Why timing matters — I

Today I started reading the book ‘When’ — by Daniel H Pink. It’s a damn interesting topic, I’ve only read a few pages and yet I feel like I have a lot of new stuff to tell people.

The basic idea of the book is this, there are lots of self-help books out there telling you ‘how’ to do stuff, but none that tells you the ‘when’. This book aims to fill that void.

Every living creature has a biological clock inside of it, and a lot of their moods, emotions, etc. depend heavily on them. For example, there are plenty of plants whose leaves open during the day and close during the night. Now you would think that maybe that’s simply them responding to sunlight. But if you take such a potted plant and keep it for a day inside a closet where no light can enter, you will find that it still follows the same pattern without fail, even though it has nothing external to enforce it.

Humans follow something similar but in a more fascinating way. A group of researchers analyzed tweets from all over the world for over two years, putting them through a Machine Learning code that predicted the sentiment in the tweet, for instance, the level of happiness or enthusiasm.

They found that this level increased from morning to noon, took a dip till about 3 PM, and then increased again till the evening. This pattern was common amongst all weekdays, and amongst all sorts of people, irrespective of their gender, nationality, or any other such classifier.

How do we use this info to our advantage? Does this mean there are certain times of the day where we should plan to do our work? Well, the answers for the same I’ll get when I read further into the book. I’ll keep you posted.