Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 129: Daniel Pink, 'When' Can Make a Big Difference

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

"All of us in our lives make decisions about when to do things. 'When should I work out? When should I do this kind of work, when should I do that kind of work? When should I start a project, when should I abandon a project?' ... and the best time of day to do something depends on what that something is," said Daniel Pink, a New York Times bestselling author whose new book is called "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing." Pink, who was trained as a lawyer and now runs his own company as an organizational management expert, argues that doing certain tasks either during the "peak, trough or recovery" periods of our energy levels, can be more effective, whether it's when to hold a meeting to get the best ideas or when to exercise to get a fulfilling workout. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

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I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, on the show today, why the time of day you choose to do stuff from meditation to exercise to key work activities matters much more than you might think. That's coming up from our guest, Daniel Pink. But we're going to start here with your voice mails. And before the voice mails, my usual caveat, which is I'm not a mental health professional, I'm not a meditation teacher, just a reporter who happens to meditate. I have not heard these questions before they're played to me, so I just do my best to answer

mostly from personal experience. So here we go. Here's question number one. Hi there. My question is, what do you do when you are a parent? And in my case, I'm home alone with a lot with my kids because my husband travels. And there are just nights where they're so little sleep. And when I use the app, I definitely feel better, but I have to pray or to sleep sometimes.

And it's really hard to pick and choose. And so I'm kind of curious as to how you do that in that phase of life when the kids are really little. You know, also I think that a show dedicated to single parents would be something amazing because I think as a community we can all do a lot more to support that group. And I think that meditation would the amazing, but also just setting up that habit for them would be really challenging and would be interesting here in experts or some more thoughtful take on it. Anyway, thank you a lot for your work and have a great day.

Bye. Great points. Great question. Great suggestion. I feel you're paying. To certain extent, I'm not a single parent clearly, but I do have a three-year year old around the house and I know what it's like to be woken up in the middle of the night or woken up before you want to be woken up in the morning. It's really hard.

So I think the thing to know is that this isn't going to last forever for better or worse. I think we will actually miss a lot of this stuff ironically when it's over, but it's not going to last forever. Our kids are not going to be young. And you need to stay sane. And sleep is incredibly important. And I would not skimp on it. And so just my own, if it was up to me, for what I do with my own personal life is,

I optimize for sleep. You just can't function without it. Just studying, you should go back and listen to the episode we did with Ariana Huffington who just talks about how it's like drinking and driving when you haven't slept. It really is debilitating. So I would, and I know it sounds to me that you're committed to meditation as well, and I know that can be tough

to try to fit it all in when you've got so many demands work, your kids. So what I would say is definitely sneak that nap to meditation as well, and I know that could be tough to try to fit it all in when you've got so many demands, work, your kids. So what I would say is definitely, you know, sneak that nap in so that you can't, because if you don't, you're gonna be, it's gonna be tough for you to be the way you wanna be, I think, with your kids.

And then maybe shoot for really short meditations. If you're using the 10% happier app, you know we've got a lot of one minute meditations on there, two, three, four minute meditations. Do that and just know that, you know, right now may not be the time in your life when you're going to be able to do as much meditation as you want. But one thing we see very clearly in meditation is that everything changes and you will get to a point where you can give it the attention you deserve right now, the people who deserve

your attention the most or your critters. If you were up to me, that's what I would advise. Hope that helps just a little bit. Yes, so just bottom line, definitely do sleep as much as you can and stay with the meditation. Just go with the short ones. All right, here's a second call. Hi, Dan. This is Elliot from Virginia.

Thank you for everything that you do. Reading your books and listening to your podcasts has truly been life changing for me. So thank you. My question revolves around one of your favorite subjects time. I've been doing 10 minutes a day for some time now and I want to go up to 15 minutes and I'm drawing number of 15 minutes. So I'm kind of worried that if I jump up to that, it'll become harder for me to stick with. So my question is, how do you advise folks to, if they want to, how do you advise them

to increase the amount of time they're meditating whether to do it gradually or some other way. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. Thank you. Yeah, I love this subject. And I had to learn a lot in writing my last book. I had to learn a lot about what it takes to change a habit, to change your behavior. And it is really hard.

And the thing to know is, as I said in the book, we're wired to fail. That evolution did not leave us with a mind that is really good at evolution didn't care about brushing your teeth, it just cared about getting your DNA into the next generation. So we're just not equipped to do this stuff seamlessly and easily. So I think it's great if you want to boost the amount of time,

10 minutes to 15 minutes sounds like a nice manageable leap. I would say that from what I can tell, in my own personal experience, and from what I've read, and talking to experts, that given that we are wired to fail, the best attitude with which to approach the formation of a new habit or in your case the expansion of an existing one is with a spirit of experimentation. Just give it a shot. See if it works and be willing to fail and know that if you fail it's not truly a failure. It's just, as Thomas Edison has reputed to have said, I've never failed, I just tried 10,000 things that didn't work. And you just gotta try, you know,

maybe that 15 minutes will work better in the afternoon or maybe the first time you try it, you know, it doesn't stick, but the second time it does. Maybe it works better in the morning. Maybe there's a teacher on the app that you really like whose meditation is actually get you there more seamlessly. Maybe 15 minutes becomes something you do three times a week instead of seven days a week.

So I think there's a lot there to play with. I think going into it it and without making the thing all overheated and supercharged and freighted, will in my view, I think it will boost your chances of success. So give that a shot and then leave me a voicemail. Let me know how it goes. If you, listener, want to leave me a voicemail, here's the number, 646-883-8326-646-88383-8326,

I suspect my brilliant producers chose that second voicemail because it leads perfectly into our guest today who's going to be talking about timing. How you manage your time when is the best time to do things. His name is Daniel Pink. He's written a bunch of. Huge best selling books, but his newest successful book is called When. The scientific secrets of perfect timing. So let me just say before we get into this that this Daniel represents a bit of a pivot that we're actually trying to do on this podcast, and I'd love your feedback on this on Twitter,

or anywhere else that you want to give me feedback. We're going to pivot slightly in the podcast to some guests who aren't meditation focused. We've done a little bit in the past. I think we're going to do more of it now, and Daniel is an example of that. We do talk about meditation to a certain extent, but that's not really his main interest or the main thing that we end up discussing. Really, I think we're kind of, we're going to still do a ton of meditation stuff on this podcast forever. It's because it's

such a huge interest for me. Most of the voicemails will be about meditation. Most of the guests will be talking about it But we are gonna start having more guests on here. We talk about just happiness and well-being more broadly And I think we're moving toward an era where this show will be about helping you get your I want to say a word that starts with S but I'm not allowed to helping you get your stuff together on every level with a huge focus on meditation. So, Daniel is a perfect example of this because he's written a ton of stuff about work, about management, about behavioral science.

He's a fascinating guy. As I said, he's got many, many best-selling books. He had a book called Drive, a book called To Sell Is Human, a book called Free Agent Nation. And in his interview, while we do talk about meditation, we actually go through each of these books and you get some bullet points that are super useful from all of this research he's done on all the books he's written. So, I'll shut up now, and here he is, Daniel Pink. You mentioned to me, and I cut you off and said, save it until we get on the podcast, that

you've tried to do a little bit of meditation. To tell me how that came about and what the results were. Yeah, so in the past I've tried meditation and it was always very, very difficult for me because my mind started wandering. I got impatient once or twice, I would kind of dose off. And so I gave it up, but I actually Dan picked up

your book because I am the quintessential fidgety skeptic. I'm actually less skeptical about meditation because I know that some of the research on it, but I am the most fidgety person around. I mean, you've already seen me here when I come into the studio. I've already, just in my position a couple of times, I've taken up my jacket, I've taken up my glasses, I'm a fidgety guy. And so I'm trying to get better at it. And I think there's a big, I think there's a huge, huge advantage in it. And it actually connects to some of the research

I've done on timing as well. When you described what you called, well, you didn't use the word, but the implied word was failed meditation. Yeah. That sounded to me was failed meditation. Yeah. That sounded to me like successful meditation. Okay. Sitting down, seeing that you're totally distracted and occasionally falling asleep and feeling

like a failure, that sounds like successful meditation with one missing ingredient, which is the knowledge that that is successful meditation. In other words, if you know going in, I'm going knowledge that that is successful meditation. In other words, if you know going in, I'm gonna get distracted a million times, I fall asleep, but that actually is meditation then you're really killing it. That, and that actually was helpful in your book

about Fijidae skeptics and that saying that, oh, okay, this is okay. Like the fact that I only, I don't know the right term, in fact, I only hold the meditative stance for four seconds. That's, that would be really long. That would be a, that's, that's, that's a victory. Half of one second would be a victory. I'll take it. So, oh, wow, I feel so much better about myself now. You should. You should. Before we dive into your new book, I actually want to talk about your new book and your previous books,

tell me a little bit about yourself and your personal history and why meditation would be interesting to you at all. Yeah, I might come out in a somewhat different angle than some people. I actually come out from, became intrigued by it from the research angle. Looking at what some of the science has told us about

meditation and its benefits, and it seems to me looking at the research, it's overwhelmingly positive. That it's one of those things, somewhat akin to physical exercise, that is all good. And so that had me thinking, well, why am I not doing this? And as like any other human being, I'm feeling at moments in my life, certain levels of stress, certain levels of confusion. And so here's this thing that scientifically validated and could be an antidote to stress and confusion. I'd be crazy not to try it. However, I mean, I think that I fell into the rabbit hole that that you that you suggest and thinking that there's a certain way it has to be done and that

success is measured by going into some kind of perma trance for an extended period of time and good luck with that right and and so taking these little you know nibbles at the apple i think is is actually a positive what's interesting to me is that you spend your life looking at the apple I think is actually a positive. What's interesting to me is that you spend your life looking at science around the mind and how we behave. So to you, as you said before, you were fidgety but not a skeptic. Because this is your world. So tell us a little bit about how you got into doing what you're doing. I know you went to law school and you famously and hilariously said in one of your TED talks

that you were the guy in law school that made the top 90% possible. Indeed, I was. I was. I haven't gotten any thank you from my law school classmates for that one yet. Yeah, so anyway, so it's like like most of us, I got to what I'm doing in a meandering somewhat half-ass way. So I grew up in in central Ohio, the classic Midwestern background. I went to college. I went to law school. It's Western, right?

Yes, indeed. I went to college. I went to law school because whatever. Yeah. You went to, you got to a really good law school because Yale obviously is one of the best. Yeah, I was a pretty good student, you know, but that doesn't really mean it.

That doesn't really mean anything. So, so I went to law school, realized, okay, I'm not gonna practice law, but I was really interested in politics. So I worked in politics for a while. I was a political speech writer. For Al Gore, right? Indeed, I was a Al Gore speech writer for a while.

I was really interested in politics. And then when I got into the belly of the beast, I said, whoa, this is not how I want to spend the rest of my life. Why? Well, part of it was, I found it to be an, you know, I went in with some degree of idealism, but not a kind of blind idealism.

And I was amazed at how deeply cynical the world was. And I found that if I was to continue to be in a world that cynical, that inevitably would seep into my pores, it would seep into my bones, and I would end up being this incredibly cynical, narrow-minded, purely tactical kind of person. The other thing though, was that throughout my life,

or at least my post-18 life, I was always quote unquote writing on the side. So even when I was in college, when I was in law school, especially when I was in law school, I was writing magazine articles on the side i was writing up ed on the side and i'll be where your grades sucked

yeah but the articles were in fact yes no no yeah yeah so you were the signals were there but i what well there you go that's exactly the point which is exactly the point so even when i was working in politics i was quote unquote writing on the side so finally i'm in my early thirty wife says to me, Hey, this thing you're doing on the side might be what it is that you actually do. And so I quit my job. My wife kept her job kept our health insurance. And what's her job? She was, she was a lawyer for the Justice Department.

Okay. So she, she succeeded. Yes. Oh, yeah. She's a very skilled lawyer until I convinced her to leave law. So I'm going to put a pin in that that when i hear that story that your soul so so uh... so i so i decide i'll got what i'm going to do and maybe i'm actually constituted to be a writer again this is a discovery i made in my early thirties so i go out and i try to be a writer and basically saying what am i really deeply interested in now let me take a quick

reverse back to my earlier life. I was actually a linguistics major in college. I did actually some original research as an undergraduate in linguistics, but of course it's like, okay, I'm not going to go get a PhD in social sciences because I'm a kid from the Midwest and that's not going to be any kind of economic security, but at some level, maybe that's what I should have done. And so this combination of forces, hey, you're really interested in social science. Hey, you want to be a writer.

Suddenly, three decades into my life, I say, wait a second, maybe this is what I should be doing. And so forgive that incredibly tortured, long-winded answer. No, that's great. No, the urn, you're in a safe place for tortured, long-winded answer. We traffic in that. So more, please. So when you say you got interested in social sciences and that's where the kind of books you started to write or articles you started to write, say more, like what were the topics specifically that you got in?

Well, I mean, I was actually really interested in work and in economics, especially. So the first book I wrote was a book called free agent nation which is about people leaving large organizations to go to work for themselves as i started writing that book i thought i was really a book about economics was about here are the inextra forces of information age capitalism that are scattering people out of firms out on their own and when i actually went and reported it which is always a valuable thing to do do. And for that book, I traveled around the country interviewing people who had left large organizations to go work for themselves. I discovered that, yeah, it was partly an

economic story and partly a technology story. But it was mostly a psychology story. It was mostly people saying, I wanted to live a different kind of life. I wanted a sense of autonomy. I wanted some degree of meaning. I didn't want to squander my time here. And that surprised me that it was about these other kinds of motives. And I guess at some level, there is an overlap, a synergy between what our desires are as human beings and what we do on the job. And at some level, work, which might be a through line in some of the books that I've

written, we spend over half of our waking hours at work. And so it becomes this place where you can understand what makes people tick, what's driving them, how do they perform, what do they care about? How do they interact with others? What are their stresses? What are their struggles? And so, so seeing human behavior take place, not in a laboratory setting, but in this really yeasty setting of the workplace is fascinating. You get insights into who we are. When did you write for ageination? 2001. Okay. Do you think it is still true? Yeah, and accelerating slowly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean

I remember I wrote for age a nation I just a labored argument for why this was gonna continue And that was and some of it was technology, but remember 2001 is before smartphones It's before social media. It's before Uber and the giga-connate web 1.0 It's before Uber and the giga-con. Right, it's Web 1.0. It's before widespread broadband. Yeah, you know? Right. And so I think that a lot of the forces that are pushing us in that direction

have only deepened and accelerated. Is it a good thing? It's a thing. I mean, I think the glass is half full rather than half empty, but it's not a uniformly good thing. And it's one of those things where I think that our policies haven't reckoned with these changes. The biggest shift in work is not so much,

oh, do you get a W2 or 1099? That's a bogus distinction. That's the distinction that a lot of people have made. Or are you an independent contractor or an employee? That's nonsense. I've been working for myself for 20 years. I get a W2 because I'm an employee of Daniel Pink Incorporated.

So like that whole way of organizing things doesn't make any sense. I think what's going on in the world of work and it's something that our policies haven't reckoned with is that there's been a massive shift of risk from organizations to the individual. That's the big thing. And that's true whether

you are an independent contractor, whether you're freelancer, whether you're self-employed, whether you're a small entrepreneur, or whether you're working inside of a company. Well, why is it that I work for Disney and massive corporation? Why is the risk shifted to me? How is the risk shifted to me? On a couple of different dimensions. Number one, you have some people who are basically making a very rational decision. They're saying, if I put all of my human capital in one organization and one company, I'm not diversified. So if I get canned, which I could easily be,

I could easily get canned, I'm done. But if I have multiple clients and customers, if one goes away, that's not good, but it's not the end of the world, I'm diversified. Now, of course, no one would ever get rid of the great Dan Harris. But all of us have that kind of risk. But the other thing that's happened,

and here I can actually assure that everyone will turn off this podcast, let's talk about pension policy here for a moment, all right? Because the other thing, but this is actually telling. Well, the other thing that's happened over the last 20 or 20 or 30 years is that, and it's a great example of the shift of risk, is that, for instance, my father, my father had what was called a defined benefit pension. That is, when he left his job after many years, he would get a check every month.

My mother still gets a check from that defined benefit pension. You and I have 401Ks. That is, we don't have, we have to actually take our own money and invest our own money in a 401K in order to have any kind of retirement savings. The burden of saving for retirement has shifted from the company to us. You see the same thing with healthcare. It used to be that companies were paying almost the lion's share of health insurance premiums. Now, employees are playing much more of the health insurance premiums. Other companies are moving to things like health savings accounts are just giving you a lump sum of money to do with what you want. Same thing is true in education and training. A lot of large firms had giant education and training

outfits inside of the firm. Now they say, I don't know, if you're only gonna be here for two or three years, why should I devote a huge amount in education and training? Instead, maybe I'll give you a $500 stipend so you can buy some books or take a course. And so all over and over again, the risk has shifted from the organization to the individual. Now, that's, I think that's

morally neutral, but you have to have policies that ensure that people don't get screwed because of that. You said it was, you, what you learned in the process of reporting the book was it was not just an economic story, not just a technological story, but also a psychology story. Right. What do you mean, can you add some? Yeah. So, not just a technological story, but also a psychology story. What do you mean, can you add some to that book? So here's, okay, here we go. So here's what happened. And again, this is the advantage of,

I think in terms of understanding things, of actually reaching something, resembling the truth, of drawing on both the hard science of research and some amount of journalism and reporting and storytelling. So I had people say things like this. You know what Dan, another reason I left this big company is I felt I wasn't making a contribution.

You just think about that phrase right there. It was commonplace. What does that mean when you say I oh, I wasn't making a contribution? At some level, it is, I mean, again, I don't wanna glorify this or over-intellectualize it, but at some level, it is existential. People wanna know what happened is people would come into large companies

and they would do stuff and it seemed like it didn't matter. Like nothing would happen. They would write a memo, go to a meeting, and like the world didn't change at all. And then you start wondering, what if I didn't show up? Would anybody care one way or another? But you said you didn't want to glorify it, but let me do that because I mean, there's a human need for meaning. It's why the churches are filled on Sunday morning. Absolutely. And this has come. And basically every, it's interesting you say that, because essentially

every book that I've written, not intentionally, but just following what I thought what the truth was or what I thought were the interesting questions, leads back to this thing about meaning. And meaning, the pursuit of meaning was a big, big part of why some people, not everybody, were leaving large organizations to go to work for themselves. There was also, I think, the human drive for some degree of autonomy, not being controlled. There was also a drive for some degree of authenticity. I had a lot of people in that book written, again, long ago, talking about, well, I kind of entered the office and I would put on a mask. I would come into the office and put on my game face. I mean literally talking in the language of concealment and

camouflage and disguise and as a way to suppressing their own authenticity. So I didn't expect to be having those kind of conversations. I expected it to be this conversation about what are the you know what are the mechanisms that work in the information age economy but it ended up coming back to some of these fundamental human drives. And in many ways, that first book experience for you, it seems to me it lifts the curtain on the rest of your career, which is not only from a technically the book was a success and therefore you had other books, more of that in terms of that you went on to really get beneath the surface of our psychology as it applies to our work.

I think so. I think that's part of it. I mean, what I was, I guess I was not shying away from that in a way that I would have initially. Initially, I didn't set out to write about these kinds of things. I set out to write about things that were nominally more hard-headed. Again, we think about the field of economics as more hard-headed than say the field of psychology or human motivation, but they're both hard-headed

and they're both important and they're both entangled up in each other. So we're at a juncture right now to ask your permission for something. My goal was to actually talk about your new book, But now we're kind of on a chronological trajectory So can we build to your new book is it would that be okay? Whatever it takes okay? So what was the next book? The next book was a book called a whole new mind What was that about that was about the rise of right brain right brain?

The subtitle is why right brainers will rule the future. Right brain is creative, left is technical math. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm using it as a metaphor. Basically, our left hemisphere, there's a lot, so much garbage written about left brain and right brain. I was leery about waiting into these waters. But the left hemisphere of our brain is,

we use both sides of our brain for everything that we do, but they have, they process things differently. Right? So the left hemisphere processes things, logical, linear, sequential, analytical, right hemisphere is more processes things in a more contextual way. So it deals with context rather than text. It deals with synthesis rather than analysis. It processes things simultaneously rather than step by step.

And my argument, such as it was, is that that division of labor in the brain offers a powerful metaphor for understanding what's going on in the economy. And the idea was, in this book, is 2005. Six is that certain kinds of abilities, characteristic of the left brain, logical linear, SAT spreadsheet kinds of abilities characteristic of the left brain, logical, linear, SAT spreadsheet kinds of abilities, those were becoming easy to outsource an automate. And therefore, what's harder to outsource an automate are these abilities more characteristic of the right hemisphere, artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big picture thinking that those kinds of abilities were

becoming more important. What if you don't have a lot of right brain capacity and you want to be successful in this economy? Well, I think that most people do have more right brain capacity than they realize. To me, it's analogous to literacy and numeracy. So we would never take a kid in almost all circumstance and say, okay, that kid just can't learn to read, that kid just can't learn to do math.

I think that all of us can be at least literate in these kinds of right brain capacities. And I think what happens is that people begin to discover that they're actually better at some of these things than they realize. It just said a lot of these abilities have been dormant. And they might be happier actually if they were really following that part of their...

They, right, they might be because a lot of these left-winged abilities are fairly routine abilities. I mean, if software can do... I started writing about the shift of jobs to India pretty early in the game. And so, oh my god, these Indian programmers are taking... I have air quotes here, taking American jobs. This is a calamity, this is unfair. And what, what basically is happening is that any kind of work that is routine, that is you can reduce to a script, to a spec sheet, to a formula, to a series of steps, that kind of work races to the cheapest cost provider. And so so that's what happened with manufacturing work. Well, that's where I was, where my mind was going. It leads me to the whole basic

income discussion. Well, I mean, I think that's, I think it's actually pretty amazing that this country is even having that universal basic income conversation right now. So I should just define what that means, but I'll try and then you'll correct me because inevitably I will run a foul of facts. I mean, I don't know very much about universal basic income. That doesn't mean that I'm not happy to point on it, but the government might kind of guy. So essentially the argument is as these jobs get more automated, either by AI artificial intelligence

or robots or their outsource to other countries, the simpler jobs, maybe that's not the right way to say it, but jobs that can be automated, let's just say, are going away, and that means that there may be large swaths of the population as we head into the future that are unemployed and unemployable. And so the idea is we need to provide a universal basic income, which would solve maybe an economic problem, but certainly wouldn't solve an existential problem. That's a great point, right?

So we would solve the problem of people falling into despair, not maybe solve the problem, but address the problem of people not having enough money to live on. It would solve the problem of people falling into poverty, but maybe not despair. Right, right, right, because there is something about, there is, in there is something about, there is, in any writing about work,

even from their studs, turquals, book working from 1974, where he went around and interviewed people doing a whole variety of jobs. He says work can be a source of not only daily bread, but daily meaning, and I think that that's a big part of it. So universal basic income can give us the daily bread. It can provide a floor so that people don't fall beneath the floor, which I think is just. But it doesn't solve necessarily that existential problem.

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oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts,

you can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. So if I'm a young person or anybody listening to this, it sounds to me like your advice would be, you should work on your right brain capacities. Well, the left brain stuff is necessary, but not sufficient. So if you don't have the left brain SAT spreadsheet abilities, if you don't have that, you're in a world of hurt. It's over for you.

But when I was growing up, if you had those left brain SAT spreadsheet abilities, you were gonna be fine. Today they're necessary, but they're not sufficient. And it's really these right brain abilities that are becoming the first among equals. This is why people have to get better at things like design, at storytelling, at invention, at synthetic thinking, at understanding what makes people tick. Um, you know, empathy, I think. And so, in that book, I try to lay out what are some of the abilities that are going to be necessary? And one of them was empathy.

It's very hard for machines to empathize in a way that human beings can't. An empathy ends up being not only inherently good, it ends up being extraordinarily important in sales. It ends up being extraordinarily important in medicine, in journalism, in anything where you're dealing with another human being. In your view, how does one develop empathy? I think there are a couple of things. I mean, there's some evidence that some of it is innate,

so you have women in general test higher on empathy than men do. I think what, like a lot of these kinds of abilities, first, you have to understand, you have to be aware of it in the first place. Hey, everyone, there is this thing called empathy. It's basically understand, you know, or perspective taking. There is this thing called that, and actually human beings are often not very good at it. So what can you do to see things from someone else's point of view? What can you do to stop and say, hmm, I wonder how this person is feeling about

it, getting out of your own head into someone else's head. I think that there's awareness and then there's some smaller things that people can do to get better at that. Do you think of your books as journalistic books, explainers, or is there an aspect of self-improvement? I don't buy the distinction among all those. To me, the way I look at it is, and this all comes from my experience as a reader. So I'll read a book about ideas. This is so interesting, great, I'm seeing the world differently. And then I'll say, well, what should I do about it?

And the book of land, they won't stoop to tell me what I should do about it. Then on the other hand, you have books that tell you what to do, purely self-help and self-improvement, and you look at, like, well, how do you know? And to me, what you want to do is you want to marry the two. You want to have books that are well researched, built on evidence, built on science, rigorous journalism, that convey big ideas, but you also want to give people some things to do. And those two things, in my view, at least reinforce each other. I think that the takeaways, if you want to call them that, the takeaways help people understand

the ideas and the ideas help people put in place to takeaways. Yes, so you want to help them see the world differently and change their own lives within that world. Exactly. Exactly. But to me, those are not, like the idea that we're thinking about those as, or at least the industry or certain writers are thinking about those as purely separate domains,

is crazy because that's not how I live my life. That's not, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, inextricable. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. And I've, but I've heard the psychology that you do the rationale that you just articulated voiced by people I respect

and have affection for, I don't get it, and I agree with you. Yeah, the people who are writing the big idea, but oh, I don't do that. That's the love of a prop. That's the love of a prop. Oh, whoa, I don't do that. That's basically compromising myself.

I thought, you know, it's, hey, listen, it's fine with me if they do that because it's a market opportunity for me. So let's keep going then. So the next book was that to sell as human? No, that book was called the Adventures of Johnny Bunko, which was a career guide in manga, Japanese comics. So it was 160 page graphic novel career guide.

So, because I did a fellowship in Japan to study the manga industry. And then I came back and said, hey, I'm going to try to do my own manga, which is actually a totally fun, interesting experience. Cool. And after that was... Then there was a book called Drive, which is... Among your best-known books. To the extent that any of them are known? Yes. There are no. And so, yes, so that was a book about the science of motivation which came from some of the other stuff that i was care you became curious about working on other countries right and there's a uh... uh... uh... uh...

a TED talk with twenty million views that i was uh... looking at today yeah there's a TED talk about that that i would that i actually did while i was working on the book um... what would you say what was the thesis of that book? Basically, it's this, that if you look at 50 years of behavioral science, a lot of what we think motivates people isn't quite right, especially on the job. So we're back to the workplace. We're back to this juncture of economics and psychology,

the workplace and the human condition coexisting. And so the single animating idea is this, that there's a certain kind of reward we use in organizations, psychologist quality controlling contingent reward. I like to call it an if-then reward. If you do this, then you get that. If you do this, then you get that. The main, we use a lot of rewards,

Disney has a lot of rewards in its compensation plans, but one of the mainstays of any kind of company is if-then-rewards. If you do this, then you get that. 50 years of science tells us very clearly that if-then-rewards are extremely effective for simple task with short-time horizons, turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line, stuffing envelopes, anything that is routine. Simple task with short-time horizons, horizons, if then rewards are very effective. We love rewards.

They get our attention. They get our attention in this very focused way. However, the same body of research tells us that if then rewards are just not effective for more complex creative kinds of work with longer time horizons, that it's not even a close call in the science. They just don't work very well. Why not? Well, the main reason is this.

The main reason, and this is sort of gets, this research is easy to caricature. So it's important to understand the nuance. Human beings love rewards. They get our attention, but they get our attention in this very narrow way. You know, they put blinders on us. That's very good if you know exactly what you need to do.

If you're following a set of rules, marching to a finish line that you can see, having that narrow view is actually enhances your performance. But if you're doing something that requires creativity, if the problem you're trying to solve is poorly framed, if you don't know exactly what the question is, you don't want to have that narrow perspective, you want to have a much more expansive perspective. And so if then rewards narrow

our perspective, that's good for some things, but for more creative, conceptual kinds of work, it's actually hurt your performance. It's not good in this right brain universe. Exactly right. And it's also it's hard to sustain your motivation over a very long period with these kinds of things. It sort of gives you a sugar high, but you have to keep taking another bite of the Snickers bar and another bite of the Snickers bar and another bite of the Snickers bar. So what does drive that? And that's basically what this book is about, which is what really leads to enduring performance on a lot of these tasks.

And I think our components of good work are autonomy. That is, do you have some sovereignty, some control over what you do, how you do it, when you do it, who you do it with? A sense of mastery. There's some very good research, including from Theresa Moby-Lay at Harvard, about the single biggest day-to-day motivator on the job is making progress. Are you getting better at something? Are you making progress?

And the third one, once again, not looking forward, but following the evidence, takes us back to purpose. That when people have a sense of purpose, they perform at a higher level, and they do a little bit better. And purpose can be something big and transcendent. I'm solving the climate crisis or feeding the hungry, but it could also be just something small

back to the free-agination stuff I'm making a contribution. I helped this guy Dan get this or feeding the hungry, but it could also be just something small back to the free-agination stuff on making a contribution. I helped this guy Dan get this project out the door and had I not shown up to work that day, he would have failed and I made a contribution to my colleague. It's interesting as we walk through these books, I'm glad we kind of stumbled on talking about them chronologically

because you can see how the themes start to build on one another. I think it makes sense only retrospectively, because I really do. Like it wasn't intentional. It wasn't saying, oh, what's the through line going to be? How can I build on this body of work? And I don't think that way.

I just basically take an idea and say, hey, what, because writing a book is a giant pain, as you know, all right, it's horrible. All right, and so you have to live with, it's really, really hard, and you have to live with the ideas for a very long time. You and I are talking about stuff I worked on 15 years ago. I'm still living with that stuff.

All right, if I didn't like it, I would be miserable. So you got to pick, so what I do is I just pick something. What am I interested in? What am I curious about? And what am I willing to live with for a very long time? And most things don't pass that cut. And so that's the criteria that I use, those are the criteria that I use in deciding what to work on next.

I'm not intentionally saying, how can I extend and deepen my body of work? I get it, I totally get it. Well, let me ask you a self-helpy kind of question. I'm just putting my empathizing with the listener who might be in a dead end job or a job he or she doesn't like, and we keep coming back to meaning and purpose, which I think we'll resonate with everybody. Well, do you have any thoughts or advice about how we could get more of that in our professional lives? Sure. I mean, there's actually some good research on that.

There's some Amy Rizuskiy Yale has done a whole line of research on what she calls job crafting, which is, can you make small changes in your job to make it more meaningful? And one of the examples that she uses is hospital janitors. She's done some work on hospital janitors. Okay, that some work on hospital janitors. Okay, that's a fairly routine job. Low paid routine, not highly respected. And so what she found is that if you encourage hospital janitors to think of themselves

as part of the medical team, you're part of the patient's care. To when you go into a room, to even just sweep the floor of a patient, talk to the patient, ask them how their day is going, and those kinds of small steps can be actually led to greater satisfaction in the part of those janitors, allow them to stick around for a lot longer. Look for these tiny pockets of meaning in your day to day. Did you do something to help a colleague? Are you contributing to something?

I think as people in any kind of job, if you, let's say you're working at a retail clothing store, all right, maybe did you help your colleague fold the jeans and make their life a little easier? Or is there somebody who's coming in for a piece of clothing for something really important in their lives? And did you help them pick the right thing and make their life a little bit better?

And again, I'm not saying that's gonna transform a job where you're getting paid minimum wage and being not treated very well into this glorious experience. However, you can find these little pockets of meaning and anything that we do if we're intentional about it. And the other route, I think, would be the grander thing to get back to the theme of your first book about free agent nation that maybe sometimes actually you do have to jump ship.

Totally. Totally. And the thing is, jumping ship now, I think, is less relatively risky than ever before, because there's not a lot of security in a regular job. So if you say, is working for yourself risky, yeah. Absolutely. But compared to what? I mean, holding a job is risky now.

And so there might be, you know, I think there are people who might be willing to jump. The other thing about it is that the way the world has changed, it used to be that if you left a regular, if you left corporate America to go to free age in nation, you had a, you know, being a turn back and denounced corporate America. It's like, you know, leaving Cuba and going to Florida.

You turn back and you denounce Castro, and you never return. But now it's more like, you know, the better analogies like the US and Canada in some ways. It's like, suppose you had dual passports in US and Canada. Like, okay, so you got people right now, this didn't happen back in 2001. I'm gonna work for a company for five or six years.

Now I'm going to work for myself for five or six years. Now I'm going to go back to a company for five or six years. That's pretty normal. People are moving smoothly across those kinds of boundaries. Next book. To sell is human. That's about the thesis of that book is that we're spending huge amounts of time on the job and other realms of our life persuading influencing, convincing, cajoling, but that we're doing

in a remade landscape. Most of what we knew about persuasion influence came from a world of information asymmetry, where the seller always had more information than the buyer. And that's why the seller could rip you off. Right, so, but now we've gone from a world of information, asymmetry to a world of information parity in all forms of persuasion. You see it in journalism as well. You have listeners who,

and viewers who can talk back. You have people who can fact check you if you make an error. God forbid, on the air. We've gone from this world of information asymmetry to information parity. asymmetry, to information, parity, I think that's a big deal. What it does is it changes the nature of what's effective in persuasion. The good news is that once again, there's a rich body of behavioral science giving us clues on how to do that better. How do we do it better? By the way, just as a precursor question, just based on the title alone, which is a great title. A lot of us, I don't think of myself as being in a sales job, but you're

saying that we all are. We all are, whether we like it or not. And I did a survey that I thought was fairly interesting where we actually tried to figure out what it, what do people do all day? Like, what do they actually do? And I've always thought there's a gap between job descriptions and the truth of what people actually do. And if you look at what people actually do, they're spending huge amounts of their time, 40, 50% of their time, in this thing,

that's kind of sort of like selling, all right? So you're not necessarily selling a Winnebago or pharmaceuticals, but you're at a meeting and you're trying to convince your colleagues to do something different. You're a boss and you're trying to get your employees to do something different or do something in a different way. You're an employee and you're trying to get your boss to stop doing something stupid. You are trying to convince someone to come and work on your team rather than another team. You're trying to get your kid to take out the garbage. Whatever it is, we're spending a huge portion of our time in this thing that, like it or

not, is kind of sort of like selling. I mean, to some extent, that's what I'm doing now. I'm basically selling your listeners on the idea that what I'm saying is more right than wrong and that it's worth paying attention to. So we're spending a huge amount of our time doing this. We're doing it on a remade landscape. And so how do you do it better? And so there's some really interesting science out there

on how to do it more effectively. What does it say? Oh, all kinds of good stuff. So what you can do, and this is where I completely lucked out, if you look at the guiding principles, the guiding principles are ABC. This pure luck. Always be closing. Exactly. It's the successor of always be closing. Glenn Gary Glen Ross. That's just a pure fortune. I was able to use that as a jumping off point. So always be closing

is this very aggressive, predatory view of selling. You can do that in a world of information, a symmetry when the seller has more information than the buyer. When there's an even match, the new ABCs are a tunement. Can you get out of your own head into someone else's head?

Lot of great research on a tunement. How do you understand where someone is coming from? How do you find common ground? When you don't have coercive power as a manager, as a seller, how do you understand what the other person's needs and concerns are and find common ground? Be buoyancy. This is what I really like because I spent some time on this book,

shadowing a fellow named Norman Hall. Norman is one of the last fuller brushmen in America. He's been going door to door in the business district of San Francisco selling brushes for 40 years. That's a hard job. And he said something to me that really stuck with me. He said, you know, Dan, you don't understand Daniel Pink. He said, you don't understand how difficult my job is.

He said, every day, this is his lovely phrase. I wish I had thought of it. Every day I face an ocean of rejection, an ocean of rejection. So when we're persuading, we get we get a lot of rejection. Human beings hate rejection. So the question is, if you're persuading all the time, you're going to get rejected all the time. How do you stay afloat in that ocean of rejection? That's what buoyancy is. And then clarity is how do you go from, you used to be that you had a persuasive edge if you had access to information. That's what it meant.

Expertise was basically, I can get information that you can't. So I'm a doctor, I got all the doctor information, you can never get it. I'm a lawyer, I got all the lawyer information, you can't get it. I'm a car salesperson, I got all the car information, you can't get it. Now everybody has the information. So the premium has shifted from accessing information to curating information. Can you make sense of information, separate out the signal from the noise and information? And then the other aspect of it, which I think is a really intriguing topic on its own, is

it used to be that sales people, sellers, persuaders, were problem solvers. And now I think they're more likely to be problem finders because problem solving has essentially become a commodity. If you know what your problem, if your customer client knows exactly what its problem is, they can find the solution without you. They don't need you very much.

They need you more to be able to do to say what is, you know, here's where your problem, what you think is your problem is not really your problem. Here's a problem you haven't considered. Here's a problem coming down the road. So, so A is a tune meant out of your own head into someone else's head, B buoyancy, stay afloat in that ocean of rejection, C clarity, go from accessing information to curating it, from solving existing problems to identifying hidden problems. I promised this in my last question before we get to the new book, When. How do you stay afloat in an ocean of rejection?

Because my list is probably surprised to hear this since many measures I've encountered. Plenty of success. Have a great job. I've written books blah, blah, blah. But definitely there is rejection in my life and I find it hard to deal with as everybody does right every human. So how what what did you learn from the fuller brush salesman or

anybody else about about achieving buoyancy? Yeah, so there are a number there are a number of there are a number of specific things that we can do. So one of them is and this is some very enduring research from a guy named Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, found out about psychology. Right. He actually did one of his most important pieces of work was about 30 years ago where he followed around a group of life insurance sales men, almost all men in Pennsylvania. And he's trying to figure out what made some life insurance sales men successful and others not. And what he found is insurance salesmen successful and others not.

And what he found is that it was their explanatory style. It wasn't their training, it was the way they explained failure. And he came up famously now with, I think it's reasonably well known now, what he called the three-piece, personal, pervasive, and permanent. And so one way to do that is if you encounter a failure is to essentially rebut some of the self-talk that you typically have. When we encounter rejection or failure, we say it's all my fault, it always happens, and it's going to ruin everything.

We tend to catastrophize that sort of failure. And you can train yourself to better de-catastrophize failure by saying, okay, is it, let's say that I, let's say that, okay, so example, my first book wasn't as successful as I wanted it to be as I thought it was going to be, all right, so it's on my fault, it always happens, and it's going to ruin everything, all right, so I could go back in time then and say, okay, was it all your fault, all right, well, maybe not, it's just sometimes you your fault? All right? Well, maybe not. It's just sometimes you get lucky sometimes you don't. Sometimes the market conditions are right.

Sometimes they're not. It wasn't all, you know? Does it always happen? Well no, because you've done other kind of things that have actually worked. All right? So it's not pervasive. Is it permanent? Is it going to ruin everything?

Most things don't ruin everything. And so that ability to rebut yourself, to decotasterize using personal pervasive and permanent is actually a real, I actually use that all the time. The three P's actually lead to the big P, which is perspective. Right. I think that's exactly what it is. You're sort of, you're taking on, at some level, I mean, Seligman doesn't say this explicitly. At some level, it would be the kind of things you would say to a stressed out friend or family member or

You're basically just saying to yourself which is I believe actually a lot of what meditation is doing for you You're providing yourself with perspective with allowing to step out of the stream of your own habitual storytelling and to see it with some distance. Okay, but the other thing on that I just give you can give you one thing on that, because again, if you're talking about training and tools and simple things that we can do, one of the things that I've discovered as one of the best things that you're doing comes out in the psychology research big time. And other people have written about this. This is not original to me. I literally said this to my daughter via text, like 36 hours ago, which is this.

Like at a juncture and you're not sure what to do or how to react, take a step back perspective to use your word and say, what would you tell your best friend to do? And when you ask that question, people always know and say, okay, it's just do that. So my daughter was like, who's in freshman in college, had texted me about some class that she's in, and it's a giant pain, and the professors of pain, and the assignments are ridiculous, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I try to be not super direct, super directive with my kids,

because they won't listen anyway, and just sort of be a little bit more, I don't know, Yoda, so cratic-like. And I said to her, I said, you know, Eliza, here's a way to think about it. What would you tell one of your friends to do? And I think that's actually a very clarifying question because it gives you the perspective

that you're talking about. I'm gonna justify my leaving your new book to the end of the podcast by saying, the less we say about it, the more likely people are to buy it. Could be. Well, let's test that there. Although I don't want to say a little about it. I want to say I want to begin. I have a robust discussion about it. I'm just trying to make myself feel better. So the book's called When, What's it about? This book is about the science of timing. And the idea here

is that we think that timing is an art, but it's really a science. And all of us in our lives make all kinds of decisions about when to do things, when should I work out, when should I do this kind of work, when should I do that kind of work, when should I start a project, when should I abandon a project, we make those decisions in a very haphazard way. That's what I was doing, that's how I got into it. And I said there's got to be a better way to make these decisions. I started looking around for guidance, didn't see anything. Then I

said, just ask myself, I wonder if there's research. And then I hit a gold mine. And there is a huge amount of research across literally dozens of disciplines about timing. What's the effective time of day on what we do and how we do it? How do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? How do groups synchronize in time? How does the way we think about time shape our behavior? And so I spent a couple of years.

This was really hard research actually, because it's in multiple domains and things that are not at my fingertips. For instance, like, I'm okay on economics and social psychology. Endocrinology, not exactly my thing. Molecular biology, not exactly my thing. Molecular biology, not exactly my thing. What would those matter?

Oh man, they matter hugely because a lot of time, a lot of our time-based behavior and perspective is biological. So there's a whole field called chronobiology, which is the study of our rhythms. The guys who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2017 were chronobiologists. So there's this whole biological component to it that is definitely not at my fingertips. What also has happened lately in the broader world of research is that

there are a lot of the really interesting insights are coming from analysis of gigantic amounts of data. And so in those kinds of papers, some of the math is a lot of the math is over my head. So I had to bring in a research assistant who's now a PhD student in finance at Duke who basically to explain the math to me. So I read something, okay, X-ray, explain the math to me. Okay, explain it again. Okay, explain it again. Okay, explain it one more time. Are you saying that? No, no, no, that's not what I'm saying, Dan. And so, and so this was the both of volume and the content of the research was challenging. I'm going to ask some basic questions. What's the best time of day to work out? It depends on what you're doing, but there's a very clear answer to that.

Here you go. It depends on your goals. You're better off exercising in the morning if your goal is to form a habit. If your goal is to lose weight and if your goal is to get an enduring mood boost, exercise has a big effect on our mood. And so if you exercise early in the day, you get that mood boost throughout the day. You don't risk sleeping it away. However, exercising in the late afternoon early evening is better if you have different

set of goals. Number one, it's better for avoiding injury because our body temperature is at its highest than you're literally more warmed up. The reason I do it in the afternoon and early evening is that people tend to enjoy it more at that time of day. I think partly because of the warming up, people reported it being more enjoyable, less effortful. And the third thing is, there's some really, really interesting evidence that performance

might be greater later in the day. There's some really fun stuff on a disproportionate number of wheel records, particularly in speed events, we're made between 4pm and 7pm local time. In part because, again, we're biological creatures, our bodies change over the course of a day, and so at that apex of body temperature, there can be a slight edge, especially when it comes to speed. What's the best time to set a meeting? there can be a slight edge, especially when it comes to speed. What's the best time to set a meeting? Depends on what the meeting's about. You can tell him trained as a lawyer because I know the answer to every question is,

it depends. That's the thing I learned like the first day of law school. It's like, oh great, I'm going to spend three years. So, here we go. So, let me take a step back. We tend to move through the day in three stages, a peak, a trough, or recovery. That's true of our mood. There's some great research from studying people's tweets.

Dan O'Conomen has done some of the famous Nobelists has done some of this research showing that our mood typically goes like this over the course of a day. Up, down, up, a peak, a trough, or recovery. And our performance also changes over the course of a day up, down, up, peak, a trough, a recovery. And our performance also changes over the course of a day. So there's some really intriguing evidence showing that, for instance, students standardized test scores drop in the afternoon. You have two students who are taking, you have students, this is some great research out of Denmark where they had a, because of the availability of computers, they had half the students assigned, roughly half the students assigned to take standardized

tests in the morning. Another half assigned to take the standardized test in the afternoon. Students who took the test in the afternoon scored as if they had missed two weeks of school. So yeah, it's a big deal. You look at healthcare, my god. Anesthesia errors are four times more likely at 3 p.m. than at 9 a.m. Colinot and doscapists find half as many polyps and afternoon exams as they do in morning exams.

Doctors, much more likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics and afternoon exams. So get that stuff done in the morning. Totally, I would not let anybody I care about go to the hospital or to an important doctor's appointment in the afternoon. What's going on in the afternoon? People are worn out and we have this cycle where we have a peak, a trough and a recovery.

The main point in a lot of this research about timing over the course of a day is that our cognitive abilities don't remain the same throughout the day. Our cognitive abilities change over the course of a day. It's not a close call. So our cognitive abilities change, but they also change in a predictable way. And they change in ways that are more extreme than we realize. The differences between the daily high point and the daily

low point and performance are faster than we realize. And so to your question, Dan, the big thing here is that the best time of day to do something depends on what that something is. So we move through the day in three stages. Peak, trough, recovery. Most of us move through it in that order. The 20% of us who are night owls go through it in their reverse order. But let's neglect night owls because that always happens to them anyway.

Peak, trough, recovery. So morning, we tend to be, morning tends to be the peak early to mid afternoon of trough, late afternoon and early evening of recovery. And what the research shows pretty clearly is that we should put certain kinds of work at certain times of the day. Example. During our peak, again for most of us this morning for night owls later in the afternoon and early evening, and into the evening, the peak is when we should be doing our analytic

work. Work that requires heads down, focus, attention, and here's the key word that comes out in all the research, vigilance. That's when we're vigilant. We're able to bat away distractions. So do your, you know, write your legal brief or analyze your data or do your strategy then. During the trough, early, early, mid-afternoon, it's not good for very much.

So we should be doing our administrative work then. That's when we should be answering our routine emails. That's when we should be filling out for all the office face fans out there, our TPS reports and those kinds of things. Do the administrative work then. Then the recovery, real, I think, really interesting. Our mood goes back up, but we're less vigilant. But that's a good combination

if you wanna do things like brainstorming. You're in a better mood, but you're looser, that's a good time for brainstorming iterative kinds of work. And so if we can move our analytic work to the peak, our administrative work to the trough, and our insight work to the recovery, we're gonna do better.

There's research out there showing that time of day, just time of day, explains about 20% of the variance and how we perform on these workplace tasks. So that doesn't mean time is everything, but it means it's a big thing. And the problem is, is that we're completely unintentional about how we do things. So you look at, so, once I started steering my schedule in this direction, once I realized this research, so I probably wrote 90% of the words in this book

when before noon, because my peak is in the morning. So what I did is I cleared the deck, no email, no phones, just focused heads down in that peak period. In the past, what I would do is I would down in that peak period. In the past, what I would do is I would come into my peak period, oh, I can check some emails. That's gonna turn out to be 97 emails.

Then it's like, you know, six ESPN highlight reals later, it's lunchtime. And I didn't get anything done. And then I say, okay, I gotta get serious now. And then I start trying to write or do my serious work during the trough. And it's like bicycling into ferocious headwinds.

It's a bad idea. What's worse is how incredibly unintentional bosses are about this kind of thing. So that goes back to your original question. When should you schedule the meeting? It depends on what kind of meeting it is. So is it a meeting where you're going over strategy, you need like keen analytic thinking?

Well, then in most cases, you wanna do that in the morning. Is it a meeting where you're going over strategy? You need like keen analytic thinking? Well then in most cases you want to do that in the morning. Is it a meeting for brainstorming? In most cases you want to do that later in the day. And it's incredible how much organizations are completely blind and unintentional about that. So when we schedule meetings at any company, a big company like this one or a small company, there's only one criterion we use in scheduling meetings,

availability, who's available then? That's the only thing we care about. And so what happens is that you have these companies where you have, that are doing analytic work with people who have their peak in the morning and the boss is scheduling a 930 meeting about the travel voucher policy, squandering their time. Or I talked to it was one executive at a big company,

big tech company. Oh yeah, we did our product, we're an important product review meeting at two in the afternoon, it didn't go that well. Yeah, the fact that everybody was available to PM doesn't mean you do it at 2 PM. And so you have to think of scheduling of meetings as a strategic decision.

What kind of meeting is it? What do you want to get done? Who is going to be there? And availability should be the last screen, not the only screen. So it sounds to me like if people took this seriously, it would change our work culture. Do you think that will happen? I think it could happen slowly. I think that things change slowly. That's my theory of the case in general. happen. I think it could happen slowly. I think that things change slowly. That's my theory of the case in general. I do think that you're going to have some people who are going to look at this evidence and

do things differently. I'm going to. I think I did myself. Now, is that going to create some kind of renaissance in company productivity? They apply the principles of when are you going, are you going to have, you know, rainbows sprouting out in corporate America and unicorns dancing through conference rooms, probably not. But I do think that you can get a better, I think you can get a better edge. Again, if you just look at this one piece of data, basically time of day explains 20% of the variance, which essentially means the difference between,

you know, why is Fred doing well and Ed not doing well? Well, 20% of that is time of day, all right? If the other 80% could be, one is smarter than the other, one is more conscientious than another, one had more social advantages than the other, all right? But 20% of it is time of day, you can actually do something about that.

And so I actually think there's a chance that, that company, I think companies would be crazy not to apply some of this. I agree, and I would say that the individual could be listening to this podcast, read the book, and say, oh, I can make some changes that actually will give me an edge, whatever my company does. Totally. Totally. I put it in this earlier, but just very quickly,

I'd loved to before I let you go. What did you convince your wife to do? Oh, I convinced her to work for a company called Daniel Pinkink. How's that going? Yeah, it's great. Really? Oh yeah, yeah, we've been working together for,

oh my gosh, like 14 years or something like that. Wow. Are you her boss? You know, I don't like bosses. I don't like being a boss and I don't like having a boss. So I consider it, I'm the president of Daniel Pinkink and the largest shareholder because the company has one share and I own it. And but Jessica is the treasure and general counsel. So I think it works great. The other thing that it does is that Daniel Pinkink

is an incredibly, incredibly family-friendly workplace. In fact, it provides Jessica, pays all of her health insurance premiums, not only for her, but for her entire family. So it's a very family-friendly workplace. The final thing, I jokingly refer to this as the plug zone. Where can people find you on the internet? Where can they find you on social media? Let's go through the list, the names of the books, again, give everything to us. but let's go through the list the names of the books again give everything to us okay so uh... the website is a wwd and pink d a n p i n k dot com w wd and pink dot com

uh... that's where you can basically find everything like that on twitter on that i'm at dano pink um... the books are will are available wherever books are sold this has been a treat hey thanks and it been a lot of fun. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast.

If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter, at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohen, and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this

thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1-3-dot-com slash survey. at Wondery.com slash serving.