When, not What

Daniel Pink’s book, When, is a wake-up call on why our intuitive feel on one aspect of problem solving may be very wrong:

“We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what.”

We ignore the “when” even though we all know this:

“(Late chronotypes) wake long after sunrise, detest mornings, and don’t begin peaking until late afternoon or early evening… (Early chronotypes) rise early and feel energized during the day but wear out by evening.”

Consider the impact to young people who “begin undergoing the most profound change in chrono-biology of their lifetimes around puberty”. And yet, most schools world over start early in the day:

“(Schools) force these extreme owls into schedules designed for chirpy seven-year-old larks.”

So why not change schools to start a bit later? Aha, guess how the adults who set the school time think:

“What difference can one hour possibly make”, ask the forty- and fifty-year olds.”

And then there’s the fact that it would disrupt the life of the adults:

“A key reason is that starting (school) later is inconvenient for adults… Parents might not be able to drop off their kids on the way to work. Teachers must stay later in the afternoon.”

So ok, changing school times probably isn’t going to happen. But as adults, we should identify our own chronotype (late or early, owl or lark) and use that to decide when we work on different kinds of problems:

-       When we’re alert and at our peak, we should do the work that requires analytical skills, and we need to stay focused;

-       And we should attack the work requiring innovation or creativity when we’re tired, when our mind will not stay focused and wander… and thus stumble upon a solution! This counter-intuitive phenomenon even has a name, the “inspiration paradox”, what Cindy May describes thus:

“Innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best.”

Want to make a big change, start something new? Pink says that:

“Imbuing an otherwise ordinary day with personal meaning generates the power to activate new beginnings.”

Like New Year. Or a birthday. Or the first of a month. Or even the first (work) day of the week, Monday. Make all the jokes you want on New Year resolutions, but starting on a day to which you gave some (arbitrary) significance has a better chance of working than starting on a random day!