The Secrets of Perfect Timing Part One

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Jill on Money with Jill Schlesinger

Episode: "The Secrets of Perfect Timing Part One"

Guest: Daniel Pink
Air Date: January 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

Jill Schlesinger starts the new year by revisiting a standout interview from 2019 with bestselling author Daniel Pink, focusing on his book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. This episode delves into the emerging science of daily rhythms—how our internal clocks ("chronotypes") shape our mood, performance, and productivity. Dan Pink shares evidence-based insights on how understanding these cycles can help individuals and leaders schedule their most important work at the optimal time and create better, more productive workplaces.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Daily Human Performance Cycle

• Natural Phases of the Day:
  • Most people (about 80%) experience a repeating daily sequence: Peak → Trough → Recovery.
    • Peak: High focus and vigilance (typically early in the day).
    • Trough: Decreased energy and alertness (midday/early afternoon).
    • Recovery: Mood improves and creative thinking increases (late afternoon/evening).
• Chronotypes:
  • Larks (Morning People): ~15%; best performance early.
  • Owls (Evening People): ~20%; peak much later.
  • Third Birds: The majority (~65%); somewhere in between.
  • [03:53] "We talk about morning people and evening people. And that's not folklore, that's actually real science." — Dan Pink

The Importance of Matching Tasks to Timing

• Focus-Intensive Work:
  • Do important, analytical, heads-down work during your Peak (when vigilance is highest).
  • [05:01] "That makes the peak the ideal time for doing heads down, focused work, analyzing data, writing a report..." — Dan Pink
• Creative Work:
  • Use the Recovery phase for brainstorming and creative problem-solving.
• Routine and Administrative Work:
  • Reserve the Trough for less demanding, routine tasks, such as email or paperwork.

How Companies and Teams Can Adapt

• Personalization Over Uniformity:
  • Rejects “one-size-fits-all” solutions, like the prescription to start work at 4:30 AM.
  • Leaders should try to learn their teams’ chronotypes and not force everyone onto the same schedule.
  • [07:04] "A lot of things that you see in like life hacking sites, everybody should get up at 4:30 in the morning is nonsense. It doesn’t work that way." — Dan Pink
• Workplace Structure Example:
  • Don’t schedule morning meetings for larks; let owls work later.

Personal Experiences and Habits

• Email Distraction:
  • Both Jill and Dan discuss how starting the day with email drains their prime focus time.
  • Dan shares his strategy: no email, no phone during his morning writing block—a system reinforced by a daily word quota.
  • [09:01] "I don’t answer my email. I don’t even open my email. I don’t even bring my phone with me into the office." — Dan Pink

Navigating the Dreaded Trough

• Don’t Power Through:
  • The urge to “power through” midday slumps is counterproductive and rooted in a false work ethic.
  • [12:06] "Powering through is a really bad idea...that’s how you get more work done...it’s nonsense." — Dan Pink
• Breaks as Productivity Boosters:
  • The latest research finds breaks should be:
    • Social rather than solo (even for introverts)
    • Active rather than sedentary
    • Outside vs. inside
    • Fully detached (“no shop talk” and leave your phone behind)
  • [12:55] "The best breaks are social rather than solo...moving rather than stationary...outside rather than inside...and fully detached rather than semi-detached." — Dan Pink

Personality Traits and Chronotypes

• OCEAN Model:
  • Pink references the link between chronotypes and personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism).
  • Morning people usually score higher on conscientiousness and emotional stability.
  • Evening people (owls) have, statistically, a higher predisposition to depression but also test higher in analytical and creative intelligence.
  • [14:19] "Owls also test higher on both analytic intelligence and creativity." — Dan Pink

Flexibility vs. Team Needs

• Striking a Balance:
  • Results-Only Work Environments (ROWEs) give staff total freedom, but most organizations need a balance.
  • Allow personal discretion, trusting team members to show up when it matters.
  • "If you have someone who, who says, I’m not coming in because I don’t want to help my team, that’s not a chronotype problem, that’s a hiring problem." — Dan Pink [16:29]

Lunch and Energy Management

• Lunch as a Strategic Break:
  • Lunch is undervalued—think of it as another essential break.
  • Dan suggests “shorting breakfast, and going long on lunch,” since research shows lunch, especially social lunch, is productivity-boosting.
  • [17:07] "I’m going to short my shares in breakfast, and I’m going long on my shares at lunch." — Dan Pink

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [03:53] "We talk about morning people and evening people. And that's not folklore, that's actually real science." — Dan Pink
• [05:01] "That makes the peak the ideal time for doing heads down, focused work, analyzing data, writing a report..." — Dan Pink
• [07:04] "Everybody should get up at 4:30 in the morning is nonsense. It doesn’t work that way." — Dan Pink
• [09:01] "I don’t answer my email. I don’t even open my email. I don’t even bring my phone with me into the office." — Dan Pink
• [12:06] "Powering through is a really bad idea...that's how you get more work done...it's nonsense." — Dan Pink
• [12:55] "The best breaks are social rather than solo...moving rather than stationary...outside rather than inside...and fully detached rather than semi-detached." — Dan Pink
• [14:19] "Owls also test higher on both analytic intelligence and creativity." — Dan Pink
• [17:07] "I’m going to short my shares in breakfast, and I’m going long on my shares at lunch." — Dan Pink

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:18: Dan Pink introduces the research-driven concept of time-of-day effects.
• 03:41: Chronotypes explained: larks, owls, and third birds.
• 05:01: Describing "peak, trough, recovery" and cognitive task alignment.
• 07:04: Why uniform early-bird advice (“everyone up at 4:30 am!”) doesn’t work.
• 09:01: Pink’s personal productivity routine (avoiding email in the morning).
• 12:06: Debunking the myth of powering through the trough; science of breaks.
• 12:55: The four elements of highly effective breaks.
• 14:19: Personality, mental health, and creative distributions in chronotypes.
• 15:19: How fixed schedules can limit team talent and productivity.
• 16:29: Addressing workplace flexibility and team norms.
• 17:07: Lunch as strategic, undervalued break.

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Tone and Style

• Conversational, humorous, and practical.
• Both Jill and Dan use personal anecdotes, relatable office situations, and clear analogies (e.g., investing metaphors for energy management).
• Doubly grounded in research and day-to-day experience.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a highly practical and eye-opening look at structuring your day—and your team's days—for optimal performance. Whether you're an extreme early bird, a night owl, or a “third bird,” syncing your most important tasks to your own biological clock (whenever possible) can lead to better outcomes, improved creativity, and higher workplace satisfaction. The science doesn’t lie: time of day matters, and small changes in how you schedule work, breaks, and even lunch can make a measurable difference.

Check out part two for more insights from Dan Pink on perfect timing!

Transcript

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[Jill Schlesinger]

Welcome to the Jill on Money Show. It is Thursday, January 1, 2020. Happy New Year. All right, here we go. Turning the page. Hey, for the first two days of the new year, we are re airing an interview that we conducted with Daniel Pink. Dan is a good friend of the show. We conducted this interview back in 2019. He had just written a book called when the Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. And I love this interview. It's a great way to start the new year. So today we'll air part one, so tomorrow will be part two. And I know you're gonna really enjoy this. So here is the first part of our interview with Dan Pink.

Let's start by explaining sort of the natural cycle of how we as human beings are programmed. So talk about that and how this might have encouraged you to dive deeper into the topic.

[Dan Pink]

Yeah, well, I mean, the reason I dove deeper into it was in part for that reason. I was frustrated because I was making all these decisions in my own life and making them in a haphazard way. And while I'm a little bit messy, I'm pretty anal retentive about decision making. And so I like to make decisions based on evidence it didn't exist. I looked around and realized there's this incredible body of science out there that gives us clues about how to make these decisions. And so one of the cornerstones of all of this is exactly as you say, there is this pattern of the day that happens inevitably. And to simplify it, each day we move through a peak, a trough and a recovery. Peak, trough, recovery. Most of us, about 80% of us, move through in more or less that order. Peak early, trough in the middle, recovery later in the day. People who are night owls who have what's called an evening chronotype, much more complicated, actually, much more interesting people. I'm not one of them.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Nor I.

[Dan Pink]

But they tend to hit their peak much, much, much, much, much, much, much later in the day. And what we know from this mountain of research is that our brain power doesn't stay the same throughout the day. It changes. And in each of those periods, our brain power is different. And so finding the right thing to do in each of those segments allows us to do more work and better work.

[Jill Schlesinger]

When you started talking about sort of the night owl versus the lark, there.

Was also a third category.

And can you talk a little bit about that?

[Dan Pink]

Sure, yeah. So this is something that was called a chronotype in a field called chronobiology.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Which is like you'd like to whip out chronobiology at your next cocktail party.

Right?

Let me tell you about that.

[Dan Pink]

Yeah, yeah. It's really simple. Toronto time, biology, study of life. It's basically scientists who study our rhythms, essentially. And what we know is that each of us has different types. So we talk about morning people and evening people. And that's not folklore, that's actually real science. And here's what we know. 15% of us, very strong morning people, larks, about 20% of us, very strong evening people, owls. About two thirds of us, though, are in the middle, what I call third birds and, and third birds. I mean, to oversimplify, you can think of kind of owls and non owls really, in how these patterns go. Most of us go peak, trough, recovery, but about a fifth of the population has very, very different rhythms and very, very different internal schedules.

[Jill Schlesinger]

The point of kind of understanding what kind of person you are is to make sure you are working around those normal cycles.

Absolutely.

And not putting yourself in a position where you. You are forced to do something at a time where you may not be obviously at your optimal. Cognition and energy and all of that.

[Dan Pink]

Absolutely right. And what's interesting about that is that there are different kinds of cognition that work differently in each of those periods. So let's take that peak, the key characteristic of the peak, which again for most of us is earlier in the day for owls in the evening, is that we're high in what psychologists Call vigilance. Vigilance is just our ability to bat away distractions. And so that makes the peak the ideal time for doing heads down, focused work, analyzing data, writing a report, those kinds of things that require that kind of intense intensity. Now what's interesting is that the recovery period, which is later in the day for most of us, late in the afternoon, early in the evening, our mood is high, but our vigilance is not. And that makes it a good time for things that require some kind of mental looseness. So iterating new ideas, brainstorming certain kinds of creative problem solving. And so you should be doing your more kind of looser, creative iterative stuff in that peak period. And what we know is that is that time of day matters in human performance. If you look at, let's take a typical workplace and we know something, let's talk about the statistical concept of variance here for a moment. Okay, Variance. So you got a workplace and there are a thousand people there. And you plot them from bad to good, who's bad and who's good in terms of their performance. And how do you explain why some people are better at their jobs and some people are not? Some people are smarter than others, some people are more conscientious than others, some people work harder, some people have more social advantage, whatever. But what this research tells us is 20% of the explanation of that variance in performance is time of day. And that's something we can do something about. I can't make myself smarter, but I can actually do the right work at the right time.

[Jill Schlesinger]

And so when you look at that, let's just say someone's listening and they have got a team of 50 people. Okay, and what is the way to take that knowledge and structure a date potentially differently?

[Dan Pink]

Yeah, so it's a great, it's a great question. I think what's interesting about this is while we have general patterns, there is considerable individual variation. So a lot of the things that you see in like life hacking sites, everybody should get up at 4:30 in the morning is nonsense. It doesn't work that way. And so each individual collection of people is going to be a little bit different. What I would do, let's say you got 50 people, I actually would want to know their chronotype. I would want to know who are the larks, who are the owls and who are in between. And it would also depend on what I was doing. So let's say I had a, let's say I was running an accounting firm, okay, unlikely. But let's say I was running an accounting firm and I had 30 of my people were larks or 30 or larky, at least with those folks right there. I would not put them in a staff meeting at 9 o' clock in the morning, 10 o' clock in the morning, 11 o' clock in the morning. I would not lard up their calendars with meetings during the morning because I know that that's when they're highest in vigilance and that's when they should be doing their heads down accounting work, you know, auditing a financial statement or doing that kind of thing. So I would leave them alone for that. If I, if I wanted to come up with say let's hey guys, let's figure out a way to do what's a new line of business that we could create. I would have that conversation generally later in the day. Now I would also see who my owls are, if I have any owls. And for the owls, what I would do is essentially leave them alone and let them tell me when they are at their best. And if that owl wants to do her audit at 9 o' clock in the evening and she's not in her chair at 9:30 in the morning, I'm good with that.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Right? Just get the work done.

[Dan Pink]

I want her to do the work when she does it. The other thing that I would also do is I would encourage them to not start their day by clearing out their email. Ah. Because that's the kind of. And listen, I'm a sinner here, I've been saved. But I'm a sinner because I'm a.

[Jill Schlesinger]

You're a convert, baby.

[Dan Pink]

I'm a writer. And so. And I'm more of a lark than an owl. Much more of a lark than an owl. So for me, I would sometimes come to my office, you know, 8:30 in the morning and first thing I would do is answer my email. Okay. So it takes me an hour to, you know, clear out my email. And I have this delusion that, oh, I've cleared the decks, my head is free. So it's 9:30 and it's like, oh wow, I'm kind of hungry now. Like maybe I'll go get a bagel. All right. Then I come back and then, you know, four sports highlight reels later, it's lunchtime and I haven't done my most important. I haven't done my most important work.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Your writing?

[Dan Pink]

My writing. Okay. And the thing is, as a. Well, you know this as a Jill, as a writer, anytime you sit down to write, at that moment, the Universe begins conspiring for ways to distract you.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Oh yeah.

[Dan Pink]

And so you want to do it at your highest vigilance. So I actually change my way. So when I on writing days, I go into my office still at 8:30 because I'm not an insane, you know, start working at 6 o' clock in the morning lark, you know what I do? I don't answer on my email. I don't even open my email. I don't even bring my phone with me into the office. I give myself a quota of words and say during this period of peak vigilance, Dan, you have to crank out these number of words.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Wow, that's fascinating.

[Dan Pink]

And then did you do it the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day?

[Jill Schlesinger]

I'm really interested in this because I think that there are so many of us who are juggling lots of different tasks that we have to do throughout a day. And so what you're saying is work to your strengths, do this task in the morning. And this is so weird because like you're saying this and this actually happened to me yesterday. So I have to wake up and check email just to make sure I don't have to be on the air.

Right.

Which is annoying, but okay. But I put it aside, I shut down my email and I cranked out like three scripts and two columns and two hours later I was like, oh my God, I'm done. And I took the dogs out for a walk after. It was like beyond fabulous.

[Dan Pink]

That's how you do it. And the thing about email, I mean, let's go back to my accounting firm here. What I might want to do is tell my accountant, my larky accountants, you know what, check your email. Make sure an important client has in contact.

[Jill Schlesinger]

That's right.

[Dan Pink]

You know, some kind of just like basic maintenance and things like that. But you want to do your heads down focused work in your peak. You want to do your iterative work during your recovery and then this trough period.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Yeah, let's talk about that.

What do we do then?

[Dan Pink]

It's a terrible time of day.

[Jill Schlesinger]

I hate it.

Well, I am the ultra large because I wake up between four and five.

[Dan Pink]

Oh my gosh.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Yeah, but sometimes I have to be on the air, so it's different.

Right.

But like I, you know, so I generally wake up between four and five and I looked at like I looked at your little schedule there, your graph and I sort of. Okay, I know where I am.

[Dan Pink]

Yeah. So you're pretty larky.

[Jill Schlesinger]

I'm very larky. Anyway, and it's a long day. So what do I do in the trough when I'm kind of like I can even feel it?

Like I physically feel that trough.

[Dan Pink]

We all do. Most of us don't acknowledge that though. And most of us say, oh, well, you know, some of us are like, oh, it doesn't matter, or oh, it's a sign of moral weakness.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Yeah, let me power through it. I'm like, no, no, I'm done with that. I don't want to power through anything.

[Dan Pink]

Powering through is a really bad idea. All right. We tend to think, and unfortunately, somehow, especially in our business culture, we've been conditioned to believe that that's how you get more work done, that's how you get better work done. That powering through is also morally virtuous and it's nonsense. So what you should be doing during that trough period, one work that doesn't require as much brain power and creativity, answering your email, filling out your expense reports, doing that kind of mundane stuff that you have to do. The other thing that you should be doing, especially in the trough, is taking more breaks. There's a whole science of breaks that's been emerging and what it tells us is exactly that powering through is a bad idea. Taking breaks is a good idea. We should be taking more breaks and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks.

[Jill Schlesinger]

And what are those types of breaks?

[Dan Pink]

Well, the best breaks, and there's some interesting research on this, the best breaks are social rather than solo, which surprised me as an introvert. So this is true even for introverts. The best breaks are moving rather than being stationary. The best breaks are outside rather than inside. And this is important. The best breaks are fully detached rather than semi detached. So a break isn't having intense conversations about what's going on in the office, it's actually being detached. This gives us a fairly simple recipe. So I'm convinced that if everybody in America took each afternoon scheduled a 10 or 15 minute walk outside with someone they liked, talking about something other than work, leaving their phone behind, you would have. I actually think you would have a measurable boost in productivity and I think you would have a measurable boost in job satisfaction and engagement.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Can you talk a little bit about how the personality traits cause the ocean? The openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, which I feel like I have all of those maybe at different points in the day. So you said that. I'm just going to quote from the book. Much of the research Shows morning people to be pleasant, productive folks, introverted, conscientious, agreeable, persistent and emotionally stable.

[Dan Pink]

Yeah.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Now I found that fascinating as someone who works in the mornings.

[Dan Pink]

Yeah, well. Or someone who's a lark. Yeah. There are personality differences. And let's take the other side of it. So let's talk about owls. Owls are more prone to depression. OWLS are more prone to other kinds of mental illness. OWLS are more prone to addiction. But owls also test higher on both analytic intelligence and creativity. And so I think the interesting question there is which way the arrow points. Is it that people who have mental illness have a difficult time getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night, or does going to sleep late and waking up late increase your chances of having some kind of problem? We don't know that, but there are these personality differences. I think that the implications for workplaces, though, back to my accounting firm, is that if I say the main criterion at Pink Partners Accounting is that people have their butts in their seat at 8:30 in the morning, I am losing one fifth of the talent pool, including the fifth of the talent pool that tests higher on analytic and creative intelligence. That's a mistake.

[Jill Schlesinger]

So what about these places where they want there to be a physical presence of people in the office and they're trying to balance the needs of people to sort of have their own schedules, but there's a team.

[Dan Pink]

Yeah.

[Jill Schlesinger]

So what's the conclusion for that?

[Dan Pink]

That makes perfect sense. I mean, I don't think that the ideal is necessarily that although there are workplaces like this, there's something, a trend that's been out there for a while called a results only work environment where people don't have any schedules, they come in whenever they want. And that can work in some instances. I just think what you have to do is you have to give people the discretion to make those decisions for themselves. And the truth is, is that people want to be good teammates. People care deeply what their peers think of them. And so if there's a meeting or a group project, you'll come in.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Right.

[Dan Pink]

Because in general, most people are responsible and people. There's a certain amount of peer pressure that comes from not letting down your teammates. And to me it doesn't. That's not the problem. To me, that's not the biggest problem that we should be worrying about. If you have someone who, who says, I'm not coming in because I don't want to help my team, that's not a chronotype problem, that's a hiring problem.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Yeah, that's a personality problem.

Right. Let's shift gears and talk about lunch.

Can you talk a little bit about fueling, refueling, gym time, all those fun parts of the chronotype?

[Dan Pink]

Right. But on lunch, we can think of lunch as. Let's think of this big category of breaks, and lunch is just another category of breaks. And what the research tells us is that at some level we have overvalued breakfast and undervalued lunch. Okay. I'll put it in investing terms. All right. I'm going to short my shares in breakfast, and I'm going long on my shares at lunch.

[Jill Schlesinger]

It's like a day part kind of spread that we're putting on.

[Dan Pink]

Absolutely. Because I do think that if you look at the actual research on breakfast, it is. It doesn't say breakfast is bad. Not at all. It says breakfast might be good.

[Jill Schlesinger]

Yeah. And it's not as good as you think it is, probably.

[Dan Pink]

And it basically says, hey, healthy people eat breakfast. But we don't know whether eating breakfast makes them healthy. It could be that healthy people just like to eat breakfast. And also some of these studies have been funded by breakfast food companies. And so you gotta take it with some degree of skepticism. My view, I'm very agnostic on that. Eat breakfast if you want, don't eat breakfast if you don't want to. But lunch, because it's in the middle of that workday is valuable because it is a break and it actually gives you some of the things that we know effective breaks give you, particularly, first of all, physical refueling. But second of all, if you have lunch with somebody else, Another social interaction.

[Jill Schlesinger]

That's amazing.

Tomorrow we'll air part two of our interview with Dan Pink. He is the author of when the Scientific Secrets of the Perfect Timing. And I don't know a better time to re air this 2019 interview than the first couple of days of a new year.

So check that out.

You can subscribe to us on the Odyssey app or wherever you find your favorite podcast.

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