Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFilippo.

Today we're talking with Dan Pink. He's an author of four books about work, management, behavioral science.

Honestly, everything Dan writes is gold. I highly recommend it. He has four bestsellers, including the one we'll be discussing today entitled When, The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

Today we'll explore the idea that timing is everything. The problem is we just don't know that much about timing itself.

We'll also discover how humans are wired for time, what this means for us, and what we can do to make sure our wiring matches our work schedules.

We'll also hear about something called the trough, how this affects us as a society and as individuals, why some people go to prison for longer or even die because of it, and how we can learn to mitigate the damage caused by what amounts to bad timing.

By the end of the show, you'll know how to time the right type of work to the right type of day and time all of that with your sleep schedule.

So this is a really useful episode in my opinion. Don't forget we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you understand everything that Dan and I are talking about here and get those practicals under your belt.

That link is in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com slash podcast. Now here's Dan Pink.

As a fellow former lawyer, I love reading books that are researched this way because if there's one thing we learned in law school, aside from how to incur crushing debt, it's how to do some research.

Absolutely.

We've all heard the expression timing is everything and the problem is that we just we don't really know much about timing itself. Nobody seems to really be researching a lot about timing as a concept.

I've been kind of a cliche and then as science has grown a little bit closer to knowing like some people are morning people and other people aren't something any teenager who's in high school can tell you.

We find that humans are wired for time. Can you give us a brief overview of how we are wired for time to SCNs or Katie and rhythm type of thing.

You're talking in part about biology of it. It's not everything but it's incredibly important. One way to think of it is as follows. There's this notion out there at least in the popular understanding that human beings have a biological clock.

That is kind of true but basically what scientists have learned pretty recently is that well it's not quite right that we have a biological clock. We have one of the SCN which is a shorthand version of a part of our hypothalamus that regulates some of our rhythms.

That's sort of like the mega clock, the big Ben. But we basically have biological clocks in every cell in our body. We are in some ways walking time pieces. We have time and timing literally imbued in our physiology.

That's really important. Even these things that as you say that have this popular hold. Oh I'm a morning person. There's a whole field called chronobiology that has said yeah some people are morning oriented. Some people are evening oriented. Some people are in the middle.

So recognizing the biology of that is enormously important. And there is also research though on timing that goes beyond our biology and our physiology in fields like economics, in fields like anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, even in fields in medical fields like anesthesiology and endocrinology.

And what I found as I started working on this is that all of these researchers and all of these different fields, whether they start with the body and biology or whether they start with sort of outside of the body to the lived experience of human beings, they were all asking very similar questions about timing.

But they weren't talking to each other. So the endocrinologist weren't talking to the economists who weren't talking to the anthropologist who weren't talking to the molecular biologists.

So they were all asking very similar questions. What's the effect of time of day on what we do and how we do it? How do beginnings affect us? How do midpoints affect us? How do endings affect us? How do groups synchronize in time?

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