Month: March 2020

Taking Issues of When Seriously

Posted on by jabittan
I wrote earlier about moving school start times to a later hour for high school students. In most school districts across the United States, our high school students start the day the earliest, and our elementary school students start the latest. Research, however, shows that swapping that order and pushing high school students’ start times back would improve learning as measured by test scores, reduce traffic accidents, and help high school students get more sleep.

 

Nevertheless, changing school schedules so that high school students start the day later would be inconvenient for adults, and we also have the idea that we need to push high school students to start their day early to prevent them from being staying up all night long with video games and social media. We choose not to consider the when of school start times, even though we will spend hours debating what books should be read in English class and whether art should be a requirement.

 

As Dan Pink writes in his book When, “We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what.”

 

School start times are only one instance where we deprioritize the when. As far as I can tell, we operate with many inefficient whens in our lives without anyone taking much action to really change them. Many of us are now knowledge or service workers, and we often work 8 hour shifts for no obvious reason. Our work start times are all pretty uniform, and with our consistent 8 hour shifts, we also end at the same time, putting a huge strain on infrastructure for just a few short hours every morning and evening.

 

I see only a few whens that really seem to count for a lot in our daily lives. The start time of our work, the duration of our work, and the end time of our work. These whens are crucial and often inflexible. Every other when in our lives seems to be crammed around those three.

 

What I find disappointing, however, is that we don’t actually ask if those three whens make any sense. We focus on the whats all the time: did a report get finished, did we reach a sales target, what did the student learn? But we don’t often ask these questions in a meaningful way in relation to time: could the report have been finished in half the time, when should we reasonably expect to reach a sales target, what is the best time for student engagement with math versus art?

 

Asking if someone was at their desk at 8 a.m. and if they stayed at their desk for a full 8 hours doesn’t really tell you if they were effective or efficient. This isn’t a valuable way to look at time in our modern world and economy. Our when can be a lot more flexible, and increased flexibility, I would argue, can help improve the outcomes we actually want to see. Thinking differently about the when would help us to do better work and interact better with our world. We don’t need to hold on to rigid expectations about the timing of work or school, what we need is to find avenues to help people produce the best work and learn the most effectively.

Nappuccino

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about naps and some research from Daniel Pink in his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Napping has a lot of benefits in terms of mental acuity and health outcomes. Unfortunately, outside of toddlers in the United States, naps have almost completely disappeared.
In my own life, I look almost longingly at nations like Spain, where afternoon siestas are a thing and people get a chance to recharge with a mid-afternoon nap. Generally, I don’t tend to be the most effective or efficient person between about 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. and would likely benefit from a short nap rather than dragging through a bunch of email.
As a perfect napping solution, Pink suggests the nappuccino. In his book he writes, “Down a cup of coffee. Seriously. The most efficient nap is the nappuccino. The caffeine won’t fully engage in your bloodstream for about twenty-five minutes, so drink up right before you lie down. If you’re not a coffee drinker, search online for an alternative drink that provides about two hundred milligrams of caffeine. (If you avoid caffeine, skip this step. Also reconsider your life choices.)”
Coffee right before a 20 minute nap is ideal because it takes about the time that you will be napping for the coffee to get to work. You will get the benefit of a short nap to recharge your brain and coming out of the nap you will get the stimulus benefit of the caffeine. Pink presents more research in his book which suggests that we generally have a lag coming out of our naps. We rebound and feel a level of sleep inertia that corresponds with the length of time we slept. At about 20 to 25 minutes, we avoid the sleep inertia, but once we start getting over 30 minutes, the sleep inertia kicks in, and we feel groggy and slow getting up from our nap. 20 minutes plus coffee avoids the sleep inertia and pumps us up with extra caffeine energy.
If you work from home or have a good set-up for a quick office nap, maybe give this strategy a try. If you don’t work from home and don’t have a place to nap in the office, then maybe its time to start lobbying the boss for afternoon siestas for everyone. Maybe one of us should run for president on a 6 hour work-day plus siesta platform.

On Naps

Posted on by jabittan
Quoting Nicholas Bakalar from an article in the New York Times, in which Balakar cites research from a 2007 journal article by Androniki Naska et al., Dan Pink writes the following in his book When: “Naps also improve our overall health. A large study in Greece, which followed more than 23,000 people over six years, found that, controlling for other risk factors, people who napped were as much as 37 percent less likely as others to die from heart disease.” Quoting Bakalar directly, “an effect of the same order of magnitude as taking an aspirin or exercising every day.”

 

In the United States, we are really missing out by not having a siesta culture. Pink was skeptical of naps going into his book, but I’ve listened to him in a couple of podcasts describe how the surprising benefits he uncovered have changed his views toward napping. Relatively short naps, say 20 minutes or so, can provide us with a lot of benefits: reduced blood pressure, better cognitive functioning, and increased vigor to name a few. Naps can have a big impact on overall health and well being, but in the United States they are not appreciated and are in many ways looked down upon.

 

Pink writes, “In general, concludes one analysis of about twenty years of napping research, health adults should ideally nap for approximately 10 to 20 minutes.”

 

For some reason, we believe that all one needs to do to be an effective and efficient employee is get a full night of sleep and then have the willpower to work hard and churn out good work throughout the day. Our ability to not be distracted, to think clearly, and to produce innovative insights are all seen as within our control if we simply work hard enough and apply ourselves with dedication.

 

The research into naps, however, suggests that we are thinking of our personal strength in focusing and producing meaningful work incorrectly. Rather than just focusing on our effort and intention with our work, we should consider our environment and small tools and techniques that can help us perform better. Yes, we should make sure we sleep well at night and find ways to motivate ourselves to do our best deep focus work, but we should recognize that it can’t all be 100% on our conscious brain. Yesterday’s post talked about the restorative power of walks, and today’s post is about the restorative power of naps. Both of these activities can seem like foo-foo time wasters, but they can actually be quite powerful in giving our brain a chance to reset and perform better in the time after we step away from our work. Rather than valuing people as automatons who should be chained to a desk of productivity, we should remember that we are creative, thinking, problem solvers, and need a little TLC to help our brains perform the best on work that matters.

Nature Walks

Posted on by jabittan
Quite a while back, I wrote about a study that Richard Wiseman shared in his book 59 Seconds. Our minds are greatly shaped by cues in our environment, even if we are not consciously aware of any cues. In the example that Wiseman shares, people are shown to be more greedy and less friendly when sitting in front of a computer with a dollar sign as the wall paper, and are more likely to be cleaner and more orderly when there is a slight scent of cleaning fluid in the air. Our environment can shape how we think and what we do, to the point where we pick up on seemingly meaningless details around us that we don’t consciously pay attention to.

 

In the book When Dan Pink shares another example of this. Pink is all for breaks due to their restorative power. They help us by allowing our brains to pause, to focus on something different for a moment, and to get out of any mental ruts into which which we have settled. Even tiny breaks where you close your eyes for a few beats while sitting at your computer can be helpful, but in the words of Pink, “Outside beats inside.”

 

Pink references academic work showing the benefits of getting outside during the workday for quick breaks, “Nature breaks may replenish us the most. Being close to trees, plants, rivers, and streams is a powerful mental restorative, one whose potency most of us don’t appreciate. For example, people who take short walks outdoors return with better moods and greater replenishment than people who walk indoors.”

 

Being around living green life helps get us away from the selfish, unfriendly, competitiveness that our dollar-sign-focused work environments often foster. Walks might seem like they are just an excuse to get away from work for a little bit, but they can actually be a tool to do better work. Nature breaks provide our mind with new cues, possibly reminding us that we live in a vast interconnected world with more important things to consider than just our salary and whether we make more money than Sally. Incorporating more breaks that harness the power of nature to restore ourselves is something we should build into our schedules. Companies and organizations should think about the ways they can create a work space that encourages green breaks, and should consider the parts of town where their offices are located, to try to allow employees to get outside on breaks, and to be able to walk in more nature connected places than just parking lots. Our brains notice more than we sometimes realize, and we can use that reality to make ourselves feel better.

Judicial Sentencing and Daylight Saving Time

Posted on by jabittan
Our justice system in the United States is not the greatest system that we have developed. In recent years a lot of attention has been paid to disparities in sentencing and ways in which the system doesn’t seem to operate fairly. For instance possession of the same amount crack cocaine and powder cocaine carried different mandated sentences, even though it was the same drug just in different forms. The sentencing differences represented a bias in the way we treated the drug considering who was more likely to be a crack versus powder cocaine user.

 

In general, we believe that our system is fair and unbiased. We like to believe that our judges, jurors, and justice system officials are blind, only seeing the facts of the case and making rational decisions that are consistent from case to case. It is important that we believe our system works this way and that we take steps to ensure it does, but there is evidence that it does not and that basic factors of our humanity prevent the system from being perfectly fair.

 

An interesting example of the challenges of creating a perfectly balanced judicial system is presented in Daniel Pink’s book When. Pink’s book is an exploration of time and the power of timing in our lives. He presents evidence that the human mind’s decision-making ability deteriorates throughout the course of the day, becoming less nuanced, less analytical, and more easily distracted the longer we have been awake and the longer we have been focused on a task. Judges are no exception.

 

Pink references a study that shows that simple timing changes can impact the decisions that judges make, even when the timing seems as though it should be irrelevant. Pink writes, “Another study of U.S. federal courts found that on the Mondays after the switch to Daylight Saving Time, when people on average lose roughly forty minutes of sleep, judges rendered prison sentences that were about 5 percent longer than the ones they handed down on typical Mondays.”

 

A slight loss of sleep, and a slight change in time resulted in inconsistent sentencing within our courts. The decisions our judges make are nuanced and challenging, and our judges have to make multiple life impacting decisions each day. Unfortunately, the system within which they operate is not designed to help provide more consistency across scheduling. Factors such as Daylight Saving Time, extensive blocks between lunch and breaks, and long daily schedules wear out our judges, and lead to less nuanced thinking and less fair sentences. We should think about how our system impacts the decisions we make (within the judicial system, the corporate board room, and on the factory floor) and try to redesign systems around time to help people make better and more consistent decisions.

The Time for Being Moral

Posted on by jabittan
Morality and our behavior is one of the spaces that I think demonstrates how little our actions and behaviors seem to actually align with the way we think about ourselves and the level of control we have in our lives. We believe that we are the masters of our own sails and that we are in control of what we do in the way that a CEO is in control of a company. We blame people when they make mistakes, hide our own shortcomings, and are pretty tough on ourselves when we don’t do the things we said we would do.

 

We hold ourselves and others to high moral standards and approach morality as if there is one fixed standard that is set in stone, but in our lives we don’t actually live that out. However, small factors that we likely ignore or completely fail to recognize play a huge role in our actual behaviors, and shape how we think about morality and whether we behave in a way that is consistent with the moral values we claim to have. One example is time.

 

In his book When, author Dan Pink looks at the ways that humans behave and interact with the world at different times of the day. Most people start their day out with a generally positive affect that peaks somewhere around 4 to 6 hours after waking up. Their mood then plummets and they experience a trough in the middle of the day and afternoon where their affect is more negative, their patience is shorter, and their attention is dulled. But, luckily for us all, people generally show a tendency to rebound in the late afternoon and early evening and their mood and affect improve. Night owls show the same pattern, but generally reversed starting out in more of a rebound phase, running through a trough in the middle of the day, and peaking in the evening.

 

Studies seem to show that this cycle holds for our attentiveness, our mood, and also our morality. Pink writes, “synchrony even affects our ethical behavior. In 2014 two scholars identified what they dubbed the morning morality effect, which showed that people are less likely to lie and cheat on tasks in the morning than they are later in the day.” Pink continues to explain that subsequent research seems to indicate that we are more moral during our peak. Most people are morning people and are most moral in the mornings. Night owls seem to be more moral in the evening when they hit their peak.

 

It seems strange that we would have certain times when we behave more moral. For the standard story we tell ourselves, we are rational agents who are not influenced by cheesy commercials, by insignificant details, or by the random time at which something takes place. We are the masters of our own destiny and we are in control of our own behavior and thoughts. This story, however, doesn’t seem to be an accurate reflection of our lives. If simply changing the time of day during which we have to make a morality decision changes the outcome of our decision, then we should ask if we really are in control of our thoughts and actions. It seems that we are greatly influenced by things that really shouldn’t matter when it comes to crucial decisions about morality and our behavior.

Night Owls By Birth

Posted on by jabittan
A chronotype is the scientific term used to describe people who are night owls and early morning people (or larks as they are sometimes called). Most people fall into these two categories, with a small segment of the population who are somewhere outside of either lark or night owl. Between morning people and night owls, the majority of people are generally in the morning person category (even if most people are not waking up at 4 a.m. to write blog posts every day).

 

In the book When, Dan Pink discusses research which suggest that our chronotypes are often determined before we are even born. He suggests that being a night owl or a lark is beyond our individual control, and not something we can flip like a light switch. He writes, “Genetics explains at least half the variability in chronotype, suggesting that larks and owls are born, not made. In fact, the when of one’s birth plays a surprisingly powerful role. People born in the fall and winter are more likely to be larks; people born in the spring and summer are more likely to be owls.”

 

To me it seems really strange that we would find a genetic component to whether we like to wake up early or go to bed late. What is even more strange is that there would be an epigenetic factor that shapes whether we are a morning person or night owl based on the time of year of our birth. I can understand why early human civilizations would benefit by having some people who were morning people and some people who were night owls, but it is still surprising to me that it is baked in at a genetic level.

 

We often look at behaviors like waking up early or staying up late and apply some type of moral lens which does not make sense given this research. Our society generally praises the early risers and is critical of night owls, but for many people, according to the research Pink presents in his book, being an owl or lark is not a choice. We don’t need to be so critical of people with a different chronotype than ourselves, and we don’t have to praise people who have the same chronotype as ourselves either. We can simply accept that some people are going to be up early and others will stay up late, and we can adjust our own schedules according to our chonotype so that we are engaging in appropriate activities at the appropriate time for ourselves based on our chronotypes.

 

Ultimately, for me, this brings me back to my personal belief that we need to shorten the work day and find more flexibility in how we work. Forcing everyone into the same work schedule doesn’t make much sense if many of us are not built on a genetic level for that work schedule. Also, if our work is knowledge work, where the important thing is what our brains produce and not how many times we swing a hammer, then there is no reason to force that work to be done at a particular time of day, at least not if it can be done at a different time of day with better output that doesn’t slow down and impact other people’s productivity. Respecting chronotypes in this way will likely make us  more productive, if we can find a reasonable way to blend chronotypes and work schedules. This is something I think we should work toward, especially since our chronotypes are more or less set before we are born, and not something we explicitly chose for ourselves.

Afternoon Creativity – The Inspiration Paradox

Posted on by jabittan
“The Inspiration Paradox – the idea that innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms,” is an idea that Daniel Pink writes about in his book When. Time is important for us human beings. We all have experienced first hand how frustrating it is to have someone energetically talk to you either first thing in the morning, or late at night after your typical bed time. We all know there are times when we like to work out, and times of the day when all we feel that we are able to do is sink into a comfy chair and absorb a TV show. The fact that we all have cycles and time preferences for certain activities is largely ignored, however, by most of us and by the schedules we have to adopt for life, work, school, and family.

 

Pink thinks this is a huge problem and provides insight from the studies of time and timing to help us design new schedules and better consider the times at which we engage with specific activities. One area that I found fascinating was Pink’s recommendations for when we should do our analytic work versus when we should do our innovative and creative work. He writes,

 

“Our moods and performance oscillate during the day. For most of us, mood follows a common pattern: a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And that helps shape a dual pattern of performance. In the mornings, during the peak, most of us excel at … analytic work that requires sharpness, vigilance, and focus. Later in the day, during the recovery, most of us do better on … insight work that requires less inhibition and resolve.”

 

Things like daily writing (focus work that requires deep thought on a given topic) and mathy tasks are good things to work on in the morning. The majority of people are roughly morning-ish people, and their brains are the most attentive and best able to focus to complete analytic work in the first several hours after waking up. Things that require focus and attention are best when done earlier.

 

Contrasting analytic work is creative work, which requires some focus, but also works best when our brains are not too narrowly focused on a single area. Brains that can pull from various sources and different fields are more creative than brains that are dialed into one specific channel. In the afternoon, after we have recovered from our daily trough, our brains are more engaged, but still a bit distracted. According to Pink this sets our brains up for creativity and innovation, taking existing ideas and combining them in new and novel ways. We actually do our best creative work when our brains are not quite firing on all cylinders. The paradox in the first quote of this piece is referring to our brains being the most creative when they are not exactly the most efficient and effective – at least in terms of how we would analytically measure our brains.

 

Keeping this in mind can help us organize our days in ways that work better with the mental capacities we will have at a given time. We shouldn’t fill our mornings with administrative low value add tasks. The mornings should be the times when we tackle the big items that require analytic focus and resolve. Our trough should be the time that we pack in the emails that don’t take much brain power and just need to get sent out today. Finally, our creative brainstorming should take place in the afternoon, when we no longer have to fight off an afternoon nap, but are not too focused on a specific area and can use our brain’s flexibility to pull together new thoughts.

Timing Impacts Test Scores and Life Outcomes

Posted on by jabittan
“Indeed, for every hour later in the day the test were administered, scores fell a little more. The effects of later-in-the-day testing were similar to having parents with slightly lower incomes or less education – or missing two weeks of school a year.”

 

The quote above is from Dan Pink’s book When in a section where he wrote about researchers who studied test scores for children in relation to the time of day that tests were administered. School children performed better on tests when they took place early in the day, and worse on tests when they came later. The difference was not enormous to the point where students were passing with flying colors in the morning and failing in the afternoon, but it was meaningful.

 

I find this incredibly interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is that I think 8 hour work-days are horrible, and the second is that I think we ascribe our success or failure in life to our own efforts far more than what we should.

 

Starting with the first point, if I were suddenly named king in the United States, my first act would be reduce the standard workday to 6 hours instead of 8. Most American’s no longer work at a factory where they need to be active on a line pushing a button or hammering a nail in order for widgets to be produced. When that was the case, 8 hour workdays may have been necessary, but in a knowledge economy where our main output comes from our mind and not our hands, 8 hour workdays likely harm our work more than they allow us to produce meaningful outputs. My big fear is that increased time outside of work will lead to more urban sprawl and longer commutes for people rather than to more valuable time spent in communities or with family.

 

Ultimately, however, I think giving us more time for sleep, for exercise, and for family will help us be better people. I believe that many people claim to be more busy than they actually are at work, and often spend a lot of time focusing on low value tasks that keep them busy but don’t provide much benefit for anyone. Shortening the work day would force people to be better schedulers and to use their time more wisely, and would hopefully create a happier workforce and nation.

 

Second, it is important to recognize that simply the time at which students took a test impacted the score they got. The test in some ways is measuring their knowledge, but it clearly is also measuring endogenous factors unrelated to their learning. We are grading and scoring our students in ways that can be influenced by meaningless factors beyond the students’ control.

 

I think this example is revealing of a basic fact of our lives. We feel like we are in control and as if the outcomes that people experience are directly related to their own effort and skill. However simply the time of day can have a big impact on our achievements, regardless of our skill or effort. Beyond test scores, perhaps you had a job interview in the afternoon, and both you and the interviewer were a little less sharp than you would have both been at 10 a.m. for an interview. You might not come across as the best candidate, and the time of day may be the biggest factor that prevented you from getting the job. In many ways small factors like timing can shape our lives in ways that we can’t even imagine. Sometimes luck is just as important as our skill and effort, and we should recognize that when we think about where we are and how we got to the point we are at.

Start High School After 8 A.M.

Posted on by jabittan
I’m a super early morning person and I have been since high school, but I was definitely a bit of an anomaly in high school and throughout college. Most high school students, not necessarily through their own poor decision-making or bad habits, go to sleep a lot later at night and don’t wake up very early. It is a pattern that is made fun of in families and in popular culture, but it is a pattern that seems to be pretty stable and should be considered when we think about designing a school system for teenage children that maximizes their educational opportunities and efficiency.

 

This is an argument that Dan Pink presents in his book When. In most places in the United States, my hometown of Reno being one of them, our high school students have the earliest start time. Middle school students head to school next, and our elementary age children start school the latest. This allows us to have three different bus schedules that pick up the oldest kids in the early morning, then get the next youngest group, and finally get the little guys. What we prioritize is an efficient bus schedule that feels safe for our youngest kids, not necessarily our kids learning.

 

The problem with this schedule is that it is a bit backwards for our oldest and youngest children. Our younger kids tend to wake up a little sooner and would actually do better than our teenagers with starting school early in the morning. Teenagers need just as much sleep as kindergartners, but rarely get enough. Moving school back for them would actually help them get more sleep and be better students. Their learning would improve, their driving would be safer, and hopefully outcomes for our high school students would be better in the long run.

 

Pink references a study of start times for schools writing, “one study examined three years of data on 9,000 students from eight high schools in Minnesota, Colorado, and Wyoming that had changed their schedules to begin school after 8:35 a.m. At these schools, attendance rose and tardiness declined. Students earned higher grades in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies and improved their performance on state and national standardized tests. At one school, the number of car crashes for teen drivers fell by 70 percent after it pushed its start time from 7:35 a.m. to 8:55 a.m.”

 

I understand that we don’t want to encourage teenagers to stay up all night on phones and computers, and I recognize that many people would be afraid that pushing the start of school back would do just that, but as it is now, we force teenagers into settings that are not conducive to learning. We make them start school early, prevent them from getting enough sleep, and put them in dangerous situations due to fatigue. What our current system reveals is that we value efficient bus schedules and perhaps a feeling of safety for our smallest kids over the actual learning that is supposed to take place in school. Perhaps it is fine to express our values this way, but we should take a critical look at the learning taking place in our schools and make sure that we are ok with the values we prioritize when it comes to our children’s school schedules. Making a switch would likely help our students learn more and save lives, two outcomes that should be high priorities for society and our education systems.