I’m a morning person and I wake at 6am every day. This has nothing to do with the fact that my four children have had a tendency to wake early and start making noise — it just seems to be an inherent part of who I am. Not only do I wake early, but I’m most alert, cheerful and productive in the first part of the morning.
Everyone’s mood fluctuates during the day. People who are at their best early in the morning are known as larks. Larks typically don’t like staying up late in the evening. At the other end of the spectrum are the night-owls — those who find it very difficult to get started in the morning, and hit their peak in the late afternoon or evening. Night-owls are typically full of energy at night and they like to stay up late.
Everyone falls somewhere on a continuum between being a lark and a night owl. It’s important to understand your daily cycle because we experience significant differences in mood and cognitive abilities during the day. Having a knowledge of how your mood fluctuates can give you a great advantage because it enables you to schedule your most important work during your peak times, and less important work when you are in a lull.
There have been a number of studies that have explored these daily cycles.
One study analysed five hundred million tweets using an Artificial Intelligence language processor that is able to determine the sentiment behind a sentence or tweet. The overall finding from this study is that the peak good mood occurs at 7:30AM in the morning. From there, the collective mood of the twittersphere drifts gradually lower until about 4PM or 5PM, and then recovers over the remainder of the day. In a similar vein, Daniel Kaneman mapped the cycle of the mood through the day as increasing through the morning until a peak is achieved, it then sinks through the late morning and afternoon until a trough occurs, and then gradual recovery through the evening.
Other studies have also been carried out to assess if cognitive performance follows a similar pattern. Across a number of studies, the findings are a resounding yes. One study found four times more anesthetic errors occur at 3PM than 9AM and that doctors find twice as many polyps in morning colonoscopies than procedures performed in the afternoon. The difference is so stark that Daniel Pink argues that you should never have a medical procedure in the afternoon if you can help it.
On the basis of this, Daniel Pink argues that the hidden pattern of the day profoundly affects our mood and performance, and accordingly, timing is more of a science than an art (although we may have historically thought about it as the other way around). His conclusion from this is that our cognitive abilities don’t stay the same through the day, the daily fluctuations are bigger than we realise and that the best time to perform a task depends on the nature of the task.
His proposed approach to best leverage this knowledge is to start by working out your chronotype — that is, whether you are a morning or evening person. Although everyone’s daily cycle will be slightly different, most people will instinctively know where they fit. One method to work out how your energy flows during the day is to keep a log for a week. Every hour, during your waking hours, simply write down a score (out of 10) based on how energetic you feel. Over the course of a week, you should start seeing where your peak time is, when your trough occurs, and where you start recovering.
You can use these insights to schedule your work for the most appropriate times in order to maximise your productivity and efficiency. Where possible, analytic work should be scheduled at your peak time. For most people — especially larks — this is the morning. The trough time should be used to schedule administrative work. For most people, this trough occurs in the early to mid afternoon. Once you have troughed and your mood and cognitive ability starts rising again you should schedule creative or insightful work. This is because your brain performance and mood have improved, but your brain is not in full-on logical mode which can constrain creative thinking.
This sort of mindful scheduling is different to the way many people work. Many people spend the first part of their day — their most productive and high performance time — attending to emails and other administrative tasks, short changing their ability to produce impactful and high quality work.
As well as using these insights to schedule your own work, also bear these in mind when scheduling meetings. The typical driver for scheduling a meeting is the availability of attendees. However, if this remains the only criteria, it can mean that a meeting about a new administrative process is held at a time when the majority of people are at their most creative or most productive — a waste of potential output. Alternatively, the meeting to brainstorm the new marketing strategy may be held during a trough when participants are at their lowest ebb.
By being more intentional about the way we schedule our individual and team work, we can maximise the output from our productive times and improve our overall efficiency and effectiveness.
To learn more about this Life Hack, read:
- The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris; or
- When by Daniel Pink
