When
2018 • 288 pages
Ratings28
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings28
Average rating4.1
The instant New York Times Bestseller #1 Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller Instant Washington Post Bestseller "Brims with a surprising amount of insight and practical advice." --The Wall Street Journal Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human, unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home. Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married? In When, Pink distills cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into a fascinating, readable narrative packed with irresistible stories and practical takeaways that give readers compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.
Reviews with the most likes.
Fascinating and at times quite funny. It's rare for me to love a piece of narrative nonfiction that isn't a memoir but this one is a great read. Be sure to read the acknowledgments too.
Audiobook Review: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink
When is a book about how timing of things (during the day, during a project, during a season, during any period) matters. Daniel highlights - with short, engaging narratives, a number of interesting findings from research on time. He argues that “when” may need to have a more prominent place in our minds next to “what”.
I found a number of useful takeaways from this book: schedule medical procedures in the morning, don't go to a teaching hospital in the summer, write letters to future you (they will be more meaningful than you expect), schedule actual breaks (no work) ideally with nature, movement, and possibly other people, try a restart if something is not working (pick a day, make it meaningful, start again).
I'm in the process of tracking down the books he recommends for further reading. He says the Roenneberg one is hands down the best reference for chronotypes. I'm pretty sure that the Currey one will not make for good audio because I've seen some images from it - that's a book for paper.
- Laura Venderkam, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
- Robert V. Levine, A Geography of Time: Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist
- Mason Currey (ed.), Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
- Till Roenneberg, Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired
- Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time
- Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation
Planning to listen? This book runs just over 5 hours on regular time. I listened to it on 2.8X speed on Libby over two runs.
Very pop-sciency, and perhaps gives too much credence to a few studies. Constructing a coherent narrative from the scientific literature is always a perilous journey. Still, there is some useful and actionable advice (I enjoy the format of exercises at the end of each chapter to apply it's lessons) especially early on in the book.
