EntreLeadership - #261: The Science of Perfect Timing with Daniel Pink

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

Whether you’re an electrician or an analyst, a brain surgeon or a salesperson, New York Timesbest-selling author Daniel Pink has discovered a universal truth: When we do our work is just as important as howwe do it. Turns out even the brightest minds aren’t at their best at certain times of the day. Luckily, it’s possible to decipher your own patterns of performance—i.e., when you’re at your peak and when, well, you’re not—and then use that information to your advantage. Tune in to find out how to get your timing right in order to boost performance, make fewer mistakes, and heighten creativity. entreleadership.com/podcast Time Audit from EntreLeadership 14-Day Free Automation Software Trail from Infusionsoft Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. And our feature conversation, this episode is Dan Pink. One of the great thinkers in America. His new book, When, The Scientific Secret of Perfect Time,

will be the focus on our conversation, and I had a blast. Can't wait for that. We've got some great resources coming your way as well, and then get to shine some light on one of our listeners who has taken advantage of one of the free resources we give away. We love applauding you when you win. Well, Dan Pink, should be no stranger to those of you who listen to this broadcast, but if you don't know who he is, I think he's probably one of the great thinkers in America and clearly a great writer, author of six great books, the latest win the scientific secrets of perfect timing. Some of you may know him from a whole new mind or drive or to sell is human. But this guy, again, is a terrific thinker. Every time he does a book, the why he did the book,

the how he gathered the information is absolutely fascinating. If you want to enjoy Dan a little bit more, he can just go search for him on TED Talks, incredible stuff. So let's get right to this. One of the most enjoyable conversations I've had in quite some time. Here is Dan Pink. We're always looking for more howls, aren't we? It's like we live in a how-to-world. Tell me how, tell me how, tell me how, tell me how.

And you have said, wait a second, how about we look at the science behind Wynn? I love this book. How did this idea come to you? Because I know from your past books, you dive deep into the content well before you write it. Give us the backstory. Yeah, the backstory is pretty simple. I was just really frustrated. it. I was making all kinds of when decisions in my own life. You know, when in the day, should I do

certain kinds of work? When in the day, should I do other kinds of work? When should I exercise? When should I start a project? When should I abandon a project? And I felt that I was making these decisions in a pretty sloppy way. And I wanted to make him in a better way. So I started looking around for some guidance. And to my surprise, that guidance didn't exist. And then, you know, as you say, I spent a lot of my time mucking around in research. And it just, out of curiosity, wait a second, there's got to be a little bit of research on this. And I started looking at looking, and that took me down this rabbit hole for two years of this massive amount of research in many, many fields across dozens of disciplines, asking questions like, you know, how does time

of day affect what we do and how we do it? How to beginning shape our behavior? How to ending shape our behavior? What happens to people at the midpoint of something? How do group synchronize in time? It was just this wealth of research and data that hadn't really been adequately accounted for. And so I said, this is the kind of book I need. I mean, I basically wrote this book so I could read it because I wanted to make better win decisions. I wish someone else had written a book because it was a hard book to write. Yeah, exactly. You had to do two years of digging just to write a book that you needed to read in the first place.

Exactly. Well, you lay it out so beautifully. Give us a great little summary there. So we're going to kind of pick and pop here in and out of the book. Sure. Let's start with that first chapter because this was interesting to me. This was by far for me the most enlightening part of the book, there is what you call, it's the first chapter, the hidden pattern of everyday life.

Okay, what does that mean? What's that look like for all of us? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question about what it looks like, because we can draw a picture of it. A mountain of research has shown that we tend to move through the day in three stages, a peak, a trough, and a recovery. Up, down, up. Peak trough recovery. Most of us moved through the day in that order. People who are strong night owls, people who have what's called an evening chronotype who go to sleep late and wake up late, they tend to move through the day in the reverse order. But this pattern, peak trough recovery, is a pattern of our mood,

but it also gives us some hints about the pattern of our performance. And what the research tells us are a few really important things. One, our brain power does not stay the same throughout the day. It changes. This is really essential. I wish someone had told me this before I turned 50. Our brain power doesn't stay the same over the course of the day. It changes. It changes sometimes in dramatic ways. It changes in somewhat predictable ways. And most important, the right time to do a particular kind of work depends on the nature of that work.

Wow. Okay, there's so much here, folks. We're going to stay here. We're going to camp for a minute. The first thing, pages 14 and 15. I like to do book notes for these people so they can get right to it. So page 14 and 15, we see the first graphs of the book. And I'm just going to blast through these, Dan, and then tee you up. Okay. So three graphs, and they all say that people, here's what they put out. Happiness. People feel increasingly happy throughout the morning, less happy in the afternoon, happier again in the evening. Stay with me, folks. There's a pattern. People feel increasingly warm towards others. So you're friendlier throughout the morning, less friendly in the afternoon.

And yet you get that warmth back in the evening. And yes, the pattern holds. People enjoy themselves. So we like ourselves more, Dan, in the morning and less in the afternoon. and morning evening. And I got to tell you, I don't mean to skip ahead here because there's a chapter we're going to get to on rest, but I was listening to you just now and I'm thinking to myself, our friends over in Spain have figured this out, haven't they? Well, you have a really good point there. The answer is yes and no. There is, as you know, there's a whole chapter on breaks and we don't

take breaks seriously enough. We should be taking more breaks. We should be taking certain kinds of breaks. But what's interesting is that this idea of some kind of afternoon rest, which Spain was famous for, is actually not. a terrible idea. There's some science behind it. Now, what's interesting is that Spain itself got rid of the siesta about 12 years ago to try to be more like us. And I'm saying we want to be a little bit. We don't want to go totally Spanish, but we want to be a little bit more like Spain. Because I don't think it's good for business to have, you know, a three and a half hour siesta with giant plates of seafood paella and three glasses of red wine. I mean, it's a really dark and sleepy

day here in Washington. This afternoon, I would have loved it here in my home. But as As a general principle, it's probably not a good idea. But as you say, there is this predictable pattern. And that pattern gives us clues about what we should do when. So what's going on? It's very interesting in all three of those graphs. It proves that there is a natural physiological dip for a lack of a better way to say it. Why is that? What's happening in our bodies? Did you research that? You know, it's hard to actually put a pin in that specifically. Our body is a set of very complex systems. So we have our endocrine system, our system of hormones. Body temperature actually plays a pretty significant role in all of this. And then there are other ways simply to measure alertness. I mean, everything from glucose levels to overall mental sharpness.

So the why behind it is complicated. The what we should do about it is less complicated. And what we should do about it is the following. During our peak, which for most of us is the morning. Again, for night owls, it's later in the day. During our peak, that's when we are most vigilant. And that's the key word in all this research, vigilance. When we're most vigilant, we're able to bat away distractions.

And that makes the peak the best time for doing analytic work, work that requires heads down, focus, attention, energy, writing a report, analyzing data. So during the peak, we should be doing our analytic work. During the trough, as you're saying, that dip, that's not good for very much. A lot of bad stuff happens there. I mean, I'm not joking. I mean, you know from the book. I mean, you have a disproportionate number of traffic accidents. And health care is just an abject disaster that time of day.

I mean, more medical errors, all kinds of other botched surgeries, colonoscopies that are less effective, doctors prescribing unnecessary antibiotics, physicians and nurses inside of hospitals, not washing their hands very often, standardized test scores go down. That trough is not a good time. And so what we should be doing is we should be trying to do as much of our administrative work during that period, work that doesn't require a lot of brain power, answering routine emails, filling out TPS reports or whatever. And then the later stage is actually really interesting. That recovery stage is really interesting because our mood is higher than, as you

suggest from those three charts, our mood is higher than during the trough. However, we're less vigilant than during the peak. And that is a really interesting combination. When we have a higher mood, you're sort of in a better mood and we're a little looser, we're less vigilant. That makes it a good time for certain kinds of creative work, work like brainstorming, iterative kinds of things. And what we should be doing is analytic work in the peak, administrative work in the trough, creative insight work in the recovery. And if we do that, we're going to perform a little bit better at work. And the evidence of this is pretty clear. Time of day explains about 20% of the variance in how people perform on these workplace tasks. So that doesn't mean timing is everything, but it means it's a big thing. And the

problem is that we don't do that. I was just getting ready to say that. You've made it so simple, Dan. Now we just need to actually do this. But you know what? It actually is fairly simple. I mean, this is the great thing about this body of research is that the research is solid and it yields relatively simple things that we can do. It doesn't tell us everybody should begin work at 735 a.m. Work for 52 consecutive minutes. Break for 14 minutes. No, no, no. But it gives us these design principles. Figure out your own pattern of peak trough recovery, put the analytic stuff in the peak, the administrative stuff in the trough, and the insight stuff during the recovery. And unfortunately, we are not very intentional in our individual work, and even worse, in our organizational work about

that. We think that all times of day are created equal. They're not. We think that when we do work is not a strategic decision. It is. And what we have to do is we have to be as intentional about when we do things as we are about what we do and how we do it. Yeah, there's no question about it. I want to add another follow-up here, and this is huge for leaders. When should we be having those relationship meetings, meaning sometimes the confrontation, sometimes the recruitment meeting, maybe interviews. Obviously, I feel like the morning certainly would be good. Is there a case for the evening interview or the constructive criticism type meeting? You know what? It's a really good point. And there are a lot of variables there because you're thinking about, so let's say you're the leader,

you have to think about are you a morning person or an evening person? So are you going through peak trough recovery? Are you going through recovery trough peak? You also have to get a read on what's the other person like? Is the other person at his or her analytic best during the morning or later in the day? And so there are a lot of variables there. So my view is that if you are interviewing somebody for a, let's take a job interview, You're interviewing somebody for a position that requires a lot of analytic focus. You're interviewing somebody for the accounting department, for the auditing department, for the general counsel's office. My advice would be to interview that person at her peak and the odds are good it's going to be in the morning. So interview her when she's at her best.

I think for other kinds of work, let's say maybe a design director or something like that, you might actually want to do it later in the day, assuming that that person is also in the 80, percent who are intermediate or morning people so that during the recovery, they're a little bit looser. But I think that simply asking the question as you're doing is really the way to go. And anything that we schedule inside of organizations, any kind of meeting we schedule inside of organizations, we enlist only one criterion in scheduling meetings and organizations. And that criterion is availability. That's all we care about. And that's a titanic mistake. Yes, it is. What I love here in this book, Dan, I think you've just

struck a wonderful balance between the science and then the practicality on how to apply all this. I just wanted you up to talk about it on page 28. You've mentioned the word chronotype a few times. I think some people are going, okay, how do I figure it out? You've got a real nice system here, three questions on page 28. And then at the back of the first chapter, there's a website. Let me hit it real quick and we'll do it again at the end of the interview. Danpink.com slash MCTQ.

And that's we're going to go to use the questionnaire. but Dan, set this up and tell them how they can do this and really enlighten themselves. It's something called the Munich Chronotype questionnaire. So what's a chronotype? A chronotype is just a fancy word for, are you a morning person, an evening person, or in between? Is your natural state to wake up early and go to sleep early? Do you naturally wake up late and go to sleep late or are you somewhere in the middle? So are you a lark, a morning person, or are you an owl?

About 15% of us are very strong larks. About 20% of us are very strong owls. the rest of us are kind of in the middle. And that's an important point in figuring out how to maximize your creativity and productivity and even your overall sense of well-being during the day. But you can use that questionnaire, which is developed by people in this field called chronobiology, chrono-meaning time and biology meaning the study of life. It's a study of our biological time-based rhythms. In fact, the three Americans who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year, we're chronobiologists. But we can do it in a back of the envelope way,

figure out your chronotype. Oh, let's do it. That'll be fun for everybody. Forty five. We can do it in 45 seconds, all right? Let's do it. On a free day, this is actually the key. On a free day, you don't have to wake up to an alarm clock and you're not massively sleep deprived and catching up on sleep. But on a free day, you don't have to wake up to an alarm clock. What time would you takefully go to sleep? I would say at the latest 11, maybe 1130, if my wife and I are watching a movie after the kids are down because I just can't do that anymore. All right. So let's say 11. All right.

Let's say 11. Now, what time would you typically wake up? Oh, sleeping in for me. On the free day. Yeah, that would be 8 o'clock. I don't think I could sleep later than 8 if it's a good night's rest. Okay. So this is great.

So you're going to go to sleep at 11. You're going to wake up at 8. All right. So what we're trying to figure out here simply is the midpoint of sleep. So your midpoint of sleep in that case would be 3.30. Okay, interesting. So you're right on the border between. between a lark and a third bird. So what we know is that if your midpoint of sleep is

3.30 or before, you're probably a lark. If your midpoint of sleep is 530 or after, you're probably an owl. And if you're in the middle, you're an intermediate, you're a third bird. That's what most of us are. So you are either a lark, but not a super strong lark, or you're an intermediate who's a little larky. I think that I'm the most ordinary person in that. My midpoint of sleep is typically four, just a little bit after you. There's a chart in the book that shows the distribution. But you have a lot of people cluster around there. It's a fairly typical midpoint of sleep for people. And so people like you and me are somewhat larky. But what's important to understand there is that we move to the day, peak trough recovery. We're probably not going

to be like the crazy people who start work every day at four in the morning willingly. But we're probably not the kind of people who want to start work at 10 in the morning either. That seems like, you know, that's too late. I feel like I've wasted half my life. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So what we're looking for is what social psychologist called the synchrony effect. You want to match up your type, your chronotype, with the task that you're doing, and then that will lead you to the time of day that you should do it. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. Again, folks, you can dive into this right there in the book. Okay, now, we're going to jump into chapter two. We already touched on this a little bit with my observation of our friends over in Spain, who first made the siesta a thing,

and then they abandoned it. But you call this chapter Afternoons and Coffee Spoons, and I really want to go to the power of breaks. Sir Ken Robinson brings this up in his latest book, that American inmates get more time outside during the day than our school children. And so I'm not trying to hijack your thing here, but you talk about the importance of breaks. And I got to tell you, this is a bit of a crusade for me because I have three kids in the public school system. I'm for public education. I'm not making a political statement. I'm just saying that we have a Western culture that has turned our kids into these little robots. And good heavens, there's a difference between a little boy and a little girl, I still believe.

And boys, they're rambunctious. They've got to get some time outside. And I know this was a reputable article about Sir Ken Robinson, who I am a fan of. But I'm just going to throw all that at you on top of your chapter on the importance for us as adults, Dan, to have some breaks. I'm just going to give the whole thing to you and let you pontificate. You're totally right. And what the science tells us here is pretty clear. that we should be taking more breaks and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks.

But let's focus on the kids here for a second because I think it's a really urgent issue. There's an important study out of Denmark showing, and it's consistent with other research, showing that kids who take standardized tests in the afternoon score systematically lower than students who take the tests in the morning. Taking a test in the afternoon is equivalent to missing two weeks of school. Now, that's kind of shocking, all right, when we're making decisions based on standardized tests. But to your point, the remedy for that is that if you give these kids a 20 to 30 minutes, it break before they take the test to run around, their scores go back up.

Wow. And so what we know about little people and big people is this. We need breaks. And you're absolutely right in thinking about this idea of this kind of Western notion. It's not even so much only a Western notion. It's almost like an American Puritan notion. Yes, that's true. Where we think that the only way to get work done is to power through, that any sort of fatigue

is a sign of weakness, that any kind of break is. a deviation from performance, that it's more effective to power through, it's morally virtuous to power through, and the science is telling us that is not true. And I'm a sinner here to keep our religious theme going, all right? I love it. I love it. I am a sinner. I am now close to being saved because I was someone who believed in that empowering through. And what I believed was that amateurs took breaks and professionals didn't take breaks. And that's the exact opposite. professionals take breaks, amateurs don't take breaks. And so what we need to do for our kids, for us, is we need to take more breaks,

but also the science yields some very good design principles for the sorts of breaks that we should take. We should be taking breaks, as you say, outside, outside beats inside when it comes to breaks. Moving beat stationary when it comes to breaks, okay? This is the logic of recess right there, verified by the science. Moving beat stationary, outside beats inside, social breaks, beats solo breaks, even for introverts. if you can believe that. That is, we're more restored when we have a break with somebody else. And the other thing, less for the kids and more for the adults,

is the importance of full detachment. Don't bring your phone with you on a break. Don't talk about work during the break. Really just fully detached. And so if people start getting in the habit of, again, we're not going back to the Spanish siesta, but if people start getting to the habit of the afternoon, of taking one or two, 10 or 15-minute breaks,

where they walk around outside with someone they like, talking about something other than work and leaving their phone behind, they're going to have higher performance, they're going to be more creative, they're going to make fewer mistakes, and they're going to be happier. Yeah, you know, it reminds me when I was in my mid-20s, I was running a speaker bureau with several guys my age,

and we would stop every day at 3 o'clock and have a furious foosball tournament for about 20 minutes. Now, that's not walking around, but you can really sweat playing foosball. I think it's underrated. Here's the thing. It's social. It's social.

It's social and it's fully detached. So I think that's good because it's hard to look at your phone while you're playing foosball. That is true. And it's hard to talk about work when, to me, as a sometime foosball player, the essential element of effective foosball player is the ability to trash talk. So you can't really talk about work while you're playing foosball. It is so true. See, we need more foosball tables than American offices.

You know what I? And think about it, there's less HR issues there than with maybe the dodge ball tournament outside that nobody sanctioned. You know what I mean? So there's so much to cover here. I told you folks we're going to not be able to get it all. But I feel like I want to move in in some of our remaining time here. Part two of the book. So we just covered a bit of part one, which is the day.

And let me lay this out for you folks because, again, this is a must read. You need to run, get this book. Part one is the day. Part two is beginnings, endings, and in between. and then he wraps up with part three with sinking and thinking. I just want to tee you up to say whatever you feel is really good for our audience here of leaders and go-getters, high achievers, personal growth junkies. You know, you really address a lot of things here, but really it's about beginnings. And if we get back to the title of the book, which I love your entire context here, which is when, when to begin, when to start anew.

You know, you really cover a lot with starting right, starting again and starting together. I'm just teeny up again. And tell us what you learned, the science behind beginnings. Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff there. And beginnings matter significantly. The most important one for personal development and for leadership, it's this, that certain days function as what researchers call temporal landmarks. So what does that mean? Temporal landmarks.

It means that there's certain dates that stand out in time the way that physical landmarks stand out in space. So if you think about a physical landmark in space, what does it do? It gets us to slow down and pay attention. And so certain dates have that effect on us. They also have this really peculiar mental effect in that they change our mental accounting. So on certain dates, we essentially open up a fresh ledger on ourselves, the way that a business would open up a fresh ledger at the beginning of a year, beginning of a quarter. We relegate our bad selves to the past and say, hey, I'm going to start again.

These are what researchers at the University of Pennsylvania call fresh start dates. And it turns out that we're more likely to do things like begin an exercise regimen or begin a new diet or some kind of program of behavior change on these fresh start dates. And if we're more likely to begin something, we're more likely we have no chance of enacting it if we don't begin. So these fresh start dates actually have a huge, huge value. Now, we know about New Year's Day as a fresh start date. And I think that in some ways we've gotten the New Year's day story wrong. We say, well, half of resolutions are broken for New Year's Day. And to me, I look at that and say, wow, half of resolutions are kept? That's remarkable given, I mean it, given how difficult it is to

change people's behavior. And so that's the power of these fresh start dates. So the takeaway here for whether you're a leader, whether you're an individual contributor, is to pay attention to these dates. So if you want to start, say, a new program at work or, you know, your own new exercise regimen, or some kind of of change initiative inside of an organization. You have to actually be conscious of the time. You're going to have a slightly better chance if you started, say, on a Monday rather than on a Thursday. If you started on the first of the month rather than on the 13th of the month. If you started on the first day of the quarter rather than on the 14th day of a quarter, if you started on the one-year anniversary of someone being at the company rather than three days before that one-year anniversary.

And so it's just another case where when we make decisions, we often know. neglect the when aspect of it. And if we bring that into our decision making, we will make better decisions. Yeah. And then you cover midpoints and endings. I want to tee you up to just talk a little bit about each of those very important chapters. Yeah. So, you know, again, our lives are episodes. They have beginnings. Anything that has a beginning and an ending by its very nature has a midpoint. And so midpoints, midpoints have two effects on us. Sometimes they bring us down. Other times they fire us up. So there's some interesting research showing that when you give teams a certain amount of time to do their work, during the

first part of their time period, they don't do very much. They do very, very little. It's only when they get to a certain moment where they really get galvanized. And over and over again, according to the work of Connie Gersick at Yale, is midpoint, the exact midpoint. So you give a team 34 days to do a project. They get started in earnest on day 17. So team leaders can use that midpoint, say, hey, it's the midpoint, we wasted half of our time, we got to get going as a way to motivate people. There's also some really good research from the NBA and from the NCAA men's basketball showing that teams that are trailing by one point at halftime are more likely to win the game than teams that are up by one point. In general, having a lead at halftime makes it much more likely

you're going to win the game. I mean, that's not a big surprise. The games have to over and you have more points. But the one exception to that is that teams that are, down by one are more likely to win. Being down by one at halftime in the NBA is equivalent to being up by two. And so if you're a leader, you basically want to be aware of midpoints, use them to wake up rather than roll over, and then suggest to your team, hey, we're a little bit behind because they can really bring it in that second half. As for endings, ending stuff is so interesting. Endings have multiple effects on our behavior. And once again, we need to be conscious of how endings affect how we remember experiences, how we remember lives, how we remember

consumer transactions. Endings can also have a galvanizing effect on our behavior. Endings end up being an important source of meaning as well. And so once again, if we're conscious of the fact that we are, you know, this interview had a beginning. It had a midpoint. And it's going to have an ending, right? I mean, everything that we do is episodic that way. And we just, for whatever reason, and we haven't been taught that that's an important feature of things. And so if we're just kind of wide on our eyes and ears a little bit, we can say, wait a second, there's timing decisions everywhere. And if I'm a little bit more awake, I can make those decisions better.

There's so much good stuff in this. The final chapter you challenge us to think in tenses. And I remember what I first reviewed the book. And I was reading it. I went, oh, that's an interesting way of saying it. And I really love what you're challenging us there. I think it would be a great way because our time is. drawing nigh, and I want to give you a chance to challenge us on this idea of thinking and tenses.

And I will tell you, I love how you finish the book with a very, I used to believe, and then what you believe now as a result of this book, I want to give it to you to challenge us all. Yeah, I guess my big challenge would be a couple of things. So at a very, very deep level, what we have to recognize is this, that we are time-based creatures, we human beings, all right? There's talk about a biological clock. What chronobiologists know is that we essentially have a biological clock in every cell in our body. We are time-based creatures. We are in a temporal world, right, as we were talking about before, a world of episodes that have beginnings, middles, and ends. It's freaky to think about it sometimes because time is so abstract and

a little bit weird. You know, you and I began this conversation in the past. We're going to end it in the future. Whoa, that's kind of heading right there, right? But what we have to realize is that we're time-based creatures who are moving through time. It's a huge part of our life. And if we're aware of it, and here's, I think, the most important thing, if we're intentional about the kinds of decisions that we make, if we take these when decisions as seriously as we take these what, who, and how decisions, the evidence is very clear. We're going to work smarter and we're going to live a little better. Yeah, there's no question about it. Well, he is Daniel Pink. When is the book, The Science scientific secrets of perfect timing.

This is a absolute must read. It's an easy read. It's a fun read. Thank you. And again, Dan, I'll let you tee this up because there's a lot of practical. Okay, now let's put some exercises into play here at the end of several chapters. It allows you to take the science and the theory and the challenges from each chapter and put it in place. Hit the website one more time where folks can get the most out of the book.

Yeah, they can go to my website, Danpink.com. A-N-P-I-N-K-com. There's some resources there. And again, as you say, you know, each chapter of the book, I talk about the science, what it all means, but then each chapter, at the end of it, I have what I call the Time Hacker's Handbook. So it says, okay, you've learned about beginnings. Here are some specific practical tactical ways to take advantage of beginnings. We've talked about breaks. Here's some specific practical tactical tactical guidance on how to take the right kind of breaks. Talked about, you know, synchronizing with others. You know, here's some practical tips, takeaways and tools. for synchronizing better with others. So I'm trying to marry the practicality of it along with the science. And my view is that those two things work together well. That is, the science gives credibility to the stuff that's practical. But I also think that when people start putting things in practice, they understand the ideas better. So to me, those work really, really well together. At least that's what I'm trying to do. Oh, no, it absolutely does. It's very transferable. I got to tell you, folks, I get as much, if not more out of these conversations as you do. I ask to learn,

on your behalf, and I got to tell you, it's 417 here, Central Standard Time in Nashville. As we wrap this, I am going to sign off in a few moments, folks. And because of Dan's influence, I'm going to turn the studio lights off and take a quick snooze. Say about 20 minutes or so because I'm a lark. And this lark needs to be able to get his energy boosted. No, this was great fun. It's always good to have you. I know your time is incredibly valuable.

and you've been a multi-guessed here with us, and we appreciate you. We really do. I love your writing, and you're a good friend to all thinkers and leaders, and we appreciate you for hanging out with us. Thanks for having it. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. Big thanks to Dan Pink for hanging out with us. That's an interview that I could have done for three hours.

No question about it. The new book, When, The Scientific Secret of Perfect Timing, You Need to Run, go get it, and dive into it and apply it. Speaking of applying stuff, the Entree leadership team always bringing you a free resource every episode. This episode, we're featuring our time audit. Now, you just heard Dan Pink and I talk about the importance of tracking your time. So this time audit is perfect. It's going to give you a time tracker chart that has your day blocked off in 30-minute blocks so that you can rank each activity as important, less important, time-waster, or hate it. And by the way, this isn't just an individual resource. This is great for your teams.

You want to take advantage of this because it is, you think of something like this and you think, well, man, this is going to be difficult to do. Well, no, the team at Andrele leadership has made this so simple. So here's how you get it. Text the phrase, time audit. Just smash those two words together for a phrase. Time audit. Text that to 33444.

That's 33444. Now, when you get this tool, start auditing your time. And for those of you that's starting to make some great progress, take a picture of your chart, and email us. Podcast at entreleadership.com. That's podcast at entreleadership.com. Speaking of winning with your time, I tease this at the top of the program. Ben Jacobson is one of you, mid and women who listens on a regular basis. He gotten connected with all access, which is our amazing community, where leaders are going deep-dive.

with our coaches and others, their peers, around the country. So we got on the phone, I guess, or was dealing with an all-access coach. And the story is he realized that he was not using his time effectively. So one of our coaches suggested he track his time with our tracker. So he did. And here's what's huge. He went the extra step and did 15-minute blocks. So he made this thing his own, which is what we expect you to do, however it works for you. And so now, he has seen huge gains in efficiency and productivity. And so he's able to bill his work hours correctly, spend more time with his family because he's being efficient. And here's the best part. His business is growing and he's ready to start scaling. So here's a guy, Ben, who has been a

solopreneur. And when you're that, you're the Chief Everything officer. It's hard to get control of your time. But he did and he did it because he used our time audit tool. Chad Kirby from Infusionsoft joins me on the line. Always good to have you on with us, Chad. And, you know, we mention Infusionsoft every episode because you're constantly giving our audience some great tools, resources, guides, ebooks. The list goes on and on and on. But some of our newer members of the listing audience may not know who InfusionSoft is. And we love the organization, but we love the mission. Take a moment and tell these fine folks who Infusionsoft is and what InfusionSoft does. Absolutely. So one thing that we do, Ken, we are passionate about making small businesses successful. We want entrepreneurs to achieve the success that they were hoping for when they started their business.

And so we do that by creating a system for them to be successful. And so what does that mean? Well, to be clear, InfusionSoft is a tool that allows you to run your business so that you can speak to your audience intelligently, and it allows you to manage your customers' interactions. For example, it allows you to capture your leads and nurture those leads so that in the end you close more sales and get your customers to want to buy from you again. And so it helps clarify your message and allow you to deliver it in a way that is based upon their level of engagement, not yours. All right. And then how would these small business owners who are saying,

all right, Chad, that's definitely where we need to be. And it's where we want to be. So how do they get connected and begin at least the process of just kicking the tires? You know, Ken, there's one thing that we've always toyed with doing here at Infusionsoft. And that's giving people a free trial of the software. And we've never done it with any partner. And so because of the relationship, we have with Entree leadership, we decided this is the perfect partner and the perfect opportunity to try the free trial. So let me tell you what we're going to do, Ken. We want to welcome everyone in the Entree Leadership community to join us here in InfusionSoft and try Infusion Soft for a 14-day free trial. And then you can see how it can empower you to leverage automation and leverage the

software of Infusion Soft to help grow your business. That's a pretty sweet deal because they get to keep all the results, even if they decide not to move forward, they get to keep all the goodness that you've tilled up for them, huh? Absolutely. It's a wonderful learning experience. And if you're the right fit for us, great. We'll move full speed ahead. But if you're not, you take what you learn and keep moving forward in your business. All right. I want to ask you a question that, again, whether they engage with Infusionsoft or not, there's some practical advice here I want you to share. And that's when you're changing systems within a business. That's always scary to leadership and many times to the team that is, you know, tasked with making those changes happen. Oh, our system

works fine now. Sure, we'd love it to work great, but they're always scared. And that's something I'm sure you guys encounter. Oh, absolutely. People think, uh, you know what, I just don't want to change yet. They're hesitant. They get stressed out about something new. But as my wife tells me all the time, whenever she asks me to do something, she always says, Chad, successful people do it now. that's the reality. They have to stop and go now. I need to do it now. And there is no risk, Ken.

Again, we have never done this with any partner before, but there's no risk. And they can say, okay, this is something I've heard about. Marketing automation is, I read about it in Entrepreneur magazine. I hear about it on Entree leadership. I hear about the importance of having marketing automation. But to stop and do it now is the key. And we're doing it. it for an opportunity for you to have no risk at all.

That's right. Come on, folks. Seriously, why wouldn't you try some marketing automation for 14 days? You get it set up. They're going to help you do it. You set it. You want to talk about working smart. How about watching your favorite TV show or sporting event knowing that your customers

are hearing from you? You know what I'm saying? I mean, it's that kind of peace of mind. And speaking of peace of mind, there's zero risk. 14-day free trial. You can click the link for the. the free trial in this episode show notes. Chad Kirby's going to be back with us again. He's at all of our big events. We love the folks in the Fusion Soft. We use them. They are amazing people. We don't talk

about them every episode because we have to. We like them. They do good work. 14 day, free trial. Move on it right now. Get the link in this episode show notes. This is exciting. Got a new guy in the studio. Actually, I'm in the studio. He's behind the glass looking at me, making sure that I do what I'm supposed to do. It's intense pressure I deal with, folks. You just need to know that. No, he's a great guy. His name is Tim Hull, and he is in the position of editor. So that is the guy who is making me sound better than I sound, making sure you get high quality audio coming to you in your ears because we take your ears very, very seriously. Jim Bab is moving on up the ladder to work full time on our All Access video production. You'll hear more about that in the days ahead. So,

excited to welcome Tim Hull. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. Thrilled to have you with us, as always, on behalf of Will the producer, Tim, the engineer, and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.