美国国家公共电台 NPR Daniel Pink's 'When' Shows the Importance Of Timing Throughout Life

 

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Here's a question. Are you thinking of changing jobs or maybe a different radical¹ life change like getting married or getting divorced or something more mundane²? Maybe you want to ask your boss for a raise. Well, there is a right time and a wrong time to do all of these things, argues Daniel Pink. Pink's new book is titled "When: The Scientific Secrets Of Perfect Timing³." And he's here to share some of those secrets. Daniel Pink, welcome.

DANIEL PINK: Thank you, Mary Louise - great to be here.

KELLY: Glad to have you with us. There's a thread that runs throughout this book, and it is that the time of day that we do things matters - matters a lot. And you argue that for most of us, most of the time, we are more productive in the morning. Why?

PINK: Well, we do certain kinds of work better in the morning. What we see from the research is that we tend to move through the day in three stages - a peak, a trough, a recovery. And most of us move through it in that order. Those of us who are strong night owls⁴ go in the reverse order. But during the peak, we're better at analytic⁵ work, work that requires heads-down focus, vigilance, attention, batting away distractions⁶ - auditing⁷ a financial statement, writing a legal brief. During - and for most of us, that's the morning.

You also see a pattern of mood that follows the same sort of trajectory⁸ where we have an elevated mood in the morning. It drops considerably⁹ in the early afternoon and then rises again late in the day around the time that ALL THINGS CONSIDERED comes on the air.

KELLY: OK.

(LAUGHTER)

PINK: And so that pattern of mood affects our performance. And so we're better off doing the analytic task during the peak, administrative¹⁰ stuff during the trough. And then actually during this third period, the recovery, we're actually pretty good at more creative things 'cause we're in a slightly better mood, but we're less inhibited¹¹.

KELLY: OK, well, so stay with me in the peak for a minute.

PINK: Sure.

KELLY: In the peak, I mean, as a way of measuring this, you were tracking students taking tests.

PINK: Sure.

KELLY: They score better if they're taking their exams in the morning. You tracked CEOs making quarterly...

PINK: Oh, yeah.

KELLY: ...Earnings¹² calls. What did you find?

PINK: Oh, yeah. That was incredible to me. This is research out of NYU that found that - and this is one of the great things about the research here - is that a lot of it's being done with big data. So what these researchers did is they took the transcripts¹³ of 26,000 earnings calls - quarterly calls that executives make with analysts¹⁴ to report on earnings and give guidance for future quarters.

KELLY: OK.

PINK: And they took these transcripts of 26,000 calls, put them in this piece of software that measures the emotional content of the words that were used. And these researchers found that calls in the afternoon were more negative and irritable¹⁵ in the afternoon than in the morning regardless of what the fundamentals were of the numbers being reported to the point where it affected¹⁶ the price of the stock temporarily.

KELLY: Wow.

PINK: They - wow is indeed the point. And so this means that public companies should probably schedule their earnings calls in the morning rather than the afternoon because stocks are being mispriced not by any fundamental economic factor but simply by time of day.

KELLY: One other practical piece of advice - since most of us, alas¹⁷, are never going to be CEOs scheduling our earnings calls, you start a chapter in a place you call the hospital of doom¹⁸.

PINK: (Laughter).

KELLY: And it's a fictional¹⁹ place, but the takeaway you find is if you're going to schedule surgery, do not schedule it in the afternoon. Go for morning. Why?

PINK: Well, what you see in - like in a lot of this research and big data, you see systematically²⁰ poor performance in health care settings in the afternoon. Example - the incidence of handwashing inside of hospitals dramatically drops in the afternoon. You look at colonoscopies - endoscopists find half as many polyps in colonoscopies in afternoon exams versus²¹ morning exams even with the same population - doctors more likely to prescribe unnecessary antibiotics²² in the afternoon than in the morning. So for me...

KELLY: And why? This is all...

PINK: Well...

KELLY: ...Back to our body rhythms and this...

PINK: Yeah.

KELLY: ...Peak you identified.

PINK: The why is actually more complicated. Our problem I think is that we focus very much in our lives. We're very intentional²³. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? Who are we going to do it with? But we give short shrift to the question of when, and it has a big role. It has a big role in health care, as you say. It has a big role in education. Even in sort of the day-to-day performance on the job, time of day explains about 20 percent of the variance²⁴ in our performance on workplace tasks. So timing isn't everything, but it's a big thing.

KELLY: Well, I'm sorry, Daniel Pink, that we have booked you here on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED instead of Morning Edition, which it sounds like from your research would have been a vastly superior and more productive interview (laughter).

PINK: But we're having a much more creative interview at this time of day because our mood is better, and we're less inhibited.

KELLY: But this - I mean, this is my question. For those of us who can't control...

PINK: Sure.

KELLY: ...What time of day we're being asked to be productive or creative...

PINK: Yeah.

KELLY: ...Are we doomed²⁵? I mean...

PINK: No.

KELLY: What should we do about it?

PINK: No, not at all. There are a lot of steps you can take. So a lot of the negative effects of the afternoon on health care has been mitigated²⁶ by breaks - certainly handwashing.

KELLY: Really?

PINK: Oh, yeah.

KELLY: Just 'cause they're more focused and...

PINK: Because human beings are not inexhaustible supplies of energy. We need that recharge. And it's - actually ends up being really important. And the whole idea of brakes I think especially in the United States where we have this sort of, you know, puritanical²⁷ tradition of work where you power through, where you don't relent is counter to the science. People who - and I've changed my ways on this.

KELLY: And by breaks you're talking taking a lunch break? You're talking naps.

PINK: It could be short naps, a short lunch break. Take 10 minutes. Go out for a walk without your phone. We're talking about those kinds of breaks - end up being enormously important. And one of the things that I've discovered and in fact changed my own behavior on is that my view always was amateurs take breaks; professionals don't. And it's the exact opposite. Professionals take breaks. Amateurs don't. Breaks are part of performance. They're not a deviation²⁹ from performance.

KELLY: You've mentioned studies. You've mentioned things that we can measure. And I want to play skeptic³⁰...

PINK: Go.

KELLY: ...A little bit here. There was an example that I read. You open the book with the anecdote³¹ about the Lusitania, which sank back in 1915. And the why has never really been solved. We know that a German U-boat hit it, but we don't know why the very experienced captain of the Lusitania put the ship in harm's way and in the path of the German sub. You posit²⁸ a theory that maybe it was about the time of day. This happened in the afternoon. Maybe the captain wasn't making good decisions. Really? I mean, we'll never really know, right?

PINK: We'll never really know.

KELLY: So how solid is the science on any of this?

PINK: We'll never know. But what we do know in this particular case is that that captain the night before didn't get any sleep, and he was making decisions - analytic decisions, life-and-death decisions - at the exact worst time of day following a night of sleep deprivation³². And he made some tactical errors. Now, I'm not saying this conclusively³³ says this is why it happened.

But what's - to me what's interesting about that is that when we speculate on the reasons for things, we focus on these giant geopolitical issues and conspiracies³⁴ about smuggling³⁵ arms and all that when in fact it could be something just simply time of day. And we never take these questions - these temporal questions into account. We always think of them as second-order issues, third-order issues. But they're not. They have a huge effect on what we do, how we do it, how we feel. And the good news in all of this is that we can make small changes in our life to do a little bit better.

KELLY: That's Daniel Pink. His new book is titled "When: The Scientific Secrets Of Perfect Timing." Daniel Pink, thanks so much for stopping by.

PINK: My pleasure.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHEN MY TIME COMES")

DAWES: (Singing) When my time comes, oh, when my times comes, oh...

1 radical   

n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的

参考例句：

• The patient got a radical cure in the hospital.病人在医院得到了根治。
• She is radical in her demands.她的要求十分偏激。

2 mundane   

adj.平凡的；尘世的；宇宙的

参考例句：

• I hope I can get an interesting job and not something mundane.我希望我可以得到的是一份有趣的工作，而不是一份平凡无奇的。
• I find it humorous sometimes that even the most mundane occurrences can have an impact on our awareness.我发现生活有时挺诙谐的，即使是最平凡的事情也能影响我们的感知。

3 timing   

n.时间安排，时间选择

参考例句：

• The timing of the meeting is not convenient.会议的时间安排不合适。
• The timing of our statement is very opportune.我们发表声明选择的时机很恰当。

4 owls   

n.猫头鹰( owl的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• 'Clumsy fellows,'said I; 'they must still be drunk as owls.' “这些笨蛋，”我说，“他们大概还醉得像死猪一样。” 来自英汉文学 - 金银岛
• The great majority of barn owls are reared in captivity. 大多数仓鸮都是笼养的。 来自辞典例句

5 analytic   

adj.分析的，用分析方法的

参考例句：

• The boy has an analytic mind. 这男孩有分析的头脑。
• Latin is a synthetic language,while English is analytic.拉丁文是一种综合性语言，而英语是一种分析性语言。

6 distractions   

n.使人分心的事[人]( distraction的名词复数 )；娱乐，消遣；心烦意乱；精神错乱

参考例句：

• I find it hard to work at home because there are too many distractions. 我发觉在家里工作很难，因为使人分心的事太多。
• There are too many distractions here to work properly. 这里叫人分心的事太多，使人无法好好工作。 来自《简明英汉词典》

7 auditing   

n.审计，查账，决算

参考例句：

• Auditing standards are the rules governing how an audit is performed.收支检查标准是规则统治一个稽核如何被运行。
• The auditing services market is dominated by a few large accounting firms.审计服务市场被几家大型会计公司独占了。

8 trajectory   

n.弹道，轨道

参考例句：

• It is not difficult to sketch the subsequent trajectory.很容易描绘出它们最终的轨迹。
• The path followed by a projectile is called its trajectory.抛物体所循的路径称为它的轨道。

9 considerably   

adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上

参考例句：

• The economic situation has changed considerably.经济形势已发生了相当大的变化。
• The gap has narrowed considerably.分歧大大缩小了。

10 administrative   

adj.行政的，管理的

参考例句：

• The administrative burden must be lifted from local government.必须解除地方政府的行政负担。
• He regarded all these administrative details as beneath his notice.他认为行政管理上的这些琐事都不值一顾。

11 inhibited   

a.拘谨的，拘束的

参考例句：

• Boys are often more inhibited than girls about discussing their problems. 男孩子往往不如女孩子敢于谈论自己的问题。
• Having been laughed at for his lameness,the boy became shy and inhibited. 那男孩因跛脚被人讥笑，变得羞怯而压抑。

12 earnings   

n.工资收人；利润，利益，所得

参考例句：

• That old man lives on the earnings of his daughter.那个老人靠他女儿的收入维持生活。
• Last year there was a 20% decrease in his earnings.去年他的收入减少了20%。

13 transcripts   

n.抄本（ transcript的名词复数 ）；转写本；文字本；副本

参考例句：

• Like mRNA, both tRNA and rRNA are transcripts of chromosomal DNA. tRNA及rRNA同mRNA一样，都是染色体DNA的转录产物。 来自辞典例句
• You can't take the transfer students'exam without your transcripts. 没有成绩证明书，你就不能参加转学考试。 来自辞典例句

14 analysts   

分析家，化验员( analyst的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• City analysts forecast huge profits this year. 伦敦金融分析家预测今年的利润非常丰厚。
• I was impressed by the high calibre of the researchers and analysts. 研究人员和分析人员的高素质给我留下了深刻印象。

15 irritable   

adj.急躁的；过敏的；易怒的

参考例句：

• He gets irritable when he's got toothache.他牙一疼就很容易发脾气。
• Our teacher is an irritable old lady.She gets angry easily.我们的老师是位脾气急躁的老太太。她很容易生气。

16 affected   

adj.不自然的，假装的

参考例句：

• She showed an affected interest in our subject.她假装对我们的课题感到兴趣。
• His manners are affected.他的态度不自然。

17 alas   

int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等)

参考例句：

• Alas!The window is broken!哎呀！窗子破了！
• Alas,the truth is less romantic.然而，真理很少带有浪漫色彩。

18 doom   

n.厄运，劫数；v.注定，命定

参考例句：

• The report on our economic situation is full of doom and gloom.这份关于我们经济状况的报告充满了令人绝望和沮丧的调子。
• The dictator met his doom after ten years of rule.独裁者统治了十年终于完蛋了。

19 fictional   

adj.小说的，虚构的

参考例句：

• The names of the shops are entirely fictional.那些商店的名字完全是虚构的。
• The two authors represent the opposite poles of fictional genius.这两位作者代表了天才小说家两个极端。

20 systematically   

adv.有系统地

参考例句：

• This government has systematically run down public services since it took office.这一屆政府自上台以来系统地削减了公共服务。
• The rainforest is being systematically destroyed.雨林正被系统地毀灭。

21 versus   

prep.以…为对手，对；与…相比之下

参考例句：

• The big match tonight is England versus Spain.今晚的大赛是英格兰对西班牙。
• The most exciting game was Harvard versus Yale.最富紧张刺激的球赛是哈佛队对耶鲁队。

22 antibiotics   

n.（用作复数）抗生素；（用作单数）抗生物质的研究；抗生素，抗菌素( antibiotic的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• the discovery of antibiotics in the 20th century 20世纪抗生素的发现
• The doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics. 医生给我开了抗生素。

23 intentional   

adj.故意的，有意（识）的

参考例句：

• Let me assure you that it was not intentional.我向你保证那不是故意的。
• His insult was intentional.他的侮辱是有意的。

24 variance   

n.矛盾，不同

参考例句：

• The question of woman suffrage sets them at variance. 妇女参政的问题使他们发生争执。
• It is unnatural for brothers to be at variance. 兄弟之间不睦是不近人情的。

25 doomed   

命定的

参考例句：

• The court doomed the accused to a long term of imprisonment. 法庭判处被告长期监禁。
• A country ruled by an iron hand is doomed to suffer. 被铁腕人物统治的国家定会遭受不幸的。

26 mitigated   

v.减轻，缓和( mitigate的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• The cost of getting there is mitigated by Sydney's offer of a subsidy. 由于悉尼提供补助金，所以到那里的花费就减少了。 来自辞典例句
• The living conditions were slightly mitigated. 居住条件稍有缓解。 来自辞典例句

27 puritanical   

adj.极端拘谨的；道德严格的

参考例句：

• He has a puritanical attitude towards sex.他在性问题上主张克制，反对纵欲。
• Puritanical grandfather is very strict with his children.古板严厉的祖父对子女要求非常严格。

28 posit   

v.假定，认为

参考例句：

• If she needs salvation,she will posit a savior.如果她需要救助，她就会设想一个救助者。
• Other historians posit that she died of old age around 550 BC.别的史学家则认为她一直活到公元前550年左右才寿终正寝。

29 deviation   

n.背离，偏离；偏差，偏向；离题

参考例句：

• Deviation from this rule are very rare.很少有违反这条规则的。
• Any deviation from the party's faith is seen as betrayal.任何对党的信仰的偏离被视作背叛。

30 skeptic   

n.怀疑者，怀疑论者，无神论者

参考例句：

• She is a skeptic about the dangers of global warming.她是全球变暖危险的怀疑论者。
• How am I going to convince this skeptic that she should attention to my research?我将如何使怀疑论者确信她应该关注我的研究呢？

31 anecdote   

n.轶事，趣闻，短故事

参考例句：

• He departed from the text to tell an anecdote.他偏离课文讲起了一则轶事。
• It had never been more than a family anecdote.那不过是个家庭趣谈罢了。

32 deprivation   

n.匮乏；丧失；夺去，贫困

参考例句：

• Many studies make it clear that sleep deprivation is dangerous.多实验都证实了睡眠被剥夺是危险的。
• Missing the holiday was a great deprivation.错过假日是极大的损失。

33 conclusively   

adv.令人信服地，确凿地

参考例句：

• All this proves conclusively that she couldn't have known the truth. 这一切无可置疑地证明她不可能知道真相。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• From the facts,he was able to determine conclusively that the death was not a suicide. 根据这些事实他断定这起死亡事件并非自杀。 来自《简明英汉词典》

34 conspiracies   

n.阴谋，密谋( conspiracy的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• He was still alive and hatching his conspiracies. 他还活着，策划着阴谋诡计。 来自辞典例句
• It appeared that they had engaged in fresh conspiracies from the very moment of their release. 看上去他们刚给释放，立刻开始新一轮的阴谋活动。 来自英汉文学

35 smuggling   

n.走私

参考例句：

• Some claimed that the docker's union fronted for the smuggling ring.某些人声称码头工人工会是走私集团的掩护所。
• The evidence pointed to the existence of an international smuggling network.证据表明很可能有一个国际走私网络存在。