole schedule starts to shift. Because if you think about if you're 11 or 12 minutes off, four days, five days, eight days, 18 days later, your whole schedule is being turned around. So without these cues, you have people who are basically following a 24-hour and 11-minute sleep cycle, which over time has them, you know, sleeping when the rest of the world is awake, the above-ground world is awake and being awake when the above-ground world is asleep. One thing that I found interesting, so far we've been talking about the way the energy and cognition peaks and troughs in the course of a day, in the course of a 24-hour day. But,

But you've also found that in the course of a person's lifetime, there is almost the same pattern, a peak, a trough, and then a bit of recovery over the span of a natural human life. That's exactly right. And one of the things about this research is that, you know, I begin in setting out these ideas by talking about this unit of a day because as we were just talking now, it's so fundamental. It's not anything we can do anything about. So we could decree that a second or a minute last longer than it lasts right now, or a week is now nine days rather than seven days. But an individual day, because we're on a planet that's turning, we can't do anything about.

So the pattern of our cognition and energy, as you say, over the course of a day is really important. That said, there are other temporal factors in our lives, things like how do beginnings affect us, how do midpoints affect us, how to endings affect us, how to group synchronize in time. And if we take a different span of time, that is the lifespan, yeah, you see some big changes. The biggest of all is probably this research has been done now in 70 different countries, showing essentially this, that if you map people's well-being over time, people are, you know, reasonably happy in their 20s, reasonably happy but less happy in the 30s. By the 40s, their overall well-being dips a little bit. By their 50s, it's at its bottom.

It's not a, it's a shallow drop, not a massive midlife crisis. The midlife crisis is a bogus idea. You have this sort of gentle U-shaped curve. So in your 50s, you're at the bottom of this gentle you. But as time goes on, late 50s, 60s, 70s, your overall well-being seems to go up and up and up. So if you think about it as like a gentle U-shaped curve of well-being, where the beginnings and ends of our lives are relatively happy.

But the midpoint, the basically mid-40s to late 50s are often, lower and well-being. I think what's intriguing about this that suggests there is at least an element of universality, perhaps biology to it, is, as I said, you can find this pattern in something like 70 different countries. So it isn't simply a phenomenon of the United States or North America or the West. My hunch is that it is probably, and it's a hunch, is that there's probably something quote unquote natural about it, but that nature, as with all things, interacts with environment circumstance and experience. And so a reason for that dip could be, and again, I don't think we know the why of this at all, a reason for this dip could be things like essentially sort of disappointment

or reckoning with where your life or your career is going to go. So you get to a certain point in midlife and you're like, oh man, it's just all there is? Am I going to keep doing this for the next, the same thing for the next two decades? Maybe there's some disappointment where you said, oh, I figured by now I'm a lawyer. I figured by now it'd be a judge or maybe even a Supreme Court justice, but here I am still working at my same law firm in Milwaukee. Or you say, you know, I'm really smart and I figured I'd be CEO of this company that I joined when I was 28 years old, but you know what? I ain't going to be CEO because I'm not in line to do that. Or maybe you have a marriage breakup or maybe you're dealing with the twin pressures of having kids and aging

parents. So there's probably a social aspect to it. And there's probably a biolology. aspect to it, where one begins the other ends. I don't think we know. So given all of this, how can a person make smarter decisions about, I guess this is a very big question, how to organize their day and how, at a very broad level, how to organize their life. But let's start with the day, since that's easier to wrap your head around. Yeah, the day is so much easier to wrap your head around. That second one is a tough one. And I think it's something that we inherently wrestle with. It's something that philosophers and religious leaders have tried to answer. It's something that now scientists have tried to understand a little bit,

something that various kinds of shady self-help gurus have tried to give us advice on. So I think that's a really, really hard one. Let's get back to it. I think the evidence in the day points to some very, very clear design principles, and it's basically this. Figure out what your chronotype is. Figure out, are you the 80% who go peak drop recovery, or are you the 20% who hit their peak later in the day? Then you organize your work essentially like this. During your peak, you do your analytic work. As I said, the work that benefits from not being distracted. Writing, for me, is a very good example of that,

where the enemy of writing is distractions. When they have to write, the whole universe begins trying to distract them. So you want to write at minimum distractibility. During that trough period, again, we should be doing the administrative work I mentioned. And then during the recovery, we should be doing more of our creative, iterative kinds of work. And I think the problem, Paula, is those design principles are very clear, but we don't do that. I myself have changed how I do my work, in part because of this research. I'm a writer, and I'm more of a lark than an owl. I should be doing my writing in the morning.

That's not even a close call. I should be doing my writing in the morning. But what I often have done in my life is when I come into my office, the first thing I do is answer my email. That is a bad idea. What I should be doing is doing my heads down writing in the morning, answering my email, doing this kind of administrative work in the early to mid-afternoon, and then do my more kind of iterative creative work, whether it's brainstorming new ideas or when I'm on the other, which is more common, when I'm on your side of the interview table, where I'm asking the questions. My interviews are kind of like yours. I'm not an investigative report. I'm not trying to trap anybody. I just say, hey, what do you think of this? What about this?

What about that? Yeastier, more freewheeling kinds of interviews. And I should be doing it then. And even today, knowing all this research, I'm better, but I'm not nearly as systematic as I should be about doing the right work at the right time. I think the bigger problem, even a bigger problem than my inadequacies, which are vast, is that is organizations and particularly meetings. When organizations schedule meetings, they use only one criteria in scheduling meetings.

And that's availability. They say, hey, is Paula available? Is Dan available? And is this conference room open? And that's a huge mistake when you think about how much damn time we spend in meetings in the white collar world. It's staggering. And yet when we schedule them, we don't even ask, what kind of meeting is this?

Do we need people to be locked down and focus? Are we going over some important financial data? Are we looking at our expenses trying to cut costs? Is this simply a meeting about the petty cash account? Is this a meeting where we're brainstorming new ideas? We don't think about that. We don't say, hey, who's going to be at this meeting? Fred the Al or Maria the Lark?

We only think about in terms of availability. We're not thinking about these questions of when in a strategic way. We're thinking about them only as questions of essentially like logistics and convenience. And that is flatly wrong. The good news here, again, at the unit of the day, is that there is a very clear guidance and very strong science undergirding that guidance. Again, do your analytic work whenever your peak is, do your administrative work during your trough period, and do your more creative, insight, iterative work during the recovery. The example that you shared about yourself,

about how you know the research, you know the data, you literally wrote the book on it, and yet you have trouble implementing it. How do you bridge the gap, or get better at bridging the gap, between awareness and action? In many cases, what you're talking about, which is often referred to very similar to way you're describing as the knowing, doing gap, haunts almost every organization and many individuals that we actually kind of know what we're supposed to do. There's this gap, as you say, between knowing what we're supposed to do and doing it. How do you breach that gap?

Again, that's a very tough question. I don't have a perfect answer for that. I think that the ultimate solution is essentially environmental. the architecture of your environment. Let's go back to the unit of one for me. What you don't want is me coming into my office in the morning and saying, hmm, what should I do first? You don't want me deciding that.

What you want is you want me just sitting down in writing. Now, how do you do that? Okay, give you some examples. One, don't bring your phone with you into the office. That way you're not distracted by text messages or anything like that. Two, literally do not open your email program on your computer. three, there's some interesting research on writing. It's a very interesting phenomenon where you set yourself up to start with some momentum rather than from a standing start. Let's say that

the last thing I write on Wednesday, maybe what I should do is stop that sentence halfway through, not even complete it. So when I come back on Thursday morning, the first thing I see is that uncompleted, oh, I know how to complete that sentence. That gives some kind of momentum. So again, change the environment, the conditions, the architecture, don't rely on people to make those kinds of decisions. Now, for organizations, I actually think that there is something to be said for scheduling a meeting is basically having a short checklist, very similar to what I said before, which is, okay, what kind of meeting is this? All right? Then I would probably ask, do we actually need to meet, which would be an important thing? Once we figure out what kind of meeting is this,

and who needs to be there and what their chronotypes are, we can make better, not perfect, but we can make better decisions about that. And also, the other thing that we often don't reckon with in scheduling meetings, and again, this is a problem in our overall reasoning. And just because we are flawed, human beings are incredibly flawed, inept decision makers, is that one of our big blind spots when we do stuff is that we don't take into account opportunity costs. I think that's true for meetings.

Let's say I have an accounting firm. and I want to have a meeting at 9.30 in the morning. What are the opportunity costs of that of having four of my accountants who might be Larks not able to do their heads down work at 9.30 in the morning? So factoring those kinds of opportunity costs. But again, and I think the research bears us out, it's basically stop making individual decisions and start using processes and environmental changes. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors.

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ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. What would you say to the people who are listening to this podcast who have jobs such as their teachers, their nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, air traffic controllers, the types of jobs where they're not necessarily in an office or going to meetings, controlling their own schedule, they come into work and they, do their job. Yeah, exactly. What I think is important there is, once again, is not to put too much of the onus on the individual. But the most important thing I can see with there, if you think about, let's say teachers, nurses, teachers, nurses, respiratory therapists, air traffic controllers. The most important thing there is breaks. We should be taking more breaks and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks. And their employers should be setting up systems so that it's true with air traffic controllers. I think that they are. federally mandated to have certain kinds of breaks, at least I hope so. But with things like teachers and nurses and whatnot, having regular breaks is essential. You know, I have a whole

chapter in this book on breaks. And what we know about breaks is that breaks are part of our performance. They're not a deviation from our performance. And we know that breaks can be performance enhancers. And in fact, that breaks can be an antidote to some of the problems we see in the changing patterns of cognition and performance over the course of a day. Let me give you an example. You mentioned nurses. So there's an important study from one of the researchers, Katie Milkman at Penn, as I mentioned, the client of hand washing in hospitals in the afternoons, particularly among nurses. The compliance with the rules on hand washing plummeted in the afternoons. That's dangerous. So how do you get that number back up? One of the remedies for that was giving the nurses more breaks

and also giving them certain kinds of breaks, particularly social breaks. And we know that a lot more about the constituent elements of effective breaks. We know that social breaks, that is breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own, even for introverts, which I found quite surprising, slightly disappointing. Second thing is that we know that breaks where people are moving are more effective than when they're sedentary. I think that idea has begun to take hold. I have always been blown away, and even in this instance, by the positive effects of being outside and even in a modest amount of nature. in restoring our mood, replenishing our mental energy.

And we also know about breaks the importance of full detachment. One of the things we have now is that people aren't really taking breaks. They're leaving their desk, but they're walking mummy-like down the hall with their nose and their Instagram feed. And that's not a break. If we take more breaks and we take breaks that are social, outside, moving, and fully detached, this is a way to arrest. some of the decline in performance. And we see this in a number of things. We see this in certain aspects

of judicial decision making that judges, there's some interesting research showing judges make very different decisions after having a break than right before having a break. When we look at the decline in particularly in elementary school students in test scores, standardized test scores, when they take the test in the afternoon, a remedy for that was before the test, give the kids 20 to 30 minutes to have a snack and run around first, and then the scores go back up. In those instances, breaks end up being extraordinarily important, more important than I ever imagine. Because that's another area that I had completely wrong, because I'm someone who never was a big break taker because I thought, oh, only whims take breaks, only amateurs take breaks. And that's

just so flatly contraindicated by the science. What the science shows is that professionals take break. It's the amateurs who don't take breaks. With regard to going outdoors, what what would you do if you lived in a very cold weather environment? Let's say you live in Washington, D.C., and it's snowing outside. Well, how about that as a hypothetical? You're not going to be able to do that every single circumstance. But on the days when you can, I would do that. There's even some interesting research that even being able to see greenery can be a restorative. You're not going to be able to have it perfect every single day. You know, if you have that chance to take a break and take certain kinds of break, it's going to help you out. Now, again, I mean, I like your question about

like the reality check of all this. We have the ideal, but let's talk about the lived experience of many people. One of the other things about breaks that we know is that something beats nothing, that even a very, very short break can be helpful. So for those of people who don't have as much liberty to take a break when they want, or the nature of the work makes them have to, like, grind away all day, there's some interesting research of South Korea on what's called microbreaks. One technique, something that I do when I feel overworked and I'm really cranking and I can't escape, is a 2020-20-20 break where every 20 minutes, especially true if you're working at a computer, every 20 minutes look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

And even that can actually replenish your mood, restore a little bit of mental acuity. Other than 2020-2020, what is the ideal duration and frequency of breaks? It depends. It depends on the person. It depends on the time of day. It's something that people should experiment with. There are some claims out there, and I just don't think the evidence is good, that, oh, everybody should work for 52 consecutive minutes and then take a 17-minute break. I think it varies. And I think it's something that people need to test out. So for me, as someone who's more of a lark than an owl, I can go longer in the mornings

without a break than I can in the afternoons. In the mornings, I might go 90 minutes of heads-down work before taking a five- or 10-minute break, whereas in the afternoon, I might have, I mean, literally like a half an hour before I'll take a five-minute break. Right. One of the issues here is helping people become better observers of their own experience. We don't observe our own experience or own conditions as well as we should. Asking yourself, okay, how do I feel right now?

How much did I get done this time of day? In some ways, we've been disadvantaged into believing that we should feel good and sharp all day long. And when we don't, it's our fault rather than the fact that we are human beings with diurnal patterns. formed over tens of thousands of years of evolution. Let's take this concept of timing. We've been talking about a day and let's expand it out to a life. What I thought was really interesting was that, as I mentioned, that pattern of it rises, it falls and it rises again.

It's the pattern that you see in a day and that you see in a really good novel is also in some ways the pattern of our lives. knowing that, what decisions can you make about essentially how to spend your 40s and 50s? Yeah, tell me about it, because that's where I am. I think there are a few things that you can do during that, what seems to be an inevitable down draft. One of them is, again, based on some interesting research. I don't write a lot about this.

I think I might have even just a paragraph about this in the book. But there's some very interesting research on what's called mental subtraction of positive events. So what you can do is you can imagine your life as it is, but then subtract, take away something from previous in your life. So like I would say, like imagine if I hadn't met my wife. Okay. Oh my God. Like I would be in such worse shape than I am right now. Or imagine if one of my kids wasn't born. Oh my God. It's like, it's like chilling, unimaginable. When you mentally subtract positive events, it's a thinking exercise to make people to shine a light on the more positive aspects of their current lives.

The other thing is falling into a trap. It's a midlife trap, I agree, and that what we do is we look at our lives. We don't compare it to a specific. We compare it to an idealized general. So you say, oh, man, what if I didn't choose to become a doctor or an engineer or a police officer? So we look at that because here I am a 50-year-old doctor, police officer, and, oh, you know, it's like, I wonder if I could have done better than that. And we think, yeah, of course I could have done, you know, maybe there is something, but we don't think about it. Okay, so what if instead of becoming a doctor, I became a banker?

We don't have the specific facts of carrying around that, so we compare it to an idealized thing, which is a losing game. Or what if I didn't become a police officer? Instead, I went to law school and became a lawyer. We don't have anything specific to compare our current condition to. We compare it against an idealized generality, which is just a recipe for disappointment. So the answer there is don't do that. You know, the other thing to think about is it might be limited solace, but you're not alone, like what you're going through in this dip in this period in your life. It's not like you're the only one going through it.

Like other people are too. What you're experiencing is pretty normal. If you compare your feelings and you're in this midlife dip to everybody else's Instagram feeds where they're leaving, you know, you're going to say, oh my God, I'm such a loser. But that's actually not the right comparison. Most people are enduring what you're going through. Also, what we know is that it's chances are things are going to get better over time. But, you know, I think there might be some more systematic things that we can do. One of the things that I've always thought, especially in organizations, I think it's a strategic move as much even more than a nicey-nice, move is mentoring in mid-careers. We do a lot of mentoring in organizations for people early in their careers. But if you have somebody, say, in the early 50s, and let's say she's not going to be the CEO, but she's still going to be able to do great work, maybe she could use some mentoring about how to spend the next 20 years of her work life.

So institutionalized things like mid-career mentoring, I think, is a really, really good idea. We haven't seen that yet. That's right. Yeah. And somebody who's 50 years old might still be at that workplace. for another 15 years. Right.

And you want that person to be happy and to contribute. And that person also, you think about the accumulated experience and wisdom of that person. The fact that she's not going to be CEO doesn't mean that she should be discarded. But I do think that person

is at a different stage of their life and could use some mentoring in the same way that somebody who's 25 years old is at a different stage of their lives and needs that kind of mentoring. So I'm 35. Knowing that this is what might come up for me 10 years from now.

How do I make decisions about what my life should look like 10 years from now, knowing this piece of knowledge? I'm not sure that you do. I think that we know in general what brings people some degree of satisfaction. And so it's harder to be satisfied with your life when you're struggling for survival, when you don't know where your next meal is going to come from, when you don't know where you're going to sleep that night. So you have to, you know, get past a struggle for survival. Once you do that, I think. that the evidence is pretty clear that what gives people enduring satisfaction is people who they love and people who love them, some amount of control over their lives, some amount of sovereignty over their lives, and some sense of purpose. No matter your age, that's what people should be aspiring to. They might have different weights, W-E-I-G-H-T-S, at different times of life. At an earlier time of life, you might need to maybe sacrifice one or two of those for accumulation, so you can send your kids to college or whatever.

That's what gives us a sense of satisfaction is not having to struggle for survival and really having a group of people who we care about and who care about us and having a little bit of sovereignty over what we do and how we do it. And then also some sense of that what we're doing is meaningful. Love autonomy and purpose. In some ways, yeah. I mean, in some ways, that's part of what it is. Although I think that if you look at this grant study,

which is a study of a little bit narrow because it was men from Harvard from the 19, I can't remember, maybe the 1920s, something like that. They followed them over long, long, long, long, long, long amounts of time to see who was happy and who was not. It basically came down to love. Like happiness is relationships. Happiness is love, period, full stop. I would put that at the top. I do think that the sense of purpose is extraordinarily important. And I do think that it is our nature to want to have some sovereignty over our lives.

And, you know, I think this is arguably one reason why people gravitate to organize religion, because it gives you a community of caring. It gives you a sense of purpose. And it seems pretty clear to me from the research that people who have a strong religious faith in general are happier and more satisfied with their lives and people who don't have that. I say that as a non-religious person. I say that as a person who just is simply looking at the data. It seems pretty clear that being part of an organized religion makes people happier and more satisfied. When you know that you are at the ending, either at the end of your life or even at the end of your day, for anyone who's listening, what are ways that you can honor that ending? It's a great question, too. There's a lot of research on endings.

Endings have a big effect on our lives. They do all kinds of things. They can help us energize and motivate us. They play a very important role in encoding experiences. So the way that something ends has a disproportionate weight on how people evaluate the totality of the experience, even of entire lives. Endings can help us elevate. So we in general, you prefer rising sequences to declining sequences. Endings can help us get to the essence. If you take these two very different ends of the telescope, so let's take the day. I think there's a good argument for certain kinds of rituals at the end of the day.

And my favorite one and one I practice myself is essentially recording what progress you made during the day. We know from the work of Theresa Mobbile at Harvard that single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress and meaningful work. And so one of the things that you can do is you can essentially record, memorialize what you got done today, what you accomplished today. I think it often ends up being more than people typically realize in the day-to-day mob thing. memorializing your progress at the end of a given day, I think is a very powerful and lightweight and easy to implement technique. When you get sort of older, there's some very interesting research from Laura Carson's at Stanford showing that as people age, the overall size of their friend network, their social network, I mean, they're real social network, not like Facebooker.

You know what? You know what I mean? Like their constellation of friends ends up shrinking considerably after about the age of 60, which seems superficially like. a sad story, but when she, Laura Carsonson, unpacked this, what she found is that the reason for that is that people were shedding the outer circles of friendships and doubling down on the inner circle, the people who are most close to them. If you think of our book as like three sections of, three act play, and act three of our lives, we end up focusing, and Carsonson's whole body of work, it talks about this, about how we move away from making decisions based on excitement, other things based more on generativity and contentment and satisfaction.

And so it could be that a reason why you see this uptick in well-being among people who are post-60 is that they've actually taken affirmative steps to narrow their circle of friends and spend their time with the people who are most meaningful to them. Should we be borrowing lessons from what people are doing in the third act of their life? Or does it make sense to let the third act be the third act and not try to. to read into that too much. So one example would be, should we borrow that lesson and double down on our most intimate friends and let go of the casual acquaintances when we're young?

Or should we, you know, not? I don't know. Because, again, I don't want to diss those casual acquaintances and things like that because they are an incredible source of learning. So if you're in the thick of your professional career, I don't know if you want to narrow your social network down too, too far. The wider your network, perhaps the more you can learn, the more opportunities. You can find what Carson's work has shown is that people end up having different priorities.

So they end up prioritizing less of the, you know, excitement, education, exploitation. My word's not hers. Things like that. It's basically saying, oh, my God, it's like, oh, I want to meet some more people because if I meet more people and go to that networking thing, I might be able to lead me to another opportunity and blah, da, da, da, and then later on, people might say, you know what? I don't really need that because what I really want to do is I want to spend time with my daughter because I'm not going to be here forever. Now, one of the things that Carsonson's work

has also shown is that if you extend the time horizon, if you ask people to imagine you're going to live to be 120, then they end up making very different decisions in their 60s and 70s, because they end up making more of those excitement, education, exploitation decisions. It's really, in some ways, a phenomenon of not so much the actual age, but of the salience of an ending. She found the same kind of thing in terms of college friendships. So over the course of college, their size of their friendship networks will increase. And then by their senior year, there's often a dramatic decrease where people say, you know what, I'm not going to be at this college forever.

And truth of the matter is there are only four people who I really like and care about who are going to be friends for the rest of my life. And I'm going to focus on them rather than on, you know, Johnny from down the hall my freshman year. Well, thank you so much, Dan. Where can people find you if they'd like to know more about you and your book and your body of work? Thanks for having me on the program. Your folks can always go to www.

Danpink.com, d-A-N-P-I-N-K.com. So there's information about the book When and all the other books. I've got an email newsletter, all kinds of free resources, anything and everything a person would want. Thank you so much, Daniel. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? I came up with six, and we're going to go into those key takeaways right after this word from our sponsors. So stick around. Do you have a side hustle or are you a solopreneur or an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur?

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And for a limited time, when my listeners go to grove.com slash afford anything, you will get a free five-piece spring cleaning set from Mrs. Meyer and Grove, a 30-year. dollar value. Go to grove.co slash afford anything to get this exclusive spring cleaning offer. Grove.com slash afford anything. We are back. Thank you for listening to that word from our sponsors. Thank you for supporting the show. Now, what are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation with Daniel Pink? Well, here are six. Number one, if you want to figure out what is the optimal time for you to perform certain tasks, meaning what is the time in which your own personal level of cognition and mental energy will be at its peak for that particular task, then there are three things that you want to consider. So what we have to do in order to figure out the right

time of day to do something is line up three factors. One of them is what's our chronotype? What kind of task are you doing? And what time of day is it? As Daniel says, You'll want to think about your chronotype. Are you a lark? Are you a night owl? Or are you that third bird? You'll also want to think about the type of task that you're performing. Is it an analytical task?

Is it an insightful, imaginative, big picture creative task? Or is it an administrative task? And finally, you'll want to take those two factors, essentially the factors of who are you and what are you doing, which are essentially. what those two questions ask, chronotype and type of task. You'll want to take that who are you and what are you doing and then take those two and contextualize it with regard to the when, with regard to what time of day would be optimal based on those two considerations. For example, I am a third bird that skews towards lark. My energy tends to be highest

early in the morning. I crash midday. And then I peek back up kind of around early evening. And so heads down analytical work, looking at spreadsheets, writing, researching. That should clearly be the thing that I'm doing first thing in the morning. And late late at night, I have had my best brainstorming sessions late at night. When I think about concepts or I think about big picture ideas, the biggest insights that I have stumbled across have been sometimes laying in bed trying to go to sleep and all of a sudden an idea will cross through my mind and I'll be able to synthesize ideas in a new way that I never have done before. If you think about it, analysis is to break something apart and synthesis is to put it back together again. And so

that peak early in the morning for larks and third birds, or that, that, that, peak energy period, that peak cognition period in your day, that is the ideal time for analysis for the breaking apart of ideas. And then you hit a little bit of a slump, you hit that trough. And then when you reach that recovery, that's the best time for synthesis for it all coming back together. By the way, I am recording these key takeaways during my trough period. So clearly I haven't learned anything.

But let's go to key takeaway number two, which is to pay attention. to your energy, pay attention to your cognitive bandwidth, because being more effective in this way, being more effective at the way that you harness and you manage your energy levels and your cognition levels, this gives you an edge. And it's not just a slight competitive edge. It's a pretty serious edge. Let's say I have a company with a thousand people, okay? And you have ratings of how good these people are at their job. There are all kinds of explanations for why some people would be better their jobs than other people, right? Some people work harder than other people. Some people are more conscientious than other people. Some people are smarter than other people. Some people are more social

advantage of, you know, all kinds of things. What this research shows is about 20% of that variance and performance can be attributed to time of day. You know, Daniel Pink at the end of his book writes the line, I used to think that timing was everything. Now I think that everything is timing. I thought that was very well said. Everything is timing. Timing is not everything, meaning timing is not the only factor. But everything is timing, meaning everything that we do can partially be explained or contextualized in the context of how that time of day or how that season of our life affected it. Dan cites the sinking of the Lusitania as, of course, this is all conjecture.

It's only a hypothesis. But he does point out the fact that the captain of the boat had been operating on no sleep and was then at that mid-afternoon slump, that time of day when energy levels wane, even in the best of circumstances, even if you've had a full night's rest, energy levels can wane for a lark or a third bird. in the early afternoon. And so when you combine those two, no sleep, plus it's your trough time of day anyway, does that explain why a very capable captain would have made some bad decisions? Possibly. There's no way of knowing. But the fact that that is, at a minimum, a plausible hypothesis certainly reflects this idea that everything is time.

And that paying attention to that gives you an edge. After all, it's the aggregation of marginal gains, right? This is another marginal gain. Key takeaway number three. Workplaces really do things the wrong way. A lot of workplaces schedule meetings based on availability and logistics, not based on cognitive peak and trough times. But ideally, financial analysis meetings would happen during peak cognitive hours.

administrative meetings would happen during those trough slumps. Brainstorming sessions might happen in the late recovery hours. I think the bigger problem, even a bigger problem than my inadequacies, which are vast, is that is organizations and particularly meetings. When organizations schedule meetings, they use only one criterion in scheduling meetings, and that's availability. They say, hey, is Paula available? is Dan available and is this conference room open?

And that's a huge mistake when you think about how much damn time we spend in meetings in the white collar world. It's staggering. And yet when we schedule them, we don't even ask, what kind of meeting is this? Do we need people to be locked down in focus? Are we going over some important financial data? Are we looking at our expenses trying to cut costs? Is this simply a meeting about the petty cash account?

Is this a meeting where we're brainstorming new ideas? We don't think about that. We don't say, hey, who's going to be at this meeting? Fred the Al or Maria the Lark? We only think about in terms of availability. We're not thinking about these questions of when in a strategic way. We're thinking about them only as questions of essentially like logistics and convenience. And that is slightly wrong.

And the application of this information to people who are self-employed or freelancers, to entrepreneurs, to those who set, their own schedules. I mean, that application is obvious. We know how to rearrange our days. We have the complete autonomy to rearrange our days. Now, there's, of course, the implementation gap, that gap between knowing and doing, but at a minimum, we have the autonomy to bridge that gap if we were to so choose to do so. However, for the majority of people who are listening to this, who you don't have that complete autonomy in your work, you can't change the way that your workplace operates. The way that you can apply this lesson to your life is that you can change the way that you manage

your household, your life, the house meetings and planning meetings that you hold with your family or with your roommates, the brainstorming sessions that you might hold with a spouse or a partner, the administrative work that you do with in your own life, such as laundry, groceries, oil changes, opening the mail. Life requires quite a lot of logistics and administration. and you can, at a minimum, apply these lessons into the management of your own life. So that is key takeaway number three. Key takeaway number four.

This is a brief key takeaway that summarizes the actionable application of today's interview. And I'll let Daniel say this in his own words. Do your analytic work whenever your peak is. Do your administrative work during your trough period. and do your more creative, insight, iterative work during the recovery. There we go. If you take away one action item from this, it's that. Plan your days to the best of your ability accordingly.

Key takeaway number five. Do you remember the interview that we did with the author Laura Vandercam? She's been on this show twice in episode 38 and also episode 147. I'll link to both of those in the show notes. The show notes are available at afford anything.com slash episode 188. That's afford anything.com slash episode 188. At any rate, when Laura Vandercam was a guest on this podcast, she said, and I will never forget this because it was such a quote that really resonated with me.

She said, if you don't take a real break, your brain will take a fake one. And what she meant by that is that if you try to power through or muscle through or you think breaks are for wimps. What's realistically going to happen is that your mind will start to wander. You won't be as focused. You won't be as efficient. You might stare off vacantly into space. You might become more forgetful.

You might scroll social media without even realizing that you're doing it. If you don't stand up and move around and talk to somebody and give yourself a genuine break, your brain is going to take a fake one. and trying to power through is inefficient. And staring at your screen is not a break. Daniel Pink echoes the same advice. We also know about breaks, the importance of full detachment. One of the things we have now is that people aren't really taking breaks.

They're leaving their desk, but they're walking mummy-like down the hall with their nose and their Instagram feed. And that's not a break. If we take more breaks and we take breaks that are social, outside, moving, and fully detached, this is a way to arrest some of the decline of performance. So the action item with this key takeaway is to take many mini breaks throughout the day. And those mini breaks should meet the following four criteria. They should be social. They should be outdoors.

You should be moving around. And you should be fully detached from the work that you're, doing. Now, sometimes you can't meet all four criteria. If you live in Alaska and it's winter and it's nighttime, you probably don't want to go outdoors. So there are realistic barriers that we face in the application of this action item in everyday life. But there are ways that you can implement this within the confines or the constructs of what you're dealing with. So for example, If you work alone or if you work from home, you might be thinking, well, I can't take a social break. I can't take a water cooler break because I work alone from home.

But what you could do is call somebody. Don't text them. Stop looking at your screen for 10 whole minutes. But call somebody and have a brief phone conversation just for five minutes. If you live in a condominium, I do this, I take the elevators of the lobby of my condo just to pick up my mail. And then while I'm doing that, I'll chat with other residents. You know, when we're in the hallways together or I'll end up chatting with the front desk staff. So that's a quick break.

It's a 10-minute break. I'm not leaving my building, but it's still a way to be around other people. You could take a slightly longer break and just go step out on the sidewalk and take a quick stroll up and down your street. Or take an even longer break and go to a mid-afternoon workout class or yoga class, which is social just insofar as you're being in the presence of others. heck, you could go to the grocery store, and even that has an element of socialization to it. Plus, you'll be moving around, you'll be outdoors in so far as getting to and from the store, and you'll be fully detached from your work. So all of those are effective examples of breaks that can improve your focus and your cognition

when you do return to whatever it is that you're doing. And this conversation about how to effectively take breaks and mini breaks, this leads to quote number six, which really very closely ties in. I'm going to keep quote number six as part of key takeaway number five because these two concepts are so closely linked together. And it is not to let your pride or your ego interfere with your willingness to learn from research and science. Because Daniel Pink says in this interview that he never used to take breaks. He thought breaks were wimpy. He thought only amateurs took breaks, but the research indicates otherwise. And it's a testament to his character and to his openness, that when the research contradicted his preconceived

notions, he listened, even if that meant reframing the thing that he took pride in. Because that's another area that I had completely wrong, because I'm someone who never was a big break taker, because I thought, oh, only whims take breaks, only amateurs take breaks. And that's just so flatly contraindicated by the science. What the science shows is that professionals take break. It's the amateurs who don't take breaks. And so as you heard Daniel Pink say, now he takes the 2020-20-20 break. Every 20 minutes, he looks at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. A break can be as simple as that. But he has not let his personal pride or his preconceived notions interfere with his

willingness to adapt and implement what research shows him is a behaviorally more effective way of conducting both his work and his life. So that's key takeaway number five. And finally, key takeaway number six. Speaking of research, the research shows that the strongest correlation to happiness is love, bonding, connection, and the strength of your relationships. If you look at this grant study, which is a study of a little bit narrow because it was men from Harvard from the 19, I can't remember maybe the 1920s, something like that, that followed

them over long, long, long, long, long, long amounts of time to see who was happy and who was not. It basically came down to love, like happiness is relationships, happiness is love, period, full stop. So how do we implement this? How do we actually strengthen our relationships? Now, in the fire community, the financial independence, retire early community, it is tempting, and I see this tendency for a lot of people to oversimplify the way in which they plan on strengthening their relationships by saying, well, quit your 9 to 5 job, retire early, so that you can spend

more time with the people that you love. And that's great, but that's slightly too narrow of an approach because quality time or even quantity time is only one of many variables. If you've read the book Five Languages of Love, that book, offered a framework in which love could be expressed and grown and fostered in a variety of different ways with quality time being only one of many of those forms. So the answer to how to strengthen your relationships, how to deepen your bonds with the people that you're closest to, the people that you care the most about, the answer is not so narrow as simply quit your job so

you can spend more time with them or go part time so you can spend more time with them. That's great. It's a start. But that is, Only the beginning of the answer, it is not the end. Furthermore, if you do spend more quality or quantity time with your friends and family, but you spend that time being a moody temperamental jerk, then that quality time that you're spending with them is going to backfire. People talk often about making sure that you're there to be able to watch your kids' soccer game or to go to your kids' ballet recital.

But the fact of the matter is that if you're going to show up and then criticize the way that your kid kicks the soccer ball, or if you're going to show up and then yell at them because their performance on the soccer field wasn't good enough, that's going to do more harm than good. So showing up alone is not enough. And if you don't have the requisite social grace, then showing up can sometimes be counterproductive. In those instances, your presence does more harm than good. So if the takeaway is that love and relationships are the most important thing, if that is the final takeaway, then what does that mean? It means that we, particularly those of us in the fire community, need to remember that the solution and the implementation of building those relationships is not merely spending more time with people. That alone is insufficient. Rather, we must cultivate a more emotionally aware, socially skilled, highly empathic core self.

Those are skills, life skills that everybody needs to work on. These are lifelong learning skills. And the mere application of quality time alone, which is what many people in the early retirement community aspire to be able to do, that's wonderful. I'm in total support of that goal. But remember, quality time by itself is not a suitable substitute for the life skills of emotional awareness, validating others, making others feel loved and heard and accepted and important. Those are all crucial life skills that can foster relationships. And those skills, regardless of where you are in your financial journey, regardless of where you are in your journey to financial independence,

if that's what you're striving for, those are skills that you can harness and cultivate right now. It doesn't matter if you're $100,000 worth of debt or if you're a deca millionaire. It doesn't matter. You can harness your emotional and social skills immediately today for free. So if the final takeaway is that the most important thing in our lives is love and relationships, well, facilitating that is a skill that we can all work on, all of us,

and we don't need to be financially independent or even financially solvent to do so. We can do it now. So those are six key takeaways from this conversation with Daniel Pink, the author of the book, When, The Scientific Secrets to Perfect Timing. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant, and as I mentioned on a previous episode, Speaking of relationships, I am spending the entire month of April in Austin, Texas. My best friend just had a baby. I Airbnb'd a place, a half a mile from her home in Austin, Texas. I'm spending the

next five weeks here with her. Well, I say next five weeks. I'm spending a total of five weeks. I'm about midway through it at this point. But I'm spending five weeks here with her, the first five weeks of the baby's life, this is a perfect example of what having that financial independence, that freedom, that flexibility can do. I say that in order to communicate the example that when people think about fire or financial independence, people often say, like, well, what are you going to do all day? You know what I'm doing all day. I can tell you exactly. I wake up, I drink a cup of coffee, I journal, I meditate. I listen to a flash briefing of news on the Amazon Alexa through the app.

And then I hang out at my Airbnb for most of the day, reading books like when and interviewing the author, you know, recording podcasts and writing and communicating, like working at this project, this passion project of mine, which is afford anything. I take a midday break to go to a yoga class. And then in the early evenings, I walk over to Mo's house. Sometimes she and I will walk around the neighborhood with the baby, we'll put the baby a stroller and do a walk around the neighborhood. Sometimes I'll spend the evening helping her out with chores and errands. Like I'll go to the grocery store, I'll do some laundry. Tomorrow morning,

at 8.15 in the morning, I'm taking her car into the shop for her because she's a brand new mom and she needs help with that. And I'm spending these five weeks in Austin specifically for the purpose of doing that. So that is when people say, oh, why do you want to reach financial independence? What's the point? What are you going to do all day? It's this. It's so that you can show up and be there for your friends. But again, as I just got finished saying, showing up alone is only a tip of the iceberg. And so for those of you who are not yet in a position in which you can travel to a different state to be there for a friend at a critical time, it's a wonderful thing if you can, but most people logistically cannot. But that doesn't mean that you can't be there for somebody, right?

There are so many ways, even if you're not there in person, that you can be there for someone. You can text them every day, multiple times a day. You can call them. You can listen to them. You can Skype with them. You can FaceTime. You can send them random gifts. You can let them know that they are important and that they are loved and that you are

thinking about them. You can make them laugh. You can send them funny memes. I mean, those are all ways that you foster relationships, that you foster connections without out having to do something as drastic as Airbnb a place that's right by their home for five weeks. That's not how the majority of people foster relationships with their friends and family. And I understand as fire enthusiasts, we want to be exceptional. We don't want to just be part of the stuck majority.

I'm in total support of that. I highly encourage that. And also, I simultaneously want to spread the message that no matter where you are, because I know there are people who are listening to this who are stuck under a mountain of debt and you're feeling frustrated. I don't want you to hear these stories about the post-FI life and then get discouraged and think, I'll never be there. Or I can't be as good of a friend or I can't be as close of a sibling. Or, you know, I don't want you to hear these messages and think that you are in any way. lacking because you are not. Sure, your net worth statement looks a little bit different, but you are in no way lacking. You have the power to make people feel loved and appreciated

and special and to make people laugh and learn and think. So do that. Be you. Spread your specialness. That doesn't require money. It doesn't require being FI. It just requires thoughtfulness. And so I suppose that's the final message that I want to leave you with. FI is wonderful, but you can have a deeply meaningful and fulfilling life and close relationships with or without it. So please don't think of it as this binary zero one. Like right now my life sucks and then I'll reach FI and life will get better. It's not like that at all. You are you.

And at some point, your balance sheet changes. And you make a couple of decisions differently because your balance sheet looks different. And that's about it. That's about all there is to it. But you're still you at the end of the day, for better or for worse. So focus on building a better you and then spreading that better you in a way that impacts more people positively. As long as you do that, then FI can be icing on the cake. But your life will be happy and meaningful either way.

So that is the final message that I want to leave you with. All right. Wow. I have a lot of energy for somebody who's doing this recording in the trough part of the day. Huh. All right. Well, this is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do me a favor. Leave a review in whatever app you're using to listen to podcasts. Also, don't forget to hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any future episodes. and share this episode with a friend or family member, somebody who you think would learn something valuable from today's episode. Thank you again for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant.

This is the Afford Anything podcast. I'll catch you next week.