The Secret to Being a Productive Human: Take More Breaks (and Naps!)

According to science (and Daniel H. Pink, author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing), people spend too much time thinking about what and how we do things instead of when.
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If you've ever been on the receiving end of a "the timing's just off" break-up line and thought your partner's excuse was a weak cop-out to avoid having to tell you how truly terrible you are, take some solace: They may not have been lying to you! Because it turns out that timing is everything. Or so says Daniel H. Pink in his latest book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, a deep dive into the hidden temporal patterns that dictate so many of our actions.

For instance: You're more likely to tweet something negative in the afternoon; you have a better chance of sticking to a new exercise regimen if you start on a Monday; and graduating from college in an economic downturn year might still be negatively affecting you more than a decade later. (No definitive word on the optimal time to be dumped, unfortunately.) We caught up with Pink to talk the importance of breaks (and naps!), the best time to exercise, and how you can tweak your work schedule to dramatically improve your performance.


GQ: What’s your elevator pitch for the book?
Daniel H. Pink: It's pretty much: We think that timing is an art, but it's really a science. That's one big idea. The other one that comes from that, and grows out of a lot of the research, is that we need to start taking these “when” questions much more seriously. We're very intentional about what we do, and how we do it, and who we do it with, but we think of these “when” questions as second order questions, and they're not. They're primary questions. I'm not saying it's more important than who, or what, or how, but those when questions are as important.

Why do you think those questions have been overlooked?
I don't even have a good answer for that. It could be the way things have developed. We have to-do lists, and so we write down what we're going to do. Companies have personnel departments, or HR departments, so they focus on the who. For whatever reason, we don't realize how much human beings are temporal creatures. We essentially have biological clocks in every cell in our body. Maybe it's the old cliché that a fish doesn't know anything about water because the fish is in it all the time.

Once you made that realization, did that change how you think about time on a daily basis?
I think about time much more on a daily basis than I ever did. We think about time in the sense that we worry about being late. I don't think that we're conscious of time in the broader sense. I guess that's sort of what I'm trying to do in the book: shine a light on things. “Hey, wait a second, we ought to pay attention to these timing and temporal questions because they matter.” If we're conscious of them, if we're intentional about them, I really do think that we can work a little bit better and we can be a little bit happier.

To that point, if there were one takeaway above all else you wanted someone to take from the book, what would it be?
To take more and better breaks.

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What would you say to someone who says, "Oh, I don't have time for a break. I've got too much to do"?
If I want to be really glib, I say, "You don't have time not to take a break." I would use myself as a testimonial and say, "I used to believe that myself, too. I used to power through breaks, for whatever reason." My view was that amateurs took breaks and professionals didn't. That's just diametrically, 100 percent erroneous. Professionals take breaks, amateurs don't take breaks.

I started thinking about breaks as part of my performance, not as a deviation from my performance, and you should, too. Don't take it from me. Take it from this mountain of research showing that we're more productive, more replenished, more creative, and happier, and we do better on our job if we take more breaks—and if we take these certain kinds of breaks.

So what are the qualities of a good break?
This goes to the person who doesn't have time: Something is better than nothing. There's some interesting research on micro breaks. There's a very, very strong Puritanical streak in American society [that] makes us recoil. We think of breaks as a two-hour martini-soaked lunch, or a three-hour siesta where you go and you have a giant plate of paella and take a 90-minute nap. We're not talking about that. Even one or two minutes is fine.

Moving is better than being stationary.

I was actually really surprised myself—maybe I'm naive—on the importance of nature: being able to see trees, being able to be outside, the replenishing effects of that.

Fully detached beats semi-detached; a break has to be a break. You don't want, "Oh, I'm on a break. I'm going to go take a walk with a friend outside, but I'm going to spend the whole time answering text messages from my boss or looking at my Instagram feed."

As someone who thinks about this stuff, what’s your relationship with your phone like?
I'm fairly intentional about getting away from my phone. [There was] a day a couple weeks ago I was racing around so much that I didn't have any time to check my e-mail, even on my phone. It's like 4:00 in the afternoon, and there's just a pile of e-mail. I noticed that a surprising number of them were somebody e-mailing me at a certain time with some urgent question, and then e-mailing me again, and then resolving the issue on their own. It's like, okay, those three, I'm just going to delete those. I don't even have to respond to any of those, just cover them up and delete them. I do think there's a false sense of urgency sometimes. I think it hurts our long-term performance.

What are some other practices—like the breaks—that you've incorporated into your life after researching this book?
I was interested in the question of when during the day somebody should exercise. Because I've always thought that morning exercise is best, but I never really did [it] a lot. I always found it painful. This research showed that [there are] virtues to both morning exercise and evening exercise. One of the things about exercising in the late afternoon [or] early evening is that you avoid injury. It's less effortful as the body is warmed up. That's the thing that was really getting me [when I exercised] at 7:00 in the morning. It was just excruciating. I could push myself to do it, but in the afternoon, after a day's worth of frustrations, I'm ready to launch out into the streets of Washington, D.C., for a run, or to set the treadmill at some absurdly fast pace to try to beat out all of the tension. There are some tantalizing hints, some evidence that record and speed events are disproportionately set during about 4:00 to 7:00 P.M. local time. This is the first Olympics ever where I'm going to be keen to watch speed skating, [like] What's the time in Korea when this is being done?

Would you break down what an ideal workday would look like given the insights you've gotten—when is best to do what tasks?
There isn't one answer. It's two answers because of chronotypes*. If you are a morning person or an intermediate person—a lark or what I call a third bird; about 80 percent of us are that way—in the morning, during the peak, you should do your analytic work. The key word here is vigilance, batting away distractions. You can't write, for instance, or analyze a financial statement, if you have a lot of distractions.

*A "chronotype" is a "personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology." Most people are what Pink calls "larks" or "third birds," whose days usually follow a pattern of morning peak, afternoon trough, evening recovery. "Night owls" experience the stages in reverse: rebound, trough, peak.

In the trough, early afternoon, mid-afternoon, that's when we should be doing our administrative work: answering routine e-mails or expense reports or whatever, the garbage that we have to do during the day.

During the recovery, we have higher mood than we had during the trough, and we have less vigilance than during the peak. The combination of elevated mood and decreased vigilance makes it a very good time for brainstorming for more creative kinds of things that require a degree of looseness. I would put the insight, creative kinds of tasks, in that period. That's for 80% of us.

For the people who are night owls, just do it in the reverse order. You still want to do your analytic work during the peak, it's just that for night owls that's going to be in the late afternoon/early evening. But if you move your analytic to the peak, administrative to the trough, and creative to the recovery, I'm convinced you're going to get more and better work done.

Again, there's evidence of this, this idea that time of day explains about 20% of the variance in how people perform on these kinds of tasks. It doesn't mean that the when is more important than how or what, but that's a big difference. I'll take a 20% edge.

One thing that stuck with me in particular was the advice to drink coffee before you nap, so that when you wake up 20-25 minutes later, you're getting the jolt of caffeine right as you're waking.
Like anything that you ingest, it doesn't hit your bloodstream immediately. I was more surprised by the fact that we could take restorative naps for as short as 10-20 minutes. Again, it's an N of 1 in terms of my own experience doing it, but personally, I've completely converted on that. If you can sleep for 15 minutes, that is really good. You don't have that sleep inertia to dig out of.

The other one that changed my behavior [is] the good news, bad news research. Everybody says “I've got good news and bad news,” and which are you going to deliver first? I always delivered the good news first, and you shouldn't. You should deliver the bad news first because people prefer those rising sequences to declining sequences. That's a hard thing for people to get their minds around.

It was interesting to read that so many people who are ending a decade—age 29, 39, or 49—are more likely to sign up for a marathon, inspired by their impending chronological clean slate—that our ability to follow through with a goal is assisted by tying it to one of these signposts. Could you explain how these "temporal landmarks" work?
This idea of temporal landmarks is that certain dates function in time the way that physical landmarks function in space. You're driving along and there's certain landmarks that will make you slow down, get a sense of where you are. That's what temporal landmarks do. They get us to slow down, but the other thing that they do is that they trigger this really peculiar form of mental accounting. You think about [how] a business will open up a fresh ledger at the beginning of a quarter, at the beginning of a year. These temporal landmarks [allow us to] do that for ourselves. We say, "Oh, last week I was eating Popeye's fried chicken every day and not exercising. But now, it's the day after my birthday, it's the first day of the semester, it's Monday, I'm going to close the ledger on old me, open up this fresh sparkling empty ledger on new me and be a different person." That's going to up your odds [of accomplishing your goal] a little bit.

Another revelatory moment for me was the idea that best endings aren't necessarily happy endings.
The most meaningful endings are endings that are poignant. Poignancy is a very deep emotion. It triggers enormous feelings of meaning and purpose, and it's when you have something that is happy but is tinged with a few droplets of sadness. That sadness doesn't diminish the experience, it actually elevates it. You see a little bit about that in a certain kind of movie or novel. The best example of that would be graduations: a ritualistic ending that is happy but also kind of poignant. There's a sadness to graduations as well, especially if you are a parent, or a loved one, or a teacher seeing these students leave. That's powerful.

What seems to come up in a lot of these very powerful temporal based emotions, like nostalgia which is looking backward, or awe which has this effect of slowing down time, is that it seems that there's this integration of the past, the present, and the future. I have no objection to this sort of Buddhist “live in the present moment,” but it seems like we find our sense of meaning through this integration of the past, the present, and the future.

I saw you tweet the "What is the Perfect Age?" Wall Street Journal story. Did you research show evidence that there's an age when people are most happy?
There's a lot of research on the change in our sense of well-being over time. It shows higher in the 20s and 30s, lower into the 40s and 50s, and then higher again in the 60s and 70s. In terms of is there a best, I'm sure there's best times for certain things. In terms of overall well-being, the only thing I can think of is that you see a curve.

I'm curious how you engage with these self-optimization ideas. How does the discovery and digestion process work for you?
I'm someone who still will often read physical newspapers and I literally will tear stuff out of physical newspapers and physical magazines. Do you know who David Allen is? The Getting Things Done guy? It's this productivity system that a lot of people swear by, myself included. One of the big things in it is an inbox. I have a folder in my bag that says "inbox." I just take my clips and things and throw it in there. Then what I will do is I'll basically organize them in Dropbox and even Evernote. But a lot of my initial collection is physical. I will write things down.

I look at things in a very probabilistic way. You're not going to be guaranteed anything, but if you can go from a 70% chance to a 73% chance, I'll probably take that. If I can get up to 73%, maybe there's something that can get me to a 75% chance. You're working the margins. If you ever took Econ, the margins are where everything happens.

This interview has been edited and condensed.


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