Well, not exactly. When scholars have tested Franklin’s “gnomic wisdom,” they found no “justification for early risers to affect moral superiority.”39 Those nefarious owls actually tend to display greater creativity, show superior working memory, and post higher scores on intelligence tests such as the GMAT.40 They even have a better sense of humor.41
The problem is that our corporate, government, and education cultures are configured for the 75 or 80 percent of people who are larks or third birds. Owls are like left-handers in a right-handed world—forced to use scissors and writing desks and catcher’s mitts designed for others. How they respond is the final piece of the puzzle in divining the rhythms of the day.
SYNCHRONY AND THE THREE-STAGE DAY
Let’s return to the Linda problem. Basic logic holds that Linda is less likely to be both a bank teller and a feminist than she is to be only a bank teller. Most people solve Linda problems more readily at 8 a.m. than at 8 p.m. But some people showed the reverse tendency. They were more likely to avoid the conjunction fallacy and produce the correct answer at 8 p.m. than at 8 a.m. Who were these oddballs? Owls—people with evening chronotypes. It was the same when owls served as jurors in that mock trial. While morning and intermediate types resorted to stereotypes—declaring Garcia guilty and Garner innocent using identical facts—later in the day, owls displayed the opposite tendency. They resorted to stereotypes early in the day but became more vigilant, fair, and logical as the hours passed.42
The ability to solve insight problems, like figuring out that a coin dated 544 BC must be fraudulent, also came with an exception. Larks and third birds had their flashes of illuminance later in the day, during their less optimal recovery stage when their inhibitions had fallen. But Edison-like owls spotted the fraud more readily in the early mornings, their less optimal time.43
What ultimately matters, then, is that type, task, and time align—what social scientists call “the synchrony effect.”44 For instance, even though it’s obviously more dangerous to drive at night, owls actually drive worse early in the day because mornings are out of synch with their natural cycle of vigilance and alertness.45 Younger people typically have keener memories than older folks. But many of these age-based cognitive differences weaken, and sometimes disappear, when synchrony is taken into account. In fact, some research has shown that for memory tasks older adults use the same regions of the brain as younger adults do when operating in the morning but different (and less effective) regions later in the day.46
Synchrony even affects our ethical behavior. In 2014 two scholars identified what they dubbed the “morning morality effect,” which showed that people are less likely to lie and cheat on tasks in the morning than they are later in the day. But subsequent research found that one explanation for the effect is simply that most people are morning or intermediate chronotypes. Factor in owliness and the effect is more nuanced. Yes, early risers display the morning morality effect. But night owls are more ethical at night than in the morning. “[T]he fit between a person’s chronotype and the time of day offers a more complete predictor of that person’s ethicality than does time of day alone,” these scholars write.47
In short, all of us experience the day in three stages—a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And about three-quarters of us (larks and third birds) experience it in that order. But about one in four people, those whose genes or age make them night owls, experience the day in something closer to the reverse order—recovery, trough, peak.
To probe this idea, I asked my colleague, researcher Cameron French, to analyze the daily rhythms of a collection of artists, writers, and inventors. His source material was a remarkable book, edited by Mason Currey, titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work that chronicles the everyday patterns of work and rest of 161 creators, from Jane Austen to Jackson Pollock to Anthony Trollope to Toni Morrison. French read their daily work schedules and coded each element as either heads-down work, no work at all, or less intense work— something close to the pattern of peak, trough, and recovery.
For instance, composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky would typically awaken between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., and then read, drink tea, and take a walk. At 9:30, he went to his piano to compose for a few hours. Then he broke for lunch and another stroll during the afternoon. (He believed walks, sometimes two hours long, were essential for creativity.) At 5 p.m., he settled back in for a few more hours of work before eating supper at 8 p.m. One hundred fifty years later, writer Joyce Carol Oates operates on a similar rhythm. She “generally writes from 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning until about 1:00 p.m. Then she eats lunch and allows herself an afternoon break before resuming work from 4:00 p.m. until dinner around 7:00.”48 Both Tchaikovsky and Oates are peak-trough-rebound kinds of people.
Other creators marched to a different diurnal drummer. Novelist Gustave Flaubert, who lived much of his adult life in his mother’s house, would typically not awaken until 10 a.m., after which he’d spend an hour bathing, primping, and puffing his pipe. Around 11, “he would join the family in the dining room for a late-morning meal that served as both his breakfast and lunch.” He would then tutor his niece for a while and devote most of the afternoon to resting and reading. At 7 p.m. he would have dinner, and afterward, “he sat and talked with his mother” until she went to bed around 9 p.m. And then he did his writing. Night owl Flaubert’s day moved in an opposite direction—from recovery to trough to peak.49
After coding these creators’ daily schedules and tabulating who did what when, French found what we now realize is a predictable distribution. About 62 percent of the creators followed the peak-trough-recovery pattern, where serious heads-down work happened in the morning followed by not much work at all, and then a shorter burst of less taxing work. About 20 percent of the sample displayed the reverse pattern—recovering in the mornings and getting down to business much later in the day à la Flaubert. And about 18 percent were more idiosyncratic or lacked sufficient data and therefore displayed neither pattern. Separate out that third group and the chronotype ratio holds. For every three peak-trough-rebound patterns, there is one rebound-trough-peak pattern.
So what does this mean for you?
At the end of this chapter is the first of six Time Hacker’s Handbooks, which offer tactics, habits, and routines for applying the science of timing to your daily life. But the essence is straightforward. Figure out your type, understand your task, and then select the appropriate time. Is your own hidden daily pattern peak-trough-rebound? Or is it rebound-trough-peak? Then look for synchrony. If you have even modest control over your schedule, try to nudge your most important work, which usually requires vigilance and clear thinking, into the peak and push your second-most important work, or tasks that benefit from disinhibition, into the rebound period. Whatever you do, do not let mundane tasks creep into your peak period.
If you’re a boss, understand these two patterns and allow people to protect their peak. For example, Till Roenneberg conducted experiments at a German auto plant and steel factory in which he rearranged work schedules to match people’s chronotypes to their work schedules. The results: greater productivity, reduced stress, and higher job satisfaction.50 If you’re an educator, know that all times are not created equal: Think hard about which classes and types of work you schedule in the morning and which you schedule later in the day.
Equally important, no matter whether you spend your days making cars or teaching children, beware of that middle period. The trough, as we’re about to learn, is more dangerous than most of us realize.
Time Hacker’s Handbook
• CHAPTER 1 •
HOW TO FIGURE OUT YOUR DAILY WHEN: A THREE-STEP METHOD
This chapter has explored the science behind our daily patterns. Now here’s a simple three-step technique—call it the type-tasktime method—for deploying that science to guide your daily timing decisions.