Have you ever sat staring at a page trying to find something to write? I believe it’s something you can train yourself out of. But I also think that it may have to do with the time of day you’re trying to write.
In Daniel Pink’s book “When”, he talks about a person’s chronotype – basically are you a morning person or a night owl.
Now for the most part, we have an idea what we are. My wife is definitely not a morning person, but I am. I get up ready to go in the morning. She sometimes doesn’t even get up in the morning…
But what I found most interesting was how he breaks the waking time of your day into three different buckets. The Peak, Trough, and Rebound.
To help optimize your output in a day, he says certain tasks need aligned with their respective bucket of time.
Let’s say you have you have a blog post to write. Should you be working on it earlier in the day or later in the day? Well it partly depends on your chronotype. If you’re a morning person, you actually want to do your creative, idea generating work in the evenings.
That sounds somewhat counterintuitive to me. (And probably means I should be updating my blog with posts in the evening instead of first thing in the morning…)
As I learned more about learning, it starts to seem more obvious though. Creative work relies on making new connections between ideas. That’s a task for diffuse thinking (when your mind wanders).
But for most of us, that means we should be doing the research and editing of our thoughts in the morning.
Now you may be a night owl. You’ll just have to check your energy levels to see how you should be structuring your day.
I have time set aside in my schedule for this project in both the morning and evening.
Sign up for my email list if you’d like more information on how I’m structuring my day to get through this challenge.
Time to get some work in. Until tomorrow.
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