DANIEL PINK: All right. Thank you, Heath. Thank you guys for being here. So I'm eager to tell you
about this latest book, tell you why I
wrote it, and then give you some ideas from it
and then take some questions. I wrote this book out of a
sense of frustration largely. I was making all kinds of
decisions in my own life about when to do things. When should I exercise? When should I do
this kind of work? What should I do
that kind of work? When should I start a project? When should I abandon a
project that's not working? And I was making those decisions
in a very, very sloppy way. I felt that I can make
them in a more coherent-- I wanted to make
them in a better way. I looked around for guidance. It didn't exist, but
that got me curious. I've written some books
about social science. And I said, I wonder if there is
any research on this question? And it turned out
there was a lot of research on this question. It was in many, many fields--
literally dozens of fields. It was in economics
and social psychology, but it was also in
molecular biology. There's a whole field
of chronobiology. There is research
in anesthesiology, endocrinology-- all
these different fields asking very similar questions. What's the effect of time of day
on what we do and how we do it? How do beginnings
affect our behavior? How do midpoints
affect our behavior? How do endings
affect our behavior? And I felt if you go wide
enough and deep enough into this research you can
begin to piece together the evidence-based ways to
make better, smarter, shorter decisions about
when to do things. For you guys, what I did
is I just put together five questions. I'm going to ask five
questions and then provide the answers to those questions
based on this research. But the main idea
here-- and then I'm going to spend a lot of
time taking your questions. The main idea here is that we
think that timing is an art, but it's really a science. We don't have to make
these timing decisions in such a haphazard, intuitive,
guesswork-centered way. We can make them in a better,
smarter, more systematic way. So let's talk about five. I'm talking five very specific,
nitty-gritty questions about timing-- all kinds of different things,
fairly idiosyncratic list here. So number one-- at
what time of day should Alphabet hold its
quarterly earnings calls? Alphabet holds its
earnings calls at 1:30 Pacific, 4:30 Eastern. Is that a good idea? Does it matter at what
time of day we do things? Does it matter a little? Does it matter a lot? Let's find out, all right? There's a huge amount
of research on this. This is just one
tiny little nugget. And as many of you know,
there's some incredible insights one can get from big data now. I don't need to explain
all that to you. One of the really
interesting programs being used in big data research
is something called LIWC-- L-I-W-C-- the Linguistic
Inquiry Word Count. It's basically a
gigantic text analyzer. It can take a giant body of
text or a small body of text and do all kinds of analysis
that would otherwise take an army of people to do. So these researchers at NYU-- so there's been
research on tracking. You can actually have
a pretty good read on the patterns of mood
over the course of a day by analyzing tweets,
because the program can measure the emotional
valence of the words there. You can do all kinds of
things with this, including measuring any body of text. So here's a body of text-- 26,000 corporate earnings calls. All these corporate earnings
calls are transcribed. You guys put them on your site-- the transcriptions of all
of your earnings calls. These researchers at NYU
took these 26,000 calls from 2,100 companies
over 6 and 1/2 years. Now, just think about manually
reading through 26,000 corporate earnings calls. You would want to just beat
your head against the wall after about five, right? And so they were actually
looking for something else. And they said, does
the emotional content of the words being used
in these earnings calls both by the executives
who are leading it and by the analysts
and journalists who are asking questions--
does the mood change at all based
on time of day? And the answer was,
yeah, even when you control for fundamentals-- even when you control
for fundamentals, right? Here's what happened. Afternoon calls were
more negative, irritable, and combative, leading to-- here's the punch
line right here-- temporary stock mispricings
for firms hosting earnings calls later in the day. Now, think about
that for a second. That's kind of weird, right? It doesn't make any sense. Think about it. You guys are familiar
with earnings calls. The people who do
your earnings calls-- your CEO and your CFO-- what's your CEO's first name? Sundar, right? OK, right. And then your CFO is Ruth. So are Sundar and
Ruth pretty good? Are they any good? They know what they're
doing more or less? You're being videotaped,
but you know. They know what they're
doing more or less? OK. Do you think those guys prepare
for these earnings calls? Any of you ever been involved
in anything like that? They prepare like
crazy-- not just these two but any CFO and CEO. They prepare like crazy. They have talking points. They rehearse the questions. They're very well prepared. Do Sundar and Ruth have anything
at stake in these earnings calls? What? Repetition. What else? You can say it--
personal wealth. Exactly. All right. So here you have-- and just extrapolate to how
many companies were there? 2,100 companies. Extrapolate to 2,000 companies. Their CEOs and CFOs
know what they're doing. They're well prepared. They have something at stake. And yet time of
day had an effect on the mood of these
calls to the point where the stocks for
afternoon conference calls were temporarily mispriced. And I'm convinced there's
someone out there-- maybe even in this building-- who has written a
program to exploit that delta between
the true price and the misprice
because of time of day. And over and over
and over again, we see this in the research--
over and over and over again. Here's what we know. Our mood does not stay the
same throughout the day. Our cognitive abilities
don't stay the same throughout the day. Our mood and our
cognitive abilities change throughout the day. They change in predictable
ways, and they sometimes can change in dramatic ways. Let me tell you what that means. Basically what we know is this. We tend to move through
the day in three stages-- peak, trough, recovery,
peak, trough, recovery. In general, our mood
goes up, then it dips, then it goes back up again. And that has an
effect on performance, and performance
varies more than you would think over time of day. I'll give you an
example of that-- hospitals. If you learn nothing else
from our little session here this morning, don't go to
the hospital in the afternoon if you can avoid it. There are predictable
differences in hospital performance
based on time of day. Example-- anesthesia errors-- four times more likely at
3:00 PM than at 9:00 AM. hand washing in hospitals-- huge
deterioration in hand washing at hospitals in the afternoon. It's lunchtime. Let's talk about colonoscopies. Colonoscopies-- doctors
find half as many polyps in afternoon exams as
they do in morning exams. Unnecessary antibiotics
fueling the rise of superbugs-- much more likely
to be prescribed in the afternoon
versus the morning. You see it in health care. You see it in education. There's a great
piece of research from the University of Chicago
looking at 2 million students from the LA Unified
School District. Students who took
math in the morning had better GPAs, higher
test scores than students who took math in the afternoon. Over and over and over
again we see this pattern. Here's what we need to know. Our cognitive abilities
don't remain the same over the course of the day. They change. They change in predictable ways. They sometimes change
in dramatic ways, and the right time
to do something depends on what you're doing. We can talk more
about that in Q&A, because I'm going to
be pretty brief here. Another question about
the particular tactical-- just put basically a dog's
breakfast of tactical questions about timing. Two-- when should you ask
your boss for a raise? When should you ask
your boss for a raise? What time of day do
you think you should ask your boss for a raise? AUDIENCE: After lunch. DANIEL PINK: After lunch. OK. Good instinct. What makes you say that? AUDIENCE: They're happy
that they've eaten. DANIEL PINK: They're happy that
they've eaten a free meal, OK? That's a good instinct. Tell me your first name. AUDIENCE: Amelia. DANIEL PINK: Amelia. All right. So let's take a look at this. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to analogize
to some research-- very powerful pretty well-known
research out of Israel. This is a study done of judges-- a study done of parole hearings. You'll see why this matters. These judges come before-- you have prisoners in Israel
who come before these judges, and these judges decide
whether they get parole. Do they stay in prison for
the rest of their term? Do they get early release? Do they continue wearing
an ankle monitor, or are they allowed
to remove it? These are pretty significant
decisions about human liberty. Does time of day effect
those judicial decisions? And the answer is-- what do you think the answer is? Why else would I be
mentioning it, right? I want you to take a
look at this chart here. This is a chart. On the vertical axis is your
probability of getting paroled. The horizontal axis
is time of day. Early in the day, you've got
a pretty good chance, then big drop. Then-- Amelia's instincts
were very good-- the judge has a break. It goes back up
then way back down. Then the judge has a
break, then way back up. Now think about
this for a second. Remember, your timing of when
you appear before that judge is largely random, right? It's like going to the DMV. How long is a person
waiting in line? I guess nobody here owns a
car, so let's make something more relevant to your life. You're waiting in line
at Whole Foods, OK? You're waiting in
line at Whole Foods. How long it takes depends
on who's in front of you-- how long that takes. You don't know when
you're going to get taken. So take a look at that here. So imagine your loved one is
coming in for a parole hearing immediately before
the judge has a break. Your odds are not good. And then imagine
the schmo behind-- the next person in
line, the person who had ticket number 14 versus
ticket number 13 in the order-- comes in after the
judge has their break. There's like a seven
or eight x difference. So what does this have
to do with your boss? Here's what it has
to do with your boss. When we make decisions--
human beings make decisions-- So first of all, this should
scare the hell out of us about the criminal
justice system. There other things about this. There's a great book
that I recommend to you called "Unfair" by a
guy named Adam Benforado who's a professor at
Temple Law School. And it basically makes
this very powerful argument that much of our
justice system is built on assumptions
and premises about human behavior
that are not true. That's problematic. And so this might
be another example. I'll give you another
example of time of day effects on
juror decision making. This is experimental research. Here's what they do. They have a fact
pattern, all right? So here's what
we're going to do. I got a fact pattern
about a defendant. And I'm going to give this
group this fact pattern, and I'm going to give this
group this fact pattern. I'm going to describe to you a
defendant and all the evidence about that defendant. You get the same fact pattern. You get the same fact pattern. The only difference is that
this group, the defendant's name is Robert Garner,
and in this group, the defendant's name
is Roberto Garcia-- same exact facts though. When jurors deliberated
in the morning, both defendants are
treated the same way. When jurors deliberated
in the afternoon, they were more likely to
exonerate Garner and convict Garcia on the same set of facts. Yeah. So we should be
disturbed about this for a number of
different reasons. But let's take this back to
decision making writ large. When people make decisions-- anybody makes a
decision-- they come to that decision with,
in their back pocket, a default decision. And that decision is largely no. Anybody here in sales? OK, yeah. So when you go to
pitch a prospect or something like that, you
know what I'm talking about. The default decision
is no, right? You go to ask your
boss for a raise. The default decision is no. You go to ask somebody
out for a date. The default decision is no-- at
least that was my experience. And when parole
judges make decisions, the default answer is no. Remember, if a judge doesn't
grant parole, she's fine. If a judge grants parole and
that person she's paroled goes on to do
something horrible, that's really bad for her. So the default decision
is not to grant parole. What we see over and over again
in studies of decision making is the following. People are more likely to
overcome the default early in the day and
immediately after breaks-- early in the day and
immediately after breaks. So Amelia, you were
exactly right about that. Hit your boss after
lunch if you want a raise, because her default
answer is going to be no. Let's go to another
idiosyncratic tactical question. When should you begin a new
diet or exercise program? Does it matter the
day that you begin? Of course it does. Let's talk about this. We're going to move
beyond the unit of a day. We're going to talk about
timing in a broader sense. There's some very
interesting research on what are called
"temporal landmarks." So think about a landmark
in physical space. What does a landmark
in physical space do? Get you to slow down
and pay attention. Helps you navigate, right? So there are also
temporal landmarks. There's some good research-- a lot of research on this. Some of the best research is
done by researchers at Penn, including Katy Milkman, Jason
Reese, and Hengchen Dai, who's no longer at
Penn-- now at UCLA. Here's what they found out. There's certain dates
that seem to be better-- make it more likely that people
will embark on behavior change. So you know this with New
Year's resolutions, right? Anybody ever made New
Year's resolutions? New Year's resolutions
get a lot of bad press. Here's the thing. New Year's resolutions--
oh, my God. Half the people don't even-- half of New Year's
resolutions fail. To me, you've buried
the lead in that. I think the lead is that means
half of New Year's resolutions succeed. That's a big deal when you
think about how hard changing behavior is. That's a big deal. Why? Because all dates are
not created equal. Some of them operate
as temporal landmarks, operating somewhat similar to
physical landmarks in space. What do these
temporal landmarks do? They trigger a peculiar
form of mental accounting. We open up a fresh ledger
on ourselves essentially, the same way a business
would open up a fresh ledger on a new quarter or a new year. So when they look
at the research on when people begin
behavior change-- and again, it's axiomatic. You're more likely to change
your behavior if you begin to try to change your behavior. You don't begin, your behavior
is not going to change, right? So what do we see? This is a study of a
very large university, and they were able to get
the data by looking at-- when you go to the gym,
you have to swipe in. And so they had massive
amounts of data. When do people go to the gym? Start of a new
semester-- huge increase. Start of a new year-- big increase. Start of a new month-- big increase. Start of a new week-- very big increase. After your birthday-- a
somewhat big increase. This is mitigated by the fact
that there are decreases. There's a big drop in
going to the gym on the day after your 21st birthday. I'm not joking. So what do we know about that? What's our question here? Our question here is, when
should you begin a new diet or exercise program--
any behavior change? The day you choose to begin-- those days are not
all created equal. You have a better chance if you
begin on a Monday rather than a Thursday, if you begin
on the first of the month rather than on the
13th of the month. You can choose personal
temporal landmarks. You're better off beginning
the day after your birthday, the day after your
anniversary working here than three days before that. Temporal landmarks
shape our behavior, help us change our behavior. Number four-- when are
you most likely to run your first marathon--
at what age? AUDIENCE: 35. DANIEL PINK: 35. Great guess. Who else has a guess? 35 is a great guess. AUDIENCE: 29. DANIEL PINK: 29. Who said 29? Why do you think 29? AUDIENCE: I think
as you approach 30, you start to [INAUDIBLE]. DANIEL PINK: Have
you run a marathon? AUDIENCE: No. I'll be 29 next year, and
I'd like to run a marathon. DANIEL PINK: OK, there you go. So tell me your first name. AUDIENCE: Abby. DANIEL PINK: Abby. Abby wants to run a
marathon at age 29. Why, Abby? AUDIENCE: Because
it's something I've said I wanted to
do for a long time, and I'd rather do it when I'm
in better physical fitness. I don't know. 30 feels like a-- a thing to do before 30. DANIEL PINK: Absolutely. So here's what we
know about that. As luck would have
it, I have a chart on 29-year-olds and marathon
running believe it or not. Now, here's what we know. The age at which people are most
likely to run a first marathon is age 29. This is the work of
Hal Hershfield at UCLA and Adam Alter at NYU. 29-year-olds-- twice as likely
to run a first marathon as 28-year-olds. 29-year-olds-- twice as
likely to run a first marathon as 30-year-olds for exactly the
reason that Abby is telling us. Abby, do you think you're
going to be physiologically different next year-- twice as physiologically
set to run a marathon? AUDIENCE: If our trainer at
the gym has anything to say. DANIEL PINK: There are
not massive physiological differences between
28-year-olds and 29-year-olds, between 29 and 30-year-olds. Let me give you
another question. What's another age at
which people are most-- I'll give you a hint. It's about 10 years later. What's another age at which
people are disproportionately likely to run their
first marathon? 39. OK. Here's another one. What's another age at which
people are disproportionately likely to run the
first marathon? 49. Let's look at that. 49-year-olds-- three times more
likely to run a first marathon than 50-year-olds. Right? There's a whole effect. Remember, our lives in
some ways are episodic. And there's a whole
line of research that I write about in here
about the effect of endings on our behavior. One of the things that endings
do is endings help us energize. When the end of something
becomes salient, we kick a little harder. One final question
for all of you before we take some
questions from you-- another idiosyncratic
tactical question. Here we go. We're going to play
a guessing game. What activity am I describing? I'm going to
describe the benefits of a particular activity. You are to tell me what
activity I'm describing. Here's what this
activity does for us. It delivers a significant
boost to positive mood. Any guesses yet? AUDIENCE: Sleeping. DANIEL PINK: Sleeping, good. AUDIENCE: Dancing. DANIEL PINK: Dancing, good. AUDIENCE: Exercise. DANIEL PINK: Exercise, good. OK. This is good, so stick
with those answers. Here, I'll give you another one. This like a game show. We're going to peel
this back a little bit. It increases
sensitivity to others and makes you more likely
to subsequently cooperate with others or
perform a good deed. AUDIENCE: Alcohol. DANIEL PINK: Alcohol, good. Great guess. OK. So what do we have
on the table here? We have alcohol. AUDIENCE: The holidays. DANIEL PINK: The holidays? OK. So let's see what we
have on the table here. We have celebrating a holiday. We have exercise. We have alcohol. AUDIENCE: Expressing gratitude. DANIEL PINK: Expressing
gratitude, very good. AUDIENCE: Meditation. AUDIENCE: Taking a walk. DANIEL PINK: Taking
a walk, very good. Meditation, very good. All right. So there's more here, folks. There's more. Here's what else it does. It calms heart rates and
it boost endorphin levels. AUDIENCE: Meditation? DANIEL PINK: Meditation, good. We have two votes
for meditation. We're not done. AUDIENCE: Eating. DANIEL PINK: Eating, good. Good guess. AUDIENCE: Sex. DANIEL PINK: Good guess. Sex is good. It increases pain
thresholds and reduces the need for pain medication. AUDIENCE: Friday. DANIEL PINK: Friday. Good guess. Great guess. You guys are circling this. AUDIENCE: Marijuana? DANIEL PINK: Marijuana, good. So what do we have? We have marijuana. We have meditation. We have Friday. We have sex. We have alcohol. We have exercise. That's not it. One more-- it increases the
production of immunoglobulin, making it easier to
fight infections. AUDIENCE: Sleep? DANIEL PINK: Sleep? Good guess. It's not sleep either. You know what it is? AUDIENCE: Reading? DANIEL PINK: Say again? AUDIENCE: Reading. DANIEL PINK: Reading. Good guess. AUDIENCE: Sunlight? DANIEL PINK: Sunlight? Good guess. AUDIENCE: Your birthday? DANIEL PINK: Your birthday? My birthday? My birthday has this
effect on people worldwide. When it's my birthday, July
23, immunoglobulin levels around the world spike. AUDIENCE: Adaptogens? DANIEL PINK: Say again? AUDIENCE: Adaptogens? DANIEL PINK: Adaptogens? OK. I don't even know what that
is, but it's a great guess. Here's what it is. It's an activity. It's an activity. You guys had a lot of
guesses for activities, but you didn't manage to
get the right activity. The activity that has all these
benefits is choral singing. You seem pumped
about that answer. Why? AUDIENCE: Because I just
started singing again, and I'm actually working
one on one with a coach. And she probably said all
these benefits to me verbatim. And I forgot that
that was singing. DANIEL PINK: Yeah. But it's not just singing,
it's singing in a group. It's singing in a group
that is different. Here's what this is about. There is a rich and
fascinating body of evidence showing how people
coordinate and synchronize in time-- how we're able to do that
but also the benefits of it. These are the benefits
of choral singing. Basically, choral singing
is about as good for you as exercise. Tell me your first name? AUDIENCE: Lakshmana. DANIEL PINK: Lakshmana? Lakshmana says exercise. Exercise is so good for you. You're crazy if
you don't exercise. Exercise is so, so, so, so
good for you, all right? Choral singing gets
the silver medal. I think it delivers more
benefits than meditation. The research is
overwhelming on this, and it's part of a
larger body of research showing the benefits
of synchronization. When we synchronize with
other people, we feel better. I'll give you an example of it. Let's take rowing. Measure people rowing
individually-- you can measure, because it's physical. You can put cameras on
people, sensors on people and say, go row. And you row your whatever
the boat is called. You row the boat, all right? And so you can measure
physical exertion. And then you can say
to people, how much pain are you experiencing? Because it's very
physically exerting. You can give them a chart
saying, how much pain are you experiencing? Then you can have
them row with a team-- row in a group. And they can exert
themselves physically the exact same amount. We can measure this. Exert the exact same amount-- they report feeling less pain
even though they were exerting themselves the same amount. They were in a group
doing it in synchrony. They reported less pain. You see this in some really
fascinating work on children. You have children. Imagine you're children. I'm the teacher. This half of the room-- we're going to play an awesome,
fun game for a little while. This group over
here-- we're going to play an awesome,
fun game, but it's going to be a synchronous game. We're going to play
a game like clap and tap where you go--
everybody follow me. Clap, clap, clap. Oh, you don't-- I mean
just hypothetically. Tap, tap, clap, clap-- we
play a synchronous game. Totally fun game--
it's synchronous. Totally fun game--
it's not synchronous. We take these kids, move
them out of this room-- more likely to help the
teacher, more likely to want to play with kids
who don't look like them. Same thing is true
on swing sets. This is incredible. This is research out of Oxford. This is incredible. Swinging-- swinging
is awesome, right? Being on a swing set
is awesome, right? Total mood booster. Unless you have serious
motion sickness issues, swinging is cool, right? So you put two kids on a swing. These two kids
swing synchronously. Next two kids swing
asynchronously. These two kids who swung
synchronously-- same thing-- more likely to cooperate,
more likely to collaborate, more likely to be open
to playing with kids who don't look like them. There is something really
peculiar in the human condition that makes us-- synchronizing
makes us feel good. Synchronizing
makes us do a good. Synchronizing with other
people is a powerful elixir-- more than I ever
would have expected. Because there's something
about us that makes us want to synchronize
with others. So those are five simple
idiosyncratic questions about timing. There are about 100 more of
these really cool things. So I'm happy to talk to you and
answer any of your questions about the pattern of the day,
why breaks are important, how beginnings affect us,
how midpoints affect us, how endings affect us, how
groups synchronize in time, and how the very way
we think about time-- including even the
verb tenses we use-- shapes our behavior. So what are your questions? Yes sir? AUDIENCE: How can I optimize my
schedule to the peak, trough, recovery thing? I heard you on the
Tim Ferriss podcast, so I was starting to use this. And I started noticing how,
yeah, earlier in the day, I'm better at analysis. Then I go through
the trough, then I recover in the afternoon. However, my schedule is
kind of inconsistent. Left to my own devices,
I go to bed at 2:00 AM, wake up at 10:30. But sometimes I have early
meetings, so I can't do that. So how do I-- does the PTR start
when you wake up, or is it a regular
time every day? And so if I wake up late, I
might wake up in the trough. DANIEL PINK: Great question. I totally understand
your question. I just like to throw
things in public. It's a great question,
and it's complicated. Tell me your first name. AUDIENCE: Chris. DANIEL PINK: Chris, OK. So one thing that we
have to think about is-- what we're looking for in terms
of figuring out the right time to do work during the day
is what social psychologists call the "synchrony effect." It's sort of a fancy word. What you want to line up
are type, task, and time. So type is really
important here. So type means chronotype. Chronotype is basically
your propensity. Do you wake up early
and go to sleep early? Do you wake up late
and go to sleep late? On a free day when
you don't have to be anywhere or do
anything, what time would you typically go to sleep? Do you say 2:00? AUDIENCE: Probably
around 1:00 or 1:30. But if I have a week of
nothing, by the end of the week, I'm going to bed at 2:30. DANIEL PINK: OK. So let's split the
difference and call it 2:00. All right, so 2:00. And then what time do
you typically wake up? AUDIENCE: 10:00. DANIEL PINK: 10:00. OK. So what we're
trying to do here-- there's a very easy
back of the envelope way to figure out
someone's chronotype. So what we're looking for is
the midpoint of your sleep. So the midpoint of your sleep--
if you go to sleep at 2:00 and wake up at 10:00, your
midpoint of sleep is 6:00 AM. And basically the
way it works is that if your midpoint
is before 3:30 AM, you're generally a
morning person-- a lark. If your midpoint is after 5:30
AM, you're generally an owl. So about 15% of us are
larks, 20% of us are owls, but 2/3 of us are in the middle. And so would you
consider yourself more of an owl than a lark? AUDIENCE: Yeah. DANIEL PINK: OK. But you still have to
go to 8:30 meetings. So in general, 80% of us
move through the day peak, trough, recovery. Owls are more complicated. Owls are more complicated. And in many ways,
as you're hinting, I think that the corporate
world-- the traditional world of work-- is designed to
crush the spirits of owls. And to my mind what should go
on is that the organization should accommodate
the owls rather than force the owls to
accommodate the organization. That said, that
doesn't always happen. In fact, that rarely happens. Let's talk about the early
morning meetings here. What time would
you have a meeting? AUDIENCE: The earlier
ones are 9:00 AM? DANIEL PINK: 9:00 AM. All right. So how do you feel in
those 9:00 AM meetings? AUDIENCE: Usually not good. DANIEL PINK: OK. Great, awesome. Do you feel like you do your
better work later in the day? AUDIENCE: Yeah, typically. Although now I'm
realizing that also I do some good work
earlier in the day. If I get up at 9:00 AM,
I am doing good work at around 11:30. DANIEL PINK: Oh, interesting. OK. AUDIENCE: There is a
zone there, and then I do hit the trough after noon and
then 7:00 PM, 8:00 PM on again. DANIEL PINK: Interesting. OK, good. So one thing here is-- and I think Chris raises one
of the most important points here-- is that what
the research gives us are general guidelines
for large populations, but there's going to be some
human individual variation. And I think the key is
to actually pay attention to how you're feeling
and what you're doing to observe yourself better. So you could be, Chris, either-- it'd be interesting to see
what kind of work you do. But you could be either
basically peak, trough, recovery just starting later,
or you could be actually recovery, trough,
peak, which is actually fairly common among owls. What would be happening early
on is that recovery period which is good for
certain kinds of work, and then the peak period
is later in the day. But leaving that aside
for the moment here, let's be very practical
and tactical here. You feel like you really
get going at around 7:00. Here's what I would
do for you if you have those 9 o'clock meetings
when you're not at your best. It's clear based on
your facial expression that you're not at
your best at 9 o'clock in the morning, which
is totally cool. Here's what I recommend you do. The day before you have an
important 9:00 meeting-- say you're working between
7:00 and 10:00 PM-- here's what I
recommend that you do. Make a checklist
for what you want to say at that
meeting, what you want to accomplish at that
meeting, what you need to get done at that meeting. Any questions you need to ask-- make that checklist. And actually come into the
meeting with that checklist so you don't have to
draw on your hazy mind when you're at your worst. Figure out what you want to
do when you're at your best, and then give yourself
those guidelines to rely on when
you're at your worst. The other thing that I would
absolutely recommend is-- and this goes to
the whole chapter that I have on breaks-- is
before that 9:00 meeting, take a walk around the block. Movement, sunlight, nature--
take a walk around the block. The other thing-- someone
here mentioned gratitude, and there's a first
cousin of this. Doing a good deed
for somebody else is a pretty significant
mood booster. So maybe bring somebody a cup
of coffee or help somebody move something--
that kind of thing. So go into that 9:00
meeting with your checklist. Before you do it, take
a walk around the block. Maybe do somebody a good deed. You're going to be
a little bit better. And the key here that
I want to emphasize, not only the
individual variation-- the fact that science
gives us these broad design principles-- but
individual variation is going to play a
role in all of this. You really have to get better-- what we're talking about
here is not like, oh, my God, you're going to be a
superstar in every meeting now at 9:00 in the
morning if you do this. Here's what we're talking about. We're talking about this
in a probabilistic way. So let's say that you have-- for you going to
a 9:00 AM meeting, you have a 23% chance of
getting good work done, getting good stuff accomplished. And if you do
these other things, we can dial that
up to a 28% chance. There's still a 72% chance
this meeting is going to be a bomb, Chris, right? But I'll take that
turn from 24%-- whatever I said-- to
28%, because you're going to go to a lot
of meetings, right? Over and over and over,
that's going to do it. So what we're
talking about here is turning the dial in
our favor a little bit using some of these principles
and the individual variation that we notice in ourselves. Who else has a question? Because I get to
throw something. All right, back there. How heavy is this? Ooh. That was my slider. AUDIENCE: Yes. So I noticed that,
yeah, I'm much more productive in the mornings. And also doctors
and dentists are all more productive in the morning. So traditionally I've always
scheduled my appointments in the afternoon, that way
I'm most productive at work. And then I go to visit
them in the afternoon. But what you're
showing now would be you should actually
try to visit them in the middle of the day. But that means that impacts
my productivity, because I'm working in the afternoon. So have you kind of
thought about that trade off of optimizing
yours versus others? DANIEL PINK: Great point. Great point, particularly
on medical appointments. So here's the thing. If it's a significant
medical appointment, I would pay the price
of my own productivity and go in the morning. So for my own family, when
there's something important going on-- a visit
to a hospital-- my elder daughter at age 20
had her wisdom teeth taken out. She had to have
general anesthesia. No way in hell she's
going in the afternoon to that appointment. I mean that. I'm dead serious about that. For things serious, nobody in
my family goes in the afternoon now. The numbers are
that overwhelming, so I put a heavy weight on that. I'll give you an
example of something that I do literally
schedule in the afternoon-- a routine dental visit. It's going to be fine. It's pretty simple
and straightforward. I don't have any
serious dental problems. They're just going to
do a cleaning and X-rays and whatever. They can probably do
that reasonably well, and it's not worth
getting a tiny little bit advantage of slightly,
infinitesimally cleaner teeth and sacrifice my best
work period of the day. So it's that kind
of a trade off. But for anything significant? No way. Go in the morning. I'm dead serious. Go in the morning. I don't even think
it's a close call. Yes sir. Oh, sorry. AUDIENCE: Similar to that, have
you thought about time zones? Because then the trade
off is interesting. Let's say you have a
meeting or an interview with somebody in London. Do you optimize for their time,
or do you optimize for yours? DANIEL PINK: It's really hard. It depends on the meeting
and to some extent who's more important. So if you have an
important customer, I would take the hit yourself
and optimize for the customer. Make it the
customer's best time. If you're talking
about distributed teams within Google,
Alphabet, then I think it becomes a little
more complicated. Because remember, let's
take a step back here. Think about our brains. Our brains evolved in a world
where there were not hours let alone time zones. It is completely
unnatural for our brain to be talking to someone who is
literally in a different day, right? Our brains aren't wired
to do that kind of thing, so it's very hard. So if you have these distributed
teams as is very, very common, I think there are probably two
solutions-- not even solutions. There are two responses to that. I think the meta
thing is recognizing we are not built to do that,
so it's going to be very hard. I think the key thing to do
tactically are the following. One-- when we think about
that conference call-- I imagine everybody in this room
has been in a conference call where somebody is in Asia,
and somebody is in Europe, and somebody is here--
multi-continent kinds of calls. I think what you have to
do is, before you even schedule that call,
you have to say, what are we trying
to accomplish? And what, if anything, can
be done asynchronously? If you think about a call-- a meeting of any kind-- it's basically a series of tasks
to be done, questions to ask, tasks to be done. So you have this bucket
of tasks to be done. You've got to look
inside of that bucket and say, do all these things
need to be done synchronously? And they usually don't. And so what you can do
is you can take some of the things that don't need
to be done synchronously, have them done asynchronously. So let's say something like
you're going to talk over, I don't know, ideas for a new
product or something like that. I think that what
you could do is you could have people generate
those ideas asynchronously and then send them around
and then have the discussion synchronously. Because a discussion
about those ideas is going to be more
valuable synchronously. But if you say, OK,
so who has some ideas, you're going to have some
people in their absolute worst time of day. So figure out what you
can do asynchronously. And then also spread the pain-- except if it's your customer,
then you take the pain. Who else? Yes. I have to say,
I'm very impressed with the hand-eye coordination
of the people in this room today just throughout. We have not had a
bobble let alone a drop. AUDIENCE: If you have bad
hand-eye coordination, you just don't ask
questions with this thing. DANIEL PINK: Oh, I
guess that's right. We're self-selecting. Yeah, well put. That's a great point. So we're only hearing
questions from people with very good hand-eye coordination. AUDIENCE: Level of confidence. So given the scope of
normal adult day-- which is on a weekday, we're working. We've got maybe family and kids. We've got dinners. We've got maybe some
prayer or meditation time-- what's the best use
of recovery time? If you could structure
your perfect day, what tasks or
activities would you do during those recovery
periods where we already know we're not productive
or mentally sharp? DANIEL PINK: OK. Yeah, that's an
interesting question. So remember, what
we have on mood is we have this sort of
peak, trough, recovery. Would you consider yourself
more of a morning, more of an evening, or in the middle? AUDIENCE: Somewhere
in the middle-- aspiring morning, but
honestly more in the middle. DANIEL PINK: Yeah. So how would you do on midpoint
of sleep on the question that I asked Chris on a free day--
not a day you have to wake up to an alarm clock, not
a day you have to-- AUDIENCE: Right now I'm aiming
for like 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM. DANIEL PINK: But not aiming. What would you do
naturally if you didn't have an aim-- you just
let your body do whatever it wanted to do? AUDIENCE: Maybe 11:00 to 8:00. DANIEL PINK: OK, 11:00 to 8:00. So you're-- AUDIENCE: 11:00
to 7:00, I guess. Eight hours. DANIEL PINK: So your midpoint
would be 3:00, so you're larky. You're more of a
lark than an owl. AUDIENCE: A lefty. DANIEL PINK: Oh, you're
also left-handed? So here's what I think about it. So recovery-- this is mood-- peak. Did I screw something up? OK. Here's your mood over
the course of a day-- peak, trough, recovery. So let's talk about
that recovery period, because it's a very
interesting period. The key in the peak period--
whether it's at the beginning of the day, or whether
it begins at 7:00 PM, whether it begins at 8:00 in the
morning or 9:00 in the morning as it does for me, or whether
it begins at 7:00 PM as it does for Chris-- the key aspect of
the peak is this. That's when we
are most vigilant. Vigilance is the key point here. Vigilance means we're able
to bat away distractions. That makes it a good time for
the heads down, locked down, analytic kinds of work. The recovery period is actually
a really interesting period, because here's what happens. Our mood goes back up,
but we're less vigilant. And that ends up being actually
an interesting combination. Think about brainstorming,
for instance. I'm sure you've been in
brainstorming sessions where someone says,
that's a bad idea. That's a bad idea. They're hyper-vigilant,
hyper-analytical, and so they're knocking
down anything that's wobbly. But for brainstorming,
you actually want a little bit
of disinhibition. You don't want super-vigilance. And so it turns out that
there's certain kinds of problem solving-- certain kinds of non-obvious
problem solving-- that people do better
in that recovery period which we look at as kind
of a non-optimal period. You want your locked down,
important, heads down work during your peak, but
there's an advantage to that recovery period. You have elevated
mood, less vigilance. You have some disinhibition,
and you're feeling OK. Brainstorming, iterative work-- I end up doing a lot
of my interviews-- so when I'm interviewing people
for books and things like that, because my interviews-- I'm not an
investigative reporter. I'm not taking a deposition. I'm not trying to trap people
in contradictions or anything like that. My interviews are, hey, what
do you think about this? What do you think about that? Does that make any sense--
much sort of yeastier. And I find I do those
interviews better. I find I do my
locked down writing-- making the words march
in order on the page-- in the morning and then the
looser stuff later in the day during that recovery period. Yes. I don't even know
if we need this. AUDIENCE: I was
wondering if there's been any work done
to help, for example, the judges or the
anesthesiologists perform better their
drops or act more fairly. Do you just take more breaks? What's the solution there? DANIEL PINK: That's part of it. It's a really, really
great question. At some level, there are two
different kinds of breaks. One of them is a
restorative break, and that's the kind of
breaks that most of us should be taking at work. So we should be going out
in the afternoon to take-- we know a lot about breaks. Basically, my view is
that the science of breaks is where the science of
sleep was 15 years ago. 15 years ago here at
Alphabet-- or Google then-- writ large,
people who pulled all-nighters were heroes. And now we know a lot
about the science of sleep, and we say, no. You're not a hero if
you pull an all-nighter. You're an idiot. You're hurting your performance. You're probably
hurting the performance of people you're working with. I think the science of breaks
are where the science of sleep was 15 years ago. We should be taking more
breaks, and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks. So part of it is actually
in some of this more breaks, and we should be taking these
certain kinds of breaks. We should be taking
breaks where we're moving rather than stationary. We should be taking them
outside rather than inside. We know from the research
that social beats solo in break taking, so take a
break with somebody else. And we know the
importance-- this is urgent-- of full detachment. So when you take a break,
leave your phone behind. Don't talk about work. So if you were to
start a regimen where twice an afternoon-- once an afternoon-- you
took a 10 or 15 minute break outside, take a walk outside
with someone you like, leaving your phone behind
and talking about something other than work,
I'm convinced it will be a performance booster. Now, another kind of break
is a vigilance break. And so what you see in
medicine is the following. So the stakes are a
little bit higher. Stakes are a little
bit higher if you're talking about life and
death or human liberty. And there what you do-- and I write about this. Go to the University of
Michigan Medical Center, and they're about to do a
surgery in the afternoon. And before they even begin the
surgery, they take a time out. And everybody-- the surgeon, the
nurses, the anesthesiologists-- take a step back. They take a break,
look at the checklist, go over everything again. They basically have a
check on their vigilance. They don't go right in. So a way to mitigate
a lot of that is a vigilance break
for those high stakes kinds of encounters
where before you begin, you take a step back. You go back and
say, I know I'm not at my vigilance best right now. So what I want to
do is I want to take a step back and actually go
through a list and figure out, am I following the procedures? Am I doing everything
I need to do to be as vigilant as possible? I actually think there's a good
argument for judges doing that. Because I don't think
it's simply a case-- I don't want to rely on
a justice system that-- I don't want the justice
system to hinge on whether the judge has
a walk in the park. And so I think there's
ways to do that. In fact, there are a lot
of moves to actually-- for sentencing and
those kinds of things-- to turn it into a sort of
almost algorithmic sentencing. So there's a script
that we use for that, but I think that vigilance
breaks for judges would be a big deal. And so you could
say something like, I'm about to make
a decision here. Am I treating this
like a comparable-- what have I done in
comparable cases? What have I done for
comparable kinds of things? And they take a step
back and actually make sure they're
being vigilant rather than just being a hostage
of the diurnal patterns. Do we have one more, two more? AUDIENCE: I wonder if we
have any similar problems with interviewing
here or elsewhere. DANIEL PINK: Absolutely. There's absolutely no
question about that. There's no question
that there's going to be time of day
bias introduced in anything like that. In interviewing-- no question. In reading college
admissions files-- no question. Remember, axiomatic--
our cognitive abilities don't say the same
throughout the day. Our mood doesn't stay the
same throughout the day. Our decision making
capacities don't stay the same throughout the day. So there are going to be-- now, you guys do multiple
interviews with people. So your candidates will
interview with multiple people. So you might be able to actually
tease that out of the system by having enough
variation so that-- OK, so every candidate's
going to have some afternoon interviews, some evening
interviews, some morning interviews. And so you might actually be
able to even it out that way. There's no question
there's going to be bias in any kind
of human encounter based on time of day, period. AUDIENCE: So I actually
had a question about when you should do fun things. When will you enjoy-- DANIEL PINK: Don't. AUDIENCE: --fun things more? DANIEL PINK: You won't. No, give me an example. AUDIENCE: Well,
like socializing. Sometimes you feel like you
have a better time with friends or sometimes you're
more frustrated. What times are good to bond
with friends or strangers more? DANIEL PINK: I think
what you see is-- well, I don't want to recommend
bonding with strangers in all cases-- just want
to say that for the record. As a father, I don't-- you know. So if we look at the pattern
of mood again, what you see is there's some chicken
and egg effect here. So remember-- peak,
trough, recovery. And in the evenings,
our mood is-- for the 80% of us who have
that more traditional kind of pattern-- our moods in the evenings
are actually pretty good. And so it's a little
chicken and egg, and it's hard to disentangle. Our moods could be good because
we're more likely to socialize, but it could also be that
we're more likely to socialize because our moods are good. I think that's
the time to do it. But there's some really,
really good research out there irrespective
of timing on friendship and what are the elements
of maintaining friendships? And I can't think of the name
of the book, but what it shows is that making and
maintaining friendships is actually much harder
than we realized. It requires two things
that we're often not comfortable with. Number one-- it requires a
significant amount of time. There's no instant-- you
have to put in the time if you really want to have
an enduring friendship. The other thing-- which is a
reason why men often don't have as many or as rich friendships
as women talking about broad populations-- is that the
research on friendship-- you've got to devote
the time to it. The second thing is the
importance of self-disclosure. Self-disclosure ends up
being this incredible bonding agent for friendships. I mean, I hate
self-disclosure, and that's why I have no friends. To answer your
question directly, mood is better in the evening. That's probably a good time. And there's a huge
amount of research on the importance of
friendships and relationships to our overall well being. The challenge, as I said, is
that it requires devoting time. It really does. And it requires self-disclosure,
and that's something that a lot of us,
myself included, are a little bit leery of. Let's take one more,
and then we'll wrap up. AUDIENCE: This is going to
sound like a joke question, but where does coffee
play into all of this? DANIEL PINK: That's
not a joke question. That's a very serious question. AUDIENCE: Does it change
those energy patterns? If you have an important
meeting with someone, how smart is it to say, it
should be a coffee meeting. Because then you can ensure
everybody's energy levels will be spiked. DANIEL PINK: There's going to
be some individual variation on that, but the positive
benefits of caffeine up to a certain limit-- I mean, not going crazy-- are very high. And so what you also have-- just remember, it
takes a certain amount of time for the caffeine to
get into the bloodstream. If you and I sit down and
begin to have a cup of coffee, the caffeine's not going to hit
our bloodstream for 25 minutes. It depends on how long
our meeting's going to be. So what it could be is that you
and I have a crappy meeting, and then my meeting with
this guy a half hour later is awesome thanks to you. The effects of caffeine,
obviously, are ephemeral. There are two caffeine
tips that are in the book. One of them is this. You're better off not
having caffeine immediately when you wake up-- immediately when you wake up. When we wake up we begin
producing cortisol. It's a stress hormone. That's how we wake
up in some ways. We have this hormone coming. Wake up, wake up, wake up. So we start producing this
stress hormone of cortisol. Our cortisol levels
rise as we wake up, and caffeine
actually can inhibit the production of cortisol. And so if you have coffee
when you first wake up, you're really not gaining much. What you're better off doing is
waiting about an hour after you wake up when your cortisol
levels begin to drop and then hit it
with the caffeine. That's something
that I've tried. That's something that
I've tried to do. There are other people
who I'm convinced have basically a conditioned
psychological response to coffee first
thing in the morning. That is, you could
probably switch out decaf. And what they're responding
to is not the caffeine, but they're responding
to the ritual. I'm convinced of that. Now, another good use of
caffeine is the following. Do you guys have nap pods here? OK. So anybody ever use them? No. All right. So here's how to use it. Here's how to take
the ideal nap. Here's what you do. The ideal nap it turns
out is very, very short-- between 10 and 20 minutes long-- much shorter than I
would have expected. 10 and 20 minutes is
the ideal length nap-- gets you that restoration
without what's called sleep inertia,
which is that groggy, boggy feeling that you
get when you take a nap. So the ideal nap-- what I
do in my office is this. I sit in a chair in my office. I will put on noise
canceling headphones. I'll set my timer on my
phone for 25 minutes, and I can usually fall asleep
in about 10 or 12 minutes. And so that gives me
a 14, 15 minute nap, which is ideal, because
the alarm goes off after 25 minutes. But before I turn on the
timer or close my eyes, I down a cup of
coffee before the nap. And so what happens
is the following. I wake up with that
ideal short nap restored, but it takes 25 minutes
for the caffeine to get into my bloodstream. So when I'm waking up, I get
hit with that second boost of caffeine. And it's something
called a "nappuccino." There are actually
several papers on this showing its
efficacy believe it or not. You had a question
here in the front row? AUDIENCE: My question was,
it all seems like the topic-- I'll reflect back
what you just said-- is the "when" depends
on freshness of mind. Is there any other major
causal factor of to when? DANIEL PINK: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So that's a great question. So some of it is on the
judges-- this is speculation in the judges research. Some of it has to do with-- it
could be with glucose levels. Another big factor,
especially in physical stuff, is body temperature. Body temperature has a
surprisingly large role in our-- not surprising-- in our
physical performance. So this is one
reason why if you're deciding whether to exercise-- what time of day to exercise--
there are virtues of morning exercise big time. It's better for habit formation,
better for weight loss. There are virtues for afternoon
and evening exercise, too. Because around
4:00 to 7:00 or so, our body temperature
is at its highest. So afternoon exercise-- you're
less likely to get injured. Fewer injuries then. Afternoon exercise-- people
find it less effortful, and so that can aid
in habit formation. And actually, our
performance is better, too. Hand-eye coordination improves,
so coming here at 6:00 would be amazing. Hand-eye coordination improves,
lung function improves, speed improves. So there's actually a
disproportionate number of records and speed events
that were set between 4:00 PM and 7:00 PM local time. So body temperature really
surprised me as a driver behind that. Our bodies and brains
are very complex systems, so some of it's hormonal. Some of it is body temperature. Some of it is purely cognitive. Some of it is neurochemical. I mean, these are
exquisitely complex systems, so it's hard to disentangle what
exactly every causal agent is. Let's go one more, then
we'll wrap up-- back in the left field bleachers
or right field bleachers. AUDIENCE: We've talked
a lot about time of day, but how about time of year? One question is, have you
studied optimal time of year to take a vacation for a
company's maximum productivity? I know some people
kind of scatter out their vacation days. Some people save
them for holidays. Based on your research,
I assume if you're most productive at the start of
a quarter, start of the year, then maybe it would be
middle of a quarter. DANIEL PINK: Part
of the question is just observing
your own behavior and seeing what works for you. I don't write about
this in the book, but did I have looked at
the research on vacations for something else. The restorative effects of
vacations are significant. They're very fleeting. It's sad. They really don't
last for that long. And so there's an argument
for taking more shorter ones than some longer ones. It's going to depend, OK? There's so many
variables in there. It depends on your
family situation. It depends on maybe where
you are in your career. It depends on all
kinds of things. But vacations have
a positive effect on restoring mood,
focus, clear thinking, but the effects are
shockingly short-lived. I mean, it's really
sad how short-lived those things can be. As for time of year,
there's something to be said for taking a vacation
or taking some kind of break or something like that
at a midpoint of a year, because midpoints have this
effect on getting our attention and galvanizing us. Here the design principles
are less distinct and clear. I think you have to experiment
a little bit with yourself. But I do think that there's
a solid argument for fewer, shorter vacations just because
the effects of the vacation are so ephemeral. Let me just say one more thing. So tell me your first name. AUDIENCE: David. DANIEL PINK: David? So David's question
is actually a good way to end in that what
David's talking about are two things that are
really, really important in this overall body of work. One of them is asking
the right questions and observing our own behavior,
which I mentioned before. The other one is
being intentional. And one of the
things that we don't do a very good job
of-- especially when it comes to temporal things--
is being intentional. And so if you look at today-- anybody here have a to-do list? That's intentionality
right there. You're being very intentional
about what you're going to do. We're intentional about
what we're going to do. We're intentional about
who we're going to do it. So we have at Google
rounds of interviews. We're intentional
about how we do things. But when it comes to
when we do things, we're not intentional at all. You see it in meetings. How do we schedule meetings? We use only one criterion. What criterion do we use
in scheduling meetings? Availability. Are the people available,
the room available? We don't say, what kind
of work are we doing? Are they morning people
doing this thing? Are they afternoon
people doing this thing? Is it a purely administrative? We don't think about that. It's all about availability. We're not intentional
about that. So if we observe our own
behavior and are intentional and we recognize that we
are temporal creatures in a temporal world,
I really think that it can be a big boost
to your overall well being and a big boost to your
productivity and creativity. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
