THEY say timing is everything. Yet when it comes to how we work, it’s often not given much thought at all. We work nine to five (or 7am to 7pm) not because that’s when our bodies work best, but because that’s when we’re supposed to show up.

We spend weeks preparing a pitch presentation for a new client, but give no thought about when we give it. We spend the first two hours answering email in our inboxes rather than doing our most challenging work.

But in Daniel Pink’s latest book, timing really is everything. What’s your “chronotype”? When’s the best time of day to do your hardest work? What does research say about giving good news or bad news first?

Pink, the long-time business author and former speechwriter for former Vice President Al Gore, answers these questions and more in his latest addition to the work-smarter genre, “When.”

Pink’s book goes on sale Jan 9, no doubt timed for when people make all those New Year’s resolutions about working more effectively in the new year. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Where’d you get the idea for this book?

A: I realised I was making all kinds of “when” decisions in my own life. When in the day should I work out — early or late? When should I abandon a project that isn’t working very well? How should I configure my day for maximum productivity?

The right ways to take breaks, time our days and order the good news and bad news we share with others

I realised that there weren’t very good answers — I actually wrote this book so I could read it. There’s a huge amount of research out on this topic, in a whole array of fields: Fields I’m comfortable with, like economics and social psychology, and things like endocrinology where I had to read a paper three or four times to realise what they were saying.

Q: Or “chronobiology” — which is what?

A: It’s the study of our biological rhythms. Some of us rise early and feel energetic in the day and fade out by early evening. Other people are groggier in the morning and take a while to ramp up and hit their peak in the late afternoon or evening. Some of us are larks — some of us are owls. But if you look at distribution, most of us are a little bit of both — what I call “third birds.”

There’s a period of day when we’re at our peak, and that’s best for doing analytic tasks things like writing a report or auditing a financial statement. There’s the trough, which is the dip — that’s not good for anything. And then there’s recovery, which is less optimal, but we do better at insight and creativity tasks.

Q: But many of us don’t have control at work over what time we do things. Are workplaces starting to wake up to this?

A: Not that many. There have been a couple of experiments: A chronobiologist did an experiment with a German industrial company where he allowed people to configure their day based on their chronotypes and, not surprisingly, satisfaction and productivity went up. To me, the bigger issue here is that we have thought of “when” as a second order question.

Q: What is it about a new year? How does our psychology influence how we think about that and making fresh starts?

A: We do what social psychologists call temporal accounting — that is, we have a ledger in our head of how we are spending our time. What we’re trying to do, in some cases, is relegate our previous selves to the past: This year we’re going to do a lot better.

People managing corporate change can take advantage of that. Managers shouldn’t start a corporate change initiative on a Thursday — start it on the day after a federal holiday, or at the beginning of a quarter, or on a Monday.

Q: Let’s talk about breaks. There’s all these different theories about the approach. Does the science say one is better than the other?

A: I’m sceptical of any claim that says it should be 14 minutes or it should be 17 minutes. I don’t think the evidence is there for that. What the evidence does tell us, though, is a broader set of design principles, the most important of which is that breaks are much more important than we realise.

Fifteen years ago, someone who pulled an all nighter or got by on two hours of sleep was seen as a kind of a hero. But fewer people today think that not getting enough sleep is a good idea, and that’s largely because the science of sleep started pointing us in that direction. I think breaks are following the same trajectory. Many hard-core workplaces think of breaks as a deviation from performance, when in fact the science of breaks tells us they’re a part of performance.

Q: When you’re giving feedback to employees, should you give good news or bad news first?

A: It’s not even close. This is one where I changed my own behaviour. I always gave good news first. I didn’t want to come on too aggressively, I didn’t want to seem like a jerk and I wanted to offer a cushion first before bringing down the hammer.

That is wrong — the research tells us this very, very clearly. If you ask people what they prefer, four out of five prefer getting the bad news first. The reason has to do with endings. Given the choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. We prefer endings that go up, that have a rising sequence rather than a declining sequence.

What happens is we tend to think that we ourselves are special. When we give feedback we think ‘oh that person can’t possibly want the bad news first, even though I do - I’m so unique.’ And so we act in ways that are different from our own preferences because we think other people don’t have the same ones. n

Bloomberg/The Washington Post Service

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, January 8th,2018