When

September 1, 2017

The No. 1 New York Times best-selling Pink (To Sell Is Human) returns to tell us how to improve our timing, e.g., when is the best time to change jobs or careers? Pink draws on research in psychology, biology, and economics to provide the answers. Booming in-house excitement.

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October 9, 2017
Pink (To Sell Is Human) should change many people’s understanding of timing with this book, which provides insights from little-known scientific studies in an accessible way. He quickly piques readers’ interest by introducing seemingly inexplicable patterns: why are prisoners eligible for parole more likely to get a favorable ruling from a judicial panel earlier in the day? Why are adolescents who start school before 8 a.m. at an academic disadvantage? Why are there more complications from anesthesia in the afternoon? The explanations come from research about “the effect of the time of day” on people’s thoughts and emotions, which began over a century ago, and which is being refined further now that social media platforms provide a wealth of data that can be analyzed from a chronological perspective. An analysis of millions of tweets from around the world, for instance, revealed a pattern that crossed continents and ethnic groups: “Tweeters felt active, engaged, and hopeful” in the morning and early evening. This is just one of the many findings with practical implications that Pink lays out in the “Time Hacker’s Handbook,” short sections that follow each chapter. By the book’s end, readers will be thinking much more carefully about how they divide up their days and organize their routines.

November 1, 2017
If you want a raise, ask the boss in the morning--but never at 2:55 in the afternoon. The reason? Ask pop-science writer Pink (To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, 2012, etc.), who examines what happens when in daily life.It's a truism that timing is of the utmost importance. Mining veins familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, Pink delves into circadian rhythms, bimodal patterns, data clusters, and all the other stuff of popular business writing to explore, for instance, what a person's optimal time of day is for such things as collegiality, productivity, happiness, and the like. The answer is that mornings are when good things happen, while afternoons are times of flagging energy, surliness, and negativity. Perhaps surprisingly, afternoon is also the time when ethical lapses are likeliest to occur, with some variation depending on one's "chronotype." Moving on, the author analyzes problems, addresses some of the latest research surrounding them, and then offers a few simple strategies for self-improvement, some a touch soft (join a yoga class), some more pointed--for instance, if you want to be perceived as an effective manager, answer colleagues' email promptly, since "e-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss." Timing, similarly, can be a simple matter or a highly elaborate one, as with the food delivery workers who fan out across Mumbai each day, guided by the careful communication of information that "allows the walas to anticipate one another's actions and move in harmony." Pink also notes points at which our culture is inefficient in its accommodation of people who move to different rhythms: night owls tend to greater intelligence and creativity than early risers, but they're forced to be "like left-handers in a right-handed world."Solid science backed by sensible action points--good airplane reading for business travelers.

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