Dan Pink looks at earnings calls for major companies in his book When. It turns out, for major companies reporting earnings on conference calls, scheduling for the early morning is best. Pink writes, “afternoon calls were more negative, irritable, and combative than morning calls.”
In the book, Pink explores how we react to the day and behave at different times. There are points where we are more and less likely to be energetic, alert, and focused, and times when we are more likely to be lethargic, irritable, and distracted. The takeaway from his research is that we should organize and schedule our days so that we are engaged when we need to be, handling the right tasks at the right time for our brain, and adjusting our schedules to fit our current states of being. Doing so would be a radical shift in how we think about the way we work.
We are still stuck in an economic model of jobs that better fits industrial assembly lines than knowledge work. When you needed someone on an assembly line pushing a button to make widgets, then it made sense to have 8 hour (or longer) shifts throughout the entire day to ensure that the factory could produce widgets. However, in a world where our output is dependent on our brain power, this model doesn’t work so well. Having someone work more hours doesn’t equate to more output. Additionally, if performance substantially declines during the day or if performance and behavior experiences wild shifts as we become hungry and tired, then we could have negative productivity. This is part of what is being explained by Pink with the earnings calls above.
Right before lunch and in the afternoon, the quality of calls was worse. People were less optimistic, less happy about the business, and company share prices were likely to take a hit. Our bodies were overwhelming our rational brain power and hurting the companies. “Economic rationality is no match for a biological clock forged during a few million years of evolution.” What we need to do is recognize how our brains work and how they respond to the world so that we can organize our shifts and schedules in ways that actually help economic performance and productivity. As it is now, we have people work through long stretches where their brains are simply not primed for good economic productivity, and then we suffer with poor output. Rather than taking advantage of the natural cycles of the human brain and productivity to do good work, we push people to slug through the day and feel miserable about their low performance. Everyone is worse off in this system, but we could change it by better aligning our schedules with our circadian rhythms and body-clocks.
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