Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPClassic: Daniel Pink, How The Most Successful People Structure Their Days

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

When Daniel Pink graduated law school, he was one of three students in his class that graduated unemployed. He tested several career paths but didn’t feel fulfilled in any of them. However, eventually, he realized that what he’d been doing as a side hustle all along was what he should pursue full-time. Now, he's a bestselling author of seven books that have been translated into 42 languages. In this episode of YAPClassic, you’ll learn about one of Daniel Pink’s New York Times bestsellers, The Science of Perfect Timing, and how to plan your day around your natural peaks and troughs to maximize your productivity.  Daniel Pink is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and thought leader. He has written for several notable publications, and his books cover topics like business, work, creativity, and behavior. He has written for several notable publications, including Fast Company, The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and Wired.   In this episode, Hala and Daniel will discuss:  - Hard questions to ask yourself when picking a career  - How Daniel discovered his love of writing  - Why you should make small pivots instead of taking bold actions - The three stages of productivity & how to plan your day around them - The shocking effect of taking breaks throughout the day - How bias levels change throughout the day - The best way to take naps - How exercise affects you in the morning vs. evening - What day of the week to adopt new habits - And other topics… Daniel Pink is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, and thought leader. In 2011, he was named one of Thinkers50’s top 50 most influential minds. He was also the host and co-executive of the television series “Crowd Control,” a National Geographic program about human behavior that aired in more than 10 countries. He has written for several notable publications, including Fast Company, The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Slate, and Wired.   He is the author of seven books, the latest being The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His books cover topics like business, work, creativity, and behavior. They have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world.  LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course. Resources Mentioned: Daniel’s Website: https://www.danpink.com/  Daniel’s Books: https://www.danpink.com/books/  Sponsored By:  RobinHood - Visit robinhood.com/PROFITING to claim an unlimited 1% bonus on your assets. Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify HelloFresh - Go to HelloFresh.com/profitingfree and use code profitingfree for FREE breakfast for life Nom Nom - Go to youngandprofiting.co/trynomnom for 50% off your two-week trial  Coda.io - Head over to coda.io/profiting to try Coda for free Indeed - Get a $75 job credit at indeed.com/profiting More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/

Today's episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Robinhood, Shopify, Indeed, HelloFresh, Nomnom, and Kota. Consider supporting our sponsors. Robinhood is the best place to boost and stash your investments. Visit Robinhood.com slash profiting to claim an unlimited 1% bonus on your assets. Shopify simplifies selling online so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. Indeed is the hiring platform where you can attract,

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And one of the best conversations I've ever had about how to do this was my 2019 conversation with Daniel Pink. Daniel is a keynote speaker, thought leader and bestselling author of seven books, including The Power of Regret and To Sell Is Human. In this app classic, you'll learn about how different times of the day impacts your productivity, how to get over your afternoon slumps, and how to effectively use beginnings, midpoints, and endings to accelerate your success. I've had Daniel on the show twice now, and this was actually my first interview with him, and we always have such a wonderful conversation. He is by far one of the best productivity experts I've ever talked to.

He's got so much amazing research and data and stories, so I know you guys are going to love hearing this episode again. Without further delay, here's my conversation with Daniel Pink. We are very excited to have you on the show. You are an expert on so many topics from motivation to perfect timing, and you have such a cool and unique background story

that I would love to better understand. From doing our research, I see that you were a young man who went off to law school, and then you decided that wasn't for you. And then you also had a stint in politics, writing speeches for people like Al Gore, and then you also decided that wasn't for you. You became a writer and you achieved massive success, and you've even hosted and produced your own TV show along the way.

So help me better understand your story, walk us through your professional journey thus far, and how you found your calling. Well, I mean, you pretty much summarized it, Hala. I'll derive a lesson from it if there is one first, and then I can talk in more detail if you're interested. Yeah. I think the lesson from it that people eventually realize but don't realize when they're younger is that

the path to doing things in your life, the course of one's life is rarely linear. It's rarely predictable. One of the things that nobody ever tells us is the importance of figuring out what you don't want to do and what you're not good at. I think that a lot of people have fed some nonsense that, oh, you can be good at anything. You're like, you're so multi-talented. And the truth of the matter is, is that most people, and certainly me, most things I'm not very good at.

I don't do them very well and I don't enjoy them. And that ends up being a really important thing to find out in figuring out what to do. So for me, for instance, I went to law school basically as a default, risk averse, had good grades, and was interested in that broader realm. And I realized pretty quickly that practicing law, once I realized what lawyers actually did, it's like, I suck at that, and I don't like it. So I don't want to spend the next X years doing that. And so that was really helpful. Then I ended up one of three people in my law school class who graduated unemployed.

I never practiced law, never clerked for a judge, never did anything like that because I realized that, hey, this is really not for me. I decided to work in politics because that was something that I was keenly interested in. I became a speechwriter in a very haphazard way. I didn't set out to do it. I just fell into it in some way.

And that was something I was much better at than practicing law. But at the same time, I looked at the work itself and the environment I was in and said, you know what, this is not for me long term. And what happened was, and my story was this, and maybe there's a lesson in it for people there, is that if you go back in time to when I was in college, all the way through into jobs that I, very demanding jobs that I had here in Washington working in politics throughout that period, and we're talking 15 years maybe, the whole time I was quote unquote writing on the side.

So when I was in college, when I was in law school, I was writing articles and columns for newspapers and magazines. Even when I was working, I was writing articles and essays and things for magazines. Even in some of the jobs that I had where I couldn't get paid for outside work, understandably, if you're working in the federal government, I was still doing it and I was doing it for free. It finally dawned on me at a certain point that what I was doing on the side was what I was good at and what I should be doing.

So for me, the dual lessons of this are, one, figure out what you're not good at because that's going to be a very wide universe of things and try to avoid that. Two, instead of trying to find your passion or think too much, just pay attention to what you do and what you do offers a window into who you are. I think that's really good advice. And what advice would you give to our listeners who are out there who are doing something that they're not entirely sure if this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives and who might be too afraid to pivot into the next thing?

Maybe they think they're too old to switch careers. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think there are two questions embedded in there as I'm hearing it. One of them is not knowing how to pivot in some ways, but the other one is the fear of being quote unquote too old to do something. And what I've seen in my own life and in observing other people is that feeling of being too old always is laughable retrospectively. So if you look at somebody like me, all right?

So 20 years ago, I was 30. Looking back at age 30, if I had said at age 30 and I probably thought of it at age 30, oh man, I'm too old to X, Y, or Z. Looking back on that right now is laughable. Like I would laugh at my earlier self. Yeah. And I think that me at 70 would laugh at me today.

Imagine me at 70 looking back at me today saying, oh, I'm too old to, I don't know, write a play. I'm too old to produce a television commercial, whatever. I think 70-year-old me would look back on me today and laugh again. So I think that's a way to think about that. Leaving aside things that require massive physical prowess, all right? So at age 50, the odds of me playing in the National Basketball Association are remote,

right? But beyond that, I think that feeling like you're too old is stupid. So understandable, but misplaced. So the folks in here got to listen to me. Twenty years from now now looking back on yourself You will say my god. The idea that I was too old is laughable So cut fade out now I think the harder question is the question about pivoting and I think it's really really hard and

When things are really really hard like that my advice always is to start small I think that small experiments small steps are better than big moves and bold leaps. So what does that mean? Let's say that you're working as a management consultant, you say, you know what, I actually don't want to be a management consultant for the rest of my life. I'm 33 years old and what I really want to do is maybe become a teacher. Wow, how do I go about doing that? I wouldn't quit your management consulting job and go become a teacher right there. What I would do is I would do smaller things.

I would find five teachers at various levels who you know through your own network or one degree of separation. Call them up, take them up for coffee and say, what's it really like to be a teacher? Have that conversation. Then maybe what you could do instead of quitting your job is maybe teach an evening course at a college, maybe tutor, maybe teach on a weekend.

That is, take small steps and small experiments in the direction that you think you might want to be headed. The advantage of that is that it's doable. What's daunting is I'm going to quit my job at Deloitteitte Accenture, whatever, give up my salary, and then go out and look for a teaching job. I think that's actually, most people wouldn't want to do that. But taking the smaller steps and the experiments allow you to help figure out what it is you actually want to do. What I'm saying isn't exactly

revelatory. It's the same thing. It's like, hey, let's say I'm on my couch potato, and I ultimately want to run a 10-miler. I don't just get out of my couch, off of my couch and start running 10 miles. You know what I do? The first thing I do is I take a walk around the block. Then I take a walk around two blocks and then over time I can run that 10-miler. I think that's really great advice. It's sort of like dip your toes in the water. Make sure you actually like the new field that you want to get into before you go full force and make sure

you're actually good at it and you can make money so you can sustain yourself. I think that's great advice. So let's get into our main topic of the show. I really want to get into all your research and insights regarding time. So your latest book came out this year and it's called When the Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. So what was your motivation behind writing this book? Frustration more than anything else. I was frustrated because I was making all kinds of timing decisions in my own life.

So I'm talking to you from my office in Washington, DC. My office is a refurbished garage behind my house. So every day I come out here and I make decisions about when to do things. When in the day should I do my writing? When in the day should I do my interviews? When should I exercise? More broader episodic questions of timing.

When should I start a new project? When should I start an experiment? When should I abandon an experiment that's not working? And I was making these decisions in a very sloppy way. That was frustrating to me. I wanted some guidance in how to make these decisions. I looked around for it, it didn't exist. And that got me curious about

whether there was any research on this question of timing because the last several books I'd written had looked at different bodies of social science to say, what does it tell us about the human condition and how can we apply some of those insights in our work and our personal lives? And so I started looking around to see if there's any research on timing. And there was a huge amount, more than I ever imagined, except it had this peculiar quality to it. It was splattered all over the place. So there was research in social psychology and economics, but there was also research in microbiology. There was research in entire field called chronobiology. There was research in linguistics and anthropology and in many of the medical sciences.

And it was curious to me is that all these disciplines were asking very similar questions, but they weren't talking to each other. So I said, if I can stitch together the findings from these disparate disciplines, maybe what I can do is reveal some of the evidence-based, scientific-based ways to make better, smarter decisions about when to do things, when to do things during the day, when to do things to some extent during the year, when to do things during a life cycle, and even things more episodically about what's the importance of beginnings, what are the importance of endings, what are the importance of midpoints, how do teams coordinate in time?

So out of that frustration, frustration turned to curiosity, curiosity turned to two years of a lot of research, and then that intern turned into the book. Yeah, the book is jam-packed with so much useful information, and it's really funny how we don't really consider the issue as when, as seriously as we take issues of what, and really thinking about when we should make certain decisions, what time of day we should do certain work is really interesting. So I think my listeners will find a lot of value in this. So let's begin with how the different times of day impact our productivity.

You say that time of the day explains 20% of the variance of how people perform and our cognitive abilities change during the 16 hours or so that we're awake. In your book, you outline three stages of the day everyone goes through in terms of performance. You say it's peak, trough, and recovery. Could you walk us through these stages and explain what type of work is best suited for each? Great.

You got it exactly right. The big idea here is that our brain power doesn't remain constant over the course of a day. It changes. It changes in material ways. The best time to do something depends on really what you're doing. And so here's what we know. What we're looking for here is something called,

that's like how it is called the synchrony effect. What you wanna do is you wanna line up your type, your task, and your time. Your type, your task, and your time. Now by type, I mean something called chronotype, which is a term from the field of chronobiology, chronobiology, chronotime, biology study of life. It's a longstanding field of research, spawned a few, nobellis. And what chronotype is the scientific way of talking about, are you a morning person, are you an evening person? And what we know is that about 15% of us naturally wake up early and go to sleep early. We're larks. Yeah. About 20%

of us wake up late naturally, wake up late and go to sleep late. We're owls. And then about two thirds of us are in the middle, oversimplified by a tad, but oversimplification in the name of clarity is let's think about the world of owls and non owls. Owls and non owls. So about 80% of us move through the day in precisely the order that you said, peak trough recovery. Peak early in the day, trough in the middle of the day, recovery later in the day. During the peak, which for 80% of us is early in the day,

for owls it's much later in the day. For owls they hit their peak early evening, mid evening, late evening. Very, very different chronotype, different way of moving through the day. During our peak, that's when we're most vigilant. And vigilance means we're able to bat away distractions. So during the peak, we should be doing

what psychologists call our analytic work, which simply means work that requires, heads down, focus and attention, writing a report, analyzing data, carefully going over the steps of a strategy. That kind of work we do better during the peak, which for most of us is early in the day. Now, during the trop, that's mid to late afternoon. That's a terrible time of day for people.

There are huge decrements in performance. We see it in studies of students performing on standardized tests. We see it hugely in the healthcare arena, where doctors and nurses perform very, very differently at that time of day versus earlier in the day. We see juries making different decisions when they deliberate that time of day versus earlier in the day. So during the trial, we want to do stuff that doesn't require a massive amount of brain power or creative thinking. And so that's administrative things,

answering routine emails, filling out expense reports, et cetera, et cetera. Then finally, the recovery, late in the afternoon, early in the evening. Now, for most of us, 80% of us, here's what happens during the recovery. Our mood follows this peak trough recovery pattern. So our mood goes up early, plummets in the middle,

and then recovers later in the day. So late in the day, 80% of us have rising mood and we have lower vigilance though. So we're in a good mood, but we're not as vigilant as we were earlier in the day. That is actually a very potent combination for cognitive tasks that require some kind of looseness. So solving non-obvious problems, iterating new ideas,

brainstorming is a good example of that. You wanna be a little bit looser. And so to make a long story lovinger, we should be doing our analytic work during our peak, which for most of us is early in the day, for ours much, much later in the day. We should be doing our administrative work during the trough, which is the early to mid afternoon for almost all of us. And then we should be doing our insight work as psychologists call it, iterative, looser,

creative, brainstormy kind of work late in the afternoon and early in the evening. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Young Improfitors, it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. With inspiration out of fingertips and powerful tools at our disposal, the possibilities are endless. And when it comes to tools that can truly make your business grow, there's one name that always stands out, Shopify. Shopify helps you sell at every stage of your business,

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Indeed.com. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. You know, I really love this because this is something that is totally under our control. We can't really improve how smart we naturally are, but we can control the time we take a test, right? And getting an improvement of 20% is really nothing to sneeze on. I really want to bring this lesson home to my listeners. So you have a very interesting story about how time of

the day impacted scores in a Danish school. Could you share that? Yeah, no, that's a great piece of research. And it's not only Danish school, it's a set of multiple schools throughout Denmark. And here's the story. It's a piece of research that was led by Francesca Geno at Harvard University. And here's what happened. So in Denmark, students take standardized tests, as they do here in the District of Columbia and the rest of the United States. In Denmark, students take these standardized tests on computers. However, the typical Danish school has more students than computers. So on testing day,

everybody can't take the test at the same time. So students are randomly assigned to take the test either early or late. And so Frantisco Gino and two Danish researchers, as I said, looked at two million Danish test scores to see whether time of day had a role in the students' test scores. What they found was just remarkable that students who took the test in the afternoon versus

the morning had significantly lower scores. They scored as if they had missed two weeks of school. Wow. Yeah, that's an appropriate wow because that's crazy when you think about it. First of all, it calls into question, you have this standardized test or a policy making tool. And so you have this policy making tool that says, wait a second, there's this massive difference between early test takers and late test takers.

Maybe this tool isn't as effective as we think. What's also alarming about that is, imagine if the school or teacher is gonna make a decision about a particular student based on standardized test scores, what if that student had been randomly assigned to a different time of day, they might have scored differently. This is part of the point you made earlier, Hala, about it just like there's a massive amount of evidence showing our brain power does not remain static as the day unfolds. We perform differently at different times of day, and

those differences can be significant. Yeah. We don't always have control in terms of the time we have to take a test, right? When we're an adult, we can kind of work out when we want to do certain work, things like that. But in terms of a student, you don't really have the option. So can you talk about how breaks can kind can counteract this? You're exactly right. I mean, the breaks are the answer to this. One of the things that we see,

and I was surprised by this research. So I had a chapter in this book about the hidden pattern of the day, which is what we've been talking about, peak trough recovery, how our performance varies at different times of day. I said, well, I'll write a little bit about breaks. So as I outlined it, I said, okay, I'll do maybe two pages about breaks. And so as I outlined it, I said, OK, I'll do maybe two pages about breaks.

And I started looking at the research and then I'd up writing an entire chapter about breaks because the research was so powerful and persuasive. And essentially what we know about breaks is this. We have woefully undervalued them. Breaks are far more important to a performance than we realize. We should be taking more breaks and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks. And so that ends up being a remedy

for some of the down draft in performance, especially during that trough period. And so in the case of the Danish students, it was pretty remarkable. They went back and said, okay, what if we gave these students a 20 to 30 minute break to have a small snack and to run around in the playground before taking the afternoon test? They do that, boom, scores go back up.

Scores are actually higher than in the morning. And so we see this in all kinds of other realms. There's an important study led by, among others, Katie Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania showing a big decline in hand washing among people who work in hospitals during the afternoon. And a remedy for that, a way to get hand washing back up, it happened to be a large sample of nurses, to give the nurses more breaks and actually breaks with other nurses. And so what we know about breaks at a top level is that, and I've changed, I totally changed my view on this myself, is that breaks are part of our performance.

They're not a deviation from our performance. They're part of our performance. They are integral to our performance. We also have evidence of the right kinds of breaks to take. What we know, and it's very actionable, we know that with breaks something is better than nothing. Even a super short break is better than no break at all. We know that outside is better than nothing. So even a super short break is better than no break at all. We know that outside is better than inside.

So taking a break outside is more restorative than taking a break inside. We know that social is better than solo, that breaks with other people are more restorative than breaks on our own. And this is true even for introverts. We know that moving is better than stationary. So you're better off actually being in motion,

physically moving rather than being sedentary. And we know that fully detached it's better than semi-detached. So a break has to be a break. It isn't going out for a walk, checking your email. And so when we look at those design principles exactly as you're saying, we can exert a little bit more control over things.

So here's an example. Because of my schedule, I had to talk to you at a suboptimal time today, one o'clock. You and I are talking at 1 p.m. Eastern time. That's a suboptimal time for me. So I knew that. And so what did I do before I got on this call? I went on and took a walk. I just took a walk around the block before I went to do this because I knew that if I just came from doing one hard task where I was fading and then immediately had to talk to you, it wasn't going to be very good for either one of us. And so simply by taking that small break, it had to be by myself, so I missed out on the social part.

But, you know, outside in motion, fully detached, I probably, I'm slightly more coherent or at least slightly less incoherent than I would have been otherwise. Yeah. I wish I did that because I'd probably be more on point right now. But as you're talking, the perfect break sounds like taking a walk outside with your coworker for 10, 15 minutes and not talking about work. So all my listeners out there, take that as a hint,

start to schedule some of those breaks in your day, and let your coworker know that, hey, I some of those breaks in your day, and let your coworker know that, like, hey, like, I don't want to talk about work, let's talk about something else. Because often, you know, when you do take a break with your coworker, you end up just venting about work, I feel like. Right, right. I think that's good. And, you know, and the thing is, it's like, you still want to talk to your coworkers, like, inadvertent contact where you're walking to the water fountain or to the bathroom or something, hey, what are you working on? That's all good. But we have to be much more conscious about

taking these breaks. And this is the thing. I'm your Hallelujah chorus on that, Hala, in part because I have the zeal of a convert, because I was someone who very rarely took breaks because I thought I would get more done if I powered through. I also thought in some weird, puritanical way that it was morally virtuous not to take breaks, that I was a better person somehow for denying myself. Yeah, you worked harder that day. That's just total nonsense. Breaks are massively important.

And if your listeners followed your guidance there and every day they took, as you say say a 10 or 15 minute walk outside with Someone they like I would be stunned if you didn't see some kind of uptick in performance. Yeah To quote you verbatim Afternoons are the Bermuda triangles of our day across many domains It represents a danger zone for productivity ethics and health Could you elaborate on this and just show us how bad afternoon slumps can be?

Okay, so let's talk about healthcare because it's just a disaster. So I mentioned that we see big declines in hand washing in hospitals during the afternoon, but it goes well beyond there. So what we see is doctors are far more likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics in afternoon appointments versus morning appointments.

There was just a paper that came out in the beginning of the fall that showed the same pattern with opioids. Doctors far more likely to prescribe opioids in afternoon appointments versus morning appointments. We look at things like anesthesia errors. Anesthesia errors are four times more likely at 3 p.m. versus 9 a.m. If you look at things like colonoscopies, doctors find twice as many polyps. They're twice as thorough in morning appointments as they are for in afternoon appointments for the exact same population. So for me, one of the personal

takeaways from me and my family from doing this research is that basically nobody in my family is allowed to go to make a discretionary hospital visit or an important doctor appointment in the afternoon period full stop. One of our daughters had to have, she's in college and came back for winter break and had to have her wisdom teeth extracted and she had to have anesthesia to have her wisdom teeth extracted. And we basically said, I don't care how inconvenient the particular day of the week is, you are only taking the 8 AM appointment because you're undergoing general anesthesia. So again, it's exactly as you said earlier, Hala,

we focus on what procedure needs to get done, but we discount the when, when are they doing it, and the when matters. Yeah, so remember, always go to the doctor in the morning. How about ethics? I thought this was so interesting, the fact that people are more likely to lie and cheat matters. Yeah. So remember, always go to the doctor in the morning. How about ethics? I thought this was so interesting, the fact that people are more likely to lie and cheat in the afternoon.

Can you talk about that? Yeah. What we see there is kind of interesting. There's some nuance on that one. Let me make a broader point here. So we talked about, for most of us, the morning is when we're most vigilant. We're most vigilant. That is, what we're able to do is we're able to battle away distractions. We're less likely to take short cognitive shortcuts of any kind. So

if you think about things like bias is a cognitive shortcut, cheating is a cognitive shortcut. And so what you see is that people make different moral decisions in the afternoon versus the morning. The researchers who uncover this call it the quote unquote morning morality effect. That is, because we're more vigilant in the morning, we're less likely to make ethical lapses. However, the nuance of this is that other researchers subsequently followed that up and said, yes, that's true for morning people and for a lot of people in the middle, but for owls, evening types, people who wake up late and go to sleep late, it's the reverse. Owls are actually more likely to make moral

lapses in the morning than later in the day, because owls are more vigilant later in the day. But again, think of this idea of cognitive shortcuts. There's a very alarming piece of research, an experiment where they did the following. They gave the participants in this experiment a set of facts. They said, you participants are a jury. And they gave people a set of written facts about a particular criminal defendant. So think about two groups. Half the groups get a set of facts. The other half of the group gets the same set of facts.

For the first group, the defendant's name is Robert Garner. For the first group, the defendant's name is Robert Garner. For the second group, the defendant's name is Roberto Garcia. So same set of facts, the only thing different is the name of the defendant. When jurors deliberated in the morning, they rendered the same verdict for Garner and Garcia. However, get a new group of participants, same deal, same set of facts. One defendant's name is Robert Garner. The other defendant's name is Roberta Garcia. When jurors deliberated in the afternoon,

they were more likely to exonerate Garner and convict Garcia on the exact same set of facts, because people were less vigilant when they're taking these, in this case, in Sidious Cognitive Shortcut of racial and ethnic bias. So interesting. It's alarming. Yeah, I was just going to say, it's so interesting and alarming.

Speaking of overcoming these afternoon slumps, you talked about breaks before. Another way to overcome an afternoon slump after reading your material I learned is napping. It turns out that breaks and napping are not just for kids. They're also very useful for adults. And apparently there's a right and a wrong way to nap. For me personally, I feel very groggy when I nap unless I go for like three, four hours. And then I'm not really sure that actually qualifies as a nap at the end of the day. So what is the right way to nap in your opinion?

Well, it's not only my opinion, it's what the research says. And your spot on, Holly, that there is, here, once again, I'm a sinner. I never liked napping. I would nap every once in a while. I would wake up feeling terrible. And the reason I discovered is that I was doing it wrong, exactly as you say. What the research tells us is that the ideal nap is exceptionally short, exceptionally short between 10 minutes and 20 minutes long.

You nap shorter than 10 minutes, you don't get much of a benefit. You nap longer than 10 minutes, you get a benefit from the nap, but if you stay within that 20 minute range, between 10 and 20 minutes, you can get the benefits of the nap without the groggyness that comes from napping longer than that. So there is this sweet spot of 10 to 20 minutes, all kinds of research showing that, yeah, it's actually a boost mood, a boost mental acuity. It makes people feel better without the downside of that Graghaness, which is known

among chronobiologists as sleep inertia. Yeah, but 10 to 20 minutes sounds so short. I know. And I noticed you didn't really talk about meditation in your book as an alternative. How do you feel about meditation? Do you feel like it's useful? Do you do it? And do you think that naps are more beneficial than meditation would be? That's a great question. I have tried meditation in the past. I haven't stuck with it unfortunately. Same. My read of the

research on meditation is that it is very very good for us. Meditation is powerful. It is not woo-woo. It is a absolutely enhancing of our subjective wellbeing, of our mood, of our mental sharpness, no question about it. I'm not sure whether a nap or meditation is, one is more valuable than the other, I have no idea. But the research to me is overwhelmingly pro-meditation. Yeah. So tell us about the napachino.

It's the way to 10X your nap. Once again, the research gives us some ideas on how to actually turbocharge the nap. The ideal nap is as follows. I've actually started doing this occasionally. So again, I told you I'm here in my office and watching DC. I got a chair right behind me as I'm sitting here. So it's a chair. It's a fairly comfortable chair. I've got a chair right behind me as I'm sitting here. So it's a chair. It's a fairly comfortable chair. I got a little ottoman. And so I'll sit in that chair and I will

set my phone alarm for 25 minutes, phone timer for 25 minutes. I will close my eyes. I will put on noise canceling headphones and get ready to go to sleep. But before that, I would chug a cup of coffee. I won't enjoy it. I'll just literally brew a cup of coffee, plop some ice cubes into the into the mug and just guzzle it. And then I will close my eyes, start my 25 minute countdown timer. And at this point, I can usually fall asleep in say 10 minutes or so. And in that sense, like meditation, that is like meditation is easier. The more you do it, I think napping, people get better at napping and being able to fall asleep quickly. So I can fall asleep. Let's say I fall asleep in 10 minutes. My alarm goes off in 25 minutes. That means I've gotten a 15 minute nap right in the middle of that sweet spot. But here's the thing. Remember that cup of coffee that I downed right before turning on my countdown timer. It takes about 25 minutes for caffeine to enter our bloodstream. And so at the moment I'm waking up, without that groggyness, without that sleep inertia,

I'm getting a second hit of caffeine entering my bloodstream. And so this technique, as you say, is known as a napachino. Sounds awesome. I can't wait to try that. Definitely try it. Try it a few times. It's surprisingly awesome.

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Tell us about that. What should we be doing during this recovery state? So what we know is that we have this peculiar combination. Our mood oscillates and we see this in a lot of research on people's self-reports of their mood. We see it reflected in big data analysis of people's Twitter feeds. So, mood goes up, mood declines, and then mood recovers. Again, that's for 80% of us.

Late in the day, early in the evening, our mood is back up. However, as I said before, our vigilance is not back up. Our vigilance is actually rather low. But that combination, that kind of looseness is actually really important. Now, let me give you an example of this. It might make more sense. Let's think about something like brainstorming. Let's say you and I are part of a seven-person team that's trying to brainstorm some ideas for, I don't know, a new product or a new marketing campaign or something like that. We've all been in brainstorming sessions where someone tosses out an idea and someone

else says, that's stupid, that'll never work. Brainstorming isn't effective if people are hyper-vigilant, if they're hyper-analytical. What you want is you want some kind of looseness. And so you can impose that looseness in some ways with the rules of brainstorming, but you can get even a greater boost if people's mental states, their cognitive states are looser rather than tighter. So doing things like brainstorming then is, at that time of day, for 80% of us is better. And you see this in some research again where you give, let's take someone like me, all right?

So I test on the chronotype scale, I test as not a full-fledged lark but pretty larky. You give people very common chronotype. You give people like me an analytic problem. I'm more likely to get it right in the morning and wrong in the late afternoon. You give an owl that same analytic problem. They're more likely to get it wrong in the morning and right later in the afternoon. So now you give me a more creative problem, all right? A problem where you have to say, come up with 50 unusual uses of a brick or a paper clip or something that's about iteration, kinds of problems that don't bend to mathematical logic, the sorts of things that require aha moments and insight and divergent thinking. Someone like me is worse at that in

the morning, but better late in the afternoon because I'm less vigilant, I'm less tight, I'm focusing more expansively, and I'm in a decent mood. So that's sort of the inspiration paradox. So for a lark like me, or a larky person like me, the paradox is that for creative iterative kinds of things, I'm actually better off doing them later in the day rather than earlier in the day. Hmm. From my understanding, it's also better to like work out in the evening or work out seem easier in the evening as well. So that's a great point too. So there are virtues of early exercise and later exercise,

and it really depends on your goal. So morning exercise is better for something. It seems to be better for weight loss. In fact, there's something literally that I read this morning showing that exercising on an empty stomach is actually better for weight loss and conditioning than exercising after eating. So morning exercise is better for weight loss. Morning exercise is better for habit formation. And I think that's a very pedestrian reason is that people are more likely, I think, to get interrupted at 7 a.m. than at 5 p.m. And then morning exercise, a great virtue of morning exercise is that aerobic exercise, but even strength training gives you a pretty significant mood boost, pretty enduring mood boost. And so

you exercise early in the day, you're gonna get that mood boost for a long time during the day. You exercise late in the day, you get your mood boost, but you end up sleeping away some of it. So that's the virtue of morning exercise. Afternoon exercise is better for other kinds of things.

So one of them, as you said, is people reported feeling less effortful. My hypothesis is that a lot of this is related to body temperature because our body temperature changes over the course of a day. Our body temperature peaks in the late afternoon and early evening. So people find it less effortful. I certainly do. It's better for avoiding injury. And I think that's the same reason, similar reason, that we're literally more warmed up. And also there's some interesting improvements in performance late afternoon and early evening. Our lung function is higher. Our hand-eye coordination is a little bit better, and there's some interesting

improvements on speed late in the afternoon and early in the evening. So it really depends on what your goals are. Totally. Very cool. So let's move on to time besides just the hours of the day that we should be doing things. In a more broader sense, you also talk about beginnings and endings. For context for my listeners, can you explain what social and personal temporal landmarks are, and how we can use them to motivate us and construct better beginnings?

Sure. Temporal landmark is as follows. Think about a physical landmark. So a physical landmark is something that exists in space that helps you make your way. If you're trying to find something, you're trying to make your way from point A to point B, and you're looking for a particular landmark that says, oh, I'm close to point B.

So the same thing happens in time, that there's certain dates that operate as temporal landmarks that help us make our way. In particular, there's a date, and this is also a research done by Kitty Milkman at Penn, whom I mentioned earlier. She found that certain dates operate as a particular kind of temporal landmark, and that is what she calls fresh start dates. Those are dates where we basically trick ourselves and say we open up what you can think of metaphorically as

a fresh ledger on ourselves. So we say, old me always ate junk food, but new me, we're born on this day, opening up a fresh ledger is not going to eat junk food anymore. And so what this means is that certain dates operate as those temporal landmarks, as fresh dark dates. So this is why you're more likely to start a behavior change and therefore more likely to sustain it By starting it on a Monday rather than on the Thursday by starting it on the first of the month rather than the 11th of the month

Those are social things We all should the first of the day of the month is the same for me as it is for you The 11th day of the month is the same as it is for me as it is for you But they're also personal temporal landmarks So you're better off starting a behavior change, say, on the day after your birthday than one week before your birthday. But that's personal. Your birthday and my birthday are probably not the same.

Yeah. And so using these temporal landmarks can be a way to essentially reboot and make a fresh start. And then how about in a business setting? Like how would you use a temporal landmark to motivate a team or pivot after something happens. Yeah. So again, you can use something like the beginning of a new quarter to say, our last quarter wasn't that great, but here it is, a new quarter, day one of a new quarter, let's reboot and start again. Or you can use some kind of anniversaries. Like this company was founded three years ago in this state. We're starting year four. This is a fresh start date.

And so you can use those kinds of things to basically, I like to think about as a reboot. The metaphor that the researchers use is this idea of, as I said, of a ledger. If you think about an old-fashioned ledger, you know, an old-fashioned print ledger, you turn the page and there before you is a fresh ledger, untainted by any of the things that have gone on before, you can write a new on that fresh ledger. So you can use again with businesses, shared social first day of the quarter, those kinds of things, first day of the month,

but you can also use milestones within the company as well. This is all such great advice. I really hope that everybody out there is absorbing it and will use it in practice. Let's talk about midpoints. They have very peculiar effects on how we do what we do. Can you talk about the different nuances

and how midpoints can both stall us and stimulate us? Yeah, so that's exactly right. Midpoints have a dual effect. Sometimes they drag us down, sometimes they fire us up. And so sometimes when we get to the midpoint of something, we're for lose motivation, we're lose interest, our motivation sags. Other times it has the opposite effect. So if you look at research on well-being over the life cycle, what you have is you have a U-shaped curve of well-being over the life

cycle where people in their 20s and 30s are fairly satisfied people in their 40s, become less satisfied people in the 50s, you know, are at the bottom of that you. It's not a midlife crisis, but it's a sort of a shallower you. But then people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are far more happy than they were. So it's shaped like a you. So we see a dip in the middle of all kinds of things in people's adherence to standards and their willingness to practice certain religious rituals, etc., etc. At the same time, what you see is you see midpoints having, in some cases, a different effect on people. They operate as a spark. So there's a researcher named Connie Gersig who's looked at how teams behave,

and she found that if you give a team a certain amount of time for a project, during the first part of the project, they won't do very much, but there's a moment in the course of the project when they throw off old routines and really get started. What she has found in her research is that that happens in an eerie way at the exact temporal midpoint. You give a team 31 days to do something, they start getting going in earnest at day 16. You give a team 17 days to do something, they start getting going at day nine. And so you also see research in analysis of basketball data showing that in general, the

NBA at least, teams that are ahead at halftime are more likely to win the game. However, the exception to that rule is that teams that are behind by one point at halftime are actually more likely to win than teams that are ahead by one point. And so I guess the lesson we derive from this is that unlike beginnings and unlike endings, midpoints are often invisible. We don't see them. And yet they seem to exert this kind of force on us. And so the key with midpoints is to be aware of them, to make them visible.

And then once you do that, you can use them to wake up rather than roll over. And one way to effectuate that is to imagine that you're a little bit behind. Once you do that, you can use them to wake up rather than roll over. One way to effectuate that is to imagine that you're a little bit behind. Yeah. That's very interesting. I could imagine a project manager leading a team, having midpoint review, going, here's all the things that we have left to do and exerting pressure on the team, healthy pressure and stress to get things done.

Yeah. Just saying, hey, we're a little bit behind. And the idea of being a little bit behind is really interesting because there's experimental evidence showing that if you take a midpoint of something, and at the midpoint, people are way ahead, they actually don't improve their performance. If they're way behind, they can become complacent and give up. But if they're a little bit behind, they really bring it during that second half. Yeah. OK, we're starting to run out of time.

I do want to just cover endings. So how do endings typically impact our behavior? Oh, gosh. So many different way. Endings have a big effect on our lives. They have a big effect on our memory. So we're more likely to, we evaluate entire experiences based heavily on how they end, rather than

on the totality of the experience or the average of the experience. It's a very well-known phenomenon in psychological science. Endings can help us energize. So when we see the end of something, we end up kicking a little bit harder. So this is some intriguing research from Adam Alter at NYU and Hal Hirschfield at UCLA showing that people are most likely to run their very first marathon at ages 29, 39, 49, and 59, right, when they get to the end of a decade. Endings can help us in some ways focus on what's really important to us that help us

sort of edit our lives. And so what you see across the life cycle, this is the research of Laura Carson, Senate Stanford, is that over the course of time, we end up research of Laura Carson, Senate Stanford, is that over the course of time, we end up starting out our lives with, say, not a huge number of friends, and then our number of friends grows throughout the middle of our life, but then later in life, say, 60 and beyond, the final third of Act 3 of our lives, we actually have fewer friends, which seems like a sad story, but Carson's and found that what's going on here is not sad at all.

What it means is that people have essentially shed the outer layer of friends, the middle layer of friends, and instead focus tightly on that inner circle of friends, because that's a real source of meaning and satisfaction. So again, our lives are so deeply episodic. As you say, projects have beginnings, middles and ends. Some relationships have beginnings, middles and ends. And so the key is to be aware of the episodic nature of these things. Beginnings, as we discussed, have one effect. Endings have another effect. Midpoints, which are often invisible, have another effect. And so if you're aware of

these things, you can actually make different decisions and use these forces, which we often don't see to our advantage rather than be hostage to them. Totally. And to everybody out there, I would totally recommend Daniel's book when it is so interesting. We couldn't even cover all of it. There's so much more valuable information on that book, so I definitely recommend to go grab that. I always end my show with this last question. What is your secret to profiting in life? My secret to profiting in life?

Well, I guess if I tell you, it's no longer a secret, right? That's an interesting question, Hala. I would say not being too concerned about what other people think. Earlier in my life, I think I was pretty concerned about what other people thought of me. And then I had a great revelation. I discovered what people thought of me. And the answer was they weren't thinking about me. They were thinking about themselves.

And that's liberating. If you stop caring too deeply about what other people think of you, I find that a source of great liberation. And too many people are trying to conform to what they imagine other people are thinking or evaluating them when, in fact, all those other people couldn't care less

about what those folks are doing. I totally agree. And where can our listeners go to learn more about you and everything that you do? So you can go to my website, which is www.danpink.com. I've got all kinds of good, cool, free resources. I've got an email newsletter, videos, all kinds of groovy stuff. Awesome. I'll stick some links in my show notes so my listeners have easy access.

It was so nice to speak with you. I think our audience is really going to enjoy this show, so thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Holly. It's been a pleasure. you