Category: When – Dan Pink

Generational Changes and How Millenials React to a New World

Posted on by jabittan
I’m a Millennial, and my generation often gets a bad rap for many of the ways we eschew traditions. We are often seen as lazy, wanting instant gratification, and as the “participation trophy” generation. However, like any branding of a particular generation, I think these views on Millennials are undeserved. My generation is responding to a lot of new pressures from changing globalized economies to social media connectedness, to global warming. In a world of quick and often chaotic change, it seems reasonable that my generation would develop new values and abandon longstanding traditions that feel irrelevant.

 

A harmless example of this, one instances I can remember from high school where my generation killed off a tradition that didn’t fit us anymore, was when my school chose a dorky nerd as prom king. In a  world of social media, popularity contests were held each day in online friend counts. Our school dances were often closely monitored by teachers, the lights were on, and no one knew how to dance anyway. Prom didn’t really hold a special place in anyone’s mind, and rather than taking the idea of prom king seriously, as I had seen in movies growing up, we laughed it off as an irrelevant relic of the past, as prom itself felt to me and many of my friends at that point.

 

More seriously, Millennials are also no longer sticking with economic traditions of generations that came before us. The world we live in makes it feel almost impossible to follow the same rout as our grandparents to financial success, and we have to take new routs toward careers and financial stability. This isn’t well understood by many people in older generations, and has created a generational friction that can be seen in things like OK Boomer. The example I want to focus on is Millennials switching jobs regularly and rarely working for a single company for 30 years, let alone more than 5 or 10 years. Job change is very common for Millennials which is not well understood by individuals from generations where it was common for someone to start in a job at the ground floor, and work 30 years to a higher position and salary.

 

In his book When, Dan Pink offers a good explanation of why so much job switching is taking place today. Particularly early in one’s career, switching jobs can make a big difference. Getting a good start in the job market can make a huge difference in where one ends up in the long-run, and that is a pressure that Millennials face and which shapes the decisions they make in terms of where they seek work. Pink writes,

 

“A large portion of one’s lifetime wage growth occurs in the first ten years of a career. Starting with a higher salary puts people on a higher initial trajectory. But that’s only the first advantage. The best way to earn more is to match your particular skills to an employer’s particular needs. That rarely happens in one’s first job. … So people quit jobs and take new ones – often every few years – to get the match right.”

 

When viewed through the lens that Pink uses, changing jobs and not holding to the traditional 30 years with a company followed by retirement makes sense. We have a limited amount of time to make an impact on this planet, and remaining in a position that does not value the particular skills that we have, and does not reward us for building and cultivating those skills, does not make sense. We can find better economic and financial opportunities in other companies, and we have more technology to help match us to those opportunities. In this sense, switching jobs early and often isn’t the historical negative that it was for older generations, but is a reflection of new values and an attempt to make sure we are not wasting the opportunities we have in life.

 

I think that many of the things Millenials are criticized for ultimately fall into this kind of category. I am certainly no fan of helicopter parenting, but I think it is more helpful to look at what is driving Millenial parents to hover over their kids so closely. Just like the example of jobs, I am sure that if you pulled back the surface, you would see how a changing lens of the world is influencing the behaviors that Millenials are so often criticized for in regard to parenting. The take-away is that generational changes reflect broader changes in society, and criticizing an entire generation is less helpful than understanding how the world has changed and how those changes influence the decisions of other generations.

More on Temporal Landmarks

Posted on by jabittan
According to Daniel Pink in his book When, temporal landmarks can come in two varieties, social and personal. Social temporal landmarks are the dates that everyone shares in common while personal landmarks are the significant dates in our own lives such as birthdays, anniversaries, and dates of significant life events. Studies presented in Pink’s book show that both types of landmarks can serve as helpful anchors for jumping off points. Students are more likely to go to the gym on a Monday, at the start of a semester, or on the day after their birthday than on other random days.

 

Pink describes the anchoring effect this way, “This new period offers a chance to start again by relegating our old selves to the past. It disconnects us from that past self’s mistakes and imperfections, and leaves us confident about our new, superior selves. Fortified by that confidence, we behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervor to achieve our aspirations.”

 

In the physical world, we can make changes that literally do shut a door on one aspect of our lives. We can move to a new city, we can sell all of our TVs and gaming consoles, we chop down a tree and pave over the place where it used to be. These changes can have physical manifestations that designate something new, something different, and prevent us from continuing on as we always have. Temporal landmarks are not physical and permanent in the same way, but can still serve a similar function for us. They break apart a continuous stream of time and allow us to make distinctions between ourselves now and who we have been in the past.

 

Pink also argues that part of the strength of temporal landmarks is in the way they allow us to reflect and think about who we are, what we have historically been or done, and what our aspirations are for our futures. He writes, “Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.”

 

My example of making a physical world change to change our behaviors is an example of taking a deliberate step to help us make better decisions. Temporal changes don’t necessarily create a physical barrier which changes our behavior, but they do give us a mental stopping point at which we can pause and consider how and why we do something. Rather than continuing on auto-pilot these landmarks make us pause and consider whether we are going in the right direction, whether we are regressing back toward a place we don’t want to be, or whether we can change course and achieve what we want. In many ways, without actually being a physical barrier, these temporal landmarks operate in the same way. Simply because they are not tangible doesn’t make them any more real in the ways we think about our lives, the changes we experience throughout life, and how we make decisions.

Temporal Landmarks

Posted on by jabittan
My general sense the last several years is that people are starting to sour on the idea of a new year’s resolution. People that I have talked the last few years seem to be getting away from the idea of making a big change for the upcoming year, or at least if they are planning on making a change, they are not admitting it. Generally, I have been supportive of killing off the new year’s resolution tradition, but Dan Pink’s book When challenged my thoughts on the usefulness of such resolutions.

 

I have had the mindset that people shouldn’t wait for a specific date to try to make a change in their life. I am also skeptical of trying to implement a resolution on January first, since it is immediately after the Christmas holiday in the United States and many people likely still have family hanging around, still have extra pie in the fridge, and its a cold and dark time of year. Trying to start a big change during this time, when the weather is demoralizing and you are not on track with a routine schedule, seems like a poor idea to me. As a result, at least as long back as I can really remember, I have never made any substantial new year’s resolution and I have not been one to encourage people to adopt a resolution.

 

The reality, however, is that people find it helpful to make a change when there is something that can delineate a new starting line for them. Pink describes it this way, “The first day of the year is what social scientists call a temporal landmark. Just as human beings rely on landmarks to navigate space – to get to my house, turn left at the Shell station – we also use landmarks to navigate time. Certain dates function like that Shell station. They stand out from the ceaseless and forgettable march of other days, and their prominence helps us find our way.”

 

I had not thought of navigating the space of time the way we navigate the space of the world around us. But it is accurate to say that days and time can blend together, and since we can’t control time, it can feel as though it relentlessly races forward. I have heard people in the Bay Area in California talk about the disorientating nature of their climate. The Bay Area doesn’t have pronounced seasons the way other parts of the country do. Most days are ok, and the temperature and weather doesn’t vary dramatically across the year. The passage of time feels different when you don’t really have a spring, summer, fall, and winter.

 

Using temporal landmarks helps us make sense of the passage of time and gives us a place to plant ourselves for our upcoming life pivots. Just as we might use another wall or a step to brace ourselves if we are pushing a heavy piece of furniture, a specific date can be a brace for us to push for a new habit. It can provide a reference point for how far we have moved and how successful (or not) we have been with any changes that we want to make.

 

So rather than looking down on the idea of new year’s resolutions or being unhelpful in telling people to just make the changes they want to see in their lives today, I can help encourage people to use temporal landmarks in a smart way. I can encourage people to think about the obstacles they will face and how long after their temporal marker they think they might face those obstacles. I can encourage people to think in time chunks with more temporal landmarks to navigate the time landscape they traverse as they implement new lifestyle goals.  Time landmarks are not just random and arbitrary, they are social constructs that can help establish shared meaning and goals across time and space.

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.