055 Chronotypes and Ideal Daily Schedules

Voiceover Artist 0:00
Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you’ve come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24
And I am Augusto Pinaud.

Art Gelwicks 0:27
And I’m Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Thank you so much for being here with me. Gentlemen, we are going to be continuing our discussion from last episode, where we were talking about two distinct books, when the scientific secrets of perfect timing by Dan pink, and the power of win by Dr. Michael Bruce. So if you have not listened to that episode, go ahead and jump back in episode and listen to that episode on Chrono types and optimal productivity, which is the name of the episode and then hop on back over here and continue on, where Today we are going to be talking about our reflections on our own ideal daily schedules, and really fleshing out for for for you how we approach some of these pieces that might be in Confluence, or may be in conflict with the archetypes. And I think that’ll be a fun, interesting discussion for us all this morning. Are before we got started recording, you had an interesting kind of starter question, I think that you would positive to to a gusto. You want to start with that. And we’ll kind of go from there.

Art Gelwicks 1:37
Sure. The question in basically was, if you studied your Chrono type, and you understand which one you are, if you find you’re not following that prototype, is it because you’re making a conscious effort to not follow it? Or is it because the rest of your life is pushing you to a different one. So if for example, I by definition, right now, I am a lion, and that works pretty well, with my regular daily life schedule. But there are days that my krona type would be much better suited if I was a wolf, for example. I don’t make a conscious effort to try and change it because like I said, it seems to work pretty well for me right now. But I’m just curious if that’s something if you find you’re not matching your krona type? Are you doing it by choice? Are you doing it by force?

Augusto Pinaud 2:30
You know, mine is exactly the opposite. When I went into the book, the chronic type that identifies the wealth that by the way, it’s to the teeth, okay. I love because I love the silence. Okay, I love the non interruption. I loved all that part of working. So the wolf works for me, so well. And I did it for many, many, many years. What happened is, I leave sadly, on a different schedule than the wolf. When I was young, I could go in two or three hours of sleep, you know, work all night, and then go back and have normal life. Okay, that’s stop working at some point. And I begin our lives and I was one to the other scene I discover. And I wrote about it on on the for a book is, in order for me to be the wolf, because I have a normal life. In the day. I need to decompress. So what happened is, I go and then finally, when I get that quiet for the wolf, okay, I need maybe half an hour, maybe two hours to decompress. Okay, and then I’m on full push. The problem was daddy’s, then I go to bed at three, four in the morning, and I need to wake up at six. It really doesn’t work well. So years ago, I begin trying the opposite. say, Well, why do you think instead of decompressing I just go to bed and wake up at four in the morning. Because what I discovered was a wolf is I really get after decompression all that couple of hours of good work. But mostly because well I’m obviously in six in the morning by four in the morning, I’m dead. So if I flip it on, it started waking up at four in the morning, I could get first super fresh, because I’m going to be completely rested. And those two first hours between four and six are incredibly, incredibly productive for me, that allows me to really be effective on on what I’m doing, and allows me to really get a lot more done during my day. But I admitted that I that is basically a conscious decision to push towards a lie on a schedule more than what the chrono type is. You know, I been waking up at four in the morning for a really long time I’m it is still a struggle, it is a conscious decision I need to make every day.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:05
That’s so unique and different than my own because as I said in the last episode, I was surprised to find out and relieved to find out that I was a dolphin in the in the Michael Bruce sleep Connor type categories. And so here I am living my life like a lion. When in reality, I was down a dolphin I mean, every way that I could look at the dolphin, Chrono type sleep Connor type, I recognize myself in it a little different than a horoscope where you can find yourself in a horoscope. In my particular case, I did the I did the temperature test, you know I did. I’ve looked at it from every angle. And it’s true I probably Emma Emma dolphin. And it just defies. Or at least it explains why I’ve had such a difficult time with Sleep my entire life. Remarkably, as I said in the last episode, it’s been a relief to not have to feel like oh, there’s, I’m doing something wrong with regard to sleep. It’s just that sleep is different for me. So that was very, that was very cathartic. That was very, you know, and therapeutic. So that was a good part in terms of your question art in terms of how I’m operating in what I believe, as close to what I can do as a dolphin. So for as a recap for folks, dolphins, I’m actually reading here off of the bulletproof blog here because it has a good description of it for everybody. But it says dolphins may or may not may or may not have a regular sleep routine, their light sleepers and wake up frequently throughout the night. And often don’t sleep enough, dolphins struggle to fall asleep. And they ruminate over the days failures. It says dolphins extreme intelligence tendency toward perfectionism probably explain why they spend so much time chewing over the day, they do their best work from mid morning through early afternoon. And that is other than struggling to fall asleep, which is not an every night affair for me. But it does on occasion, the everything else about the description and the book is to the tee. And that’s a that’s just a unique component of my life that I really, you know, I’d given quite a bit of thought to but until the power of when I hadn’t seen a lot of material that wasn’t in the category of some kind of sleep disorder, as opposed to this is just the way you are. And so for anybody who does take the test and is also a dolphin, you probably sense the same kind of relief I did, which is that there’s not something wrong with you, that there is just really a different way of experiencing sleep, that not everybody, not everybody feels it’s just a very different experience. I’m just trying to do as many things that Dr. Bruce talks about in the book to align myself with the social aspects of the other people in my life. You know, so a lot of people don’t, in the power of when Dr. Bruce really goes into the perspective that we’re either trying to be in synchrony with our bio time and, or with the social world. In my case, I’m trying to align contrary to the dolphin to be with the more social aspects of my life, you know, that is home life, work life, those kinds of things. Even though being a dolphin doesn’t necessarily make that optimal for me, I also need to work from in an ideal, kind of ideal daily schedules, since that mid morning to mid afternoon timeframe for me, is supposed to be my peak. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t typically feel that way for me. I need to I need to realign my schedule, I realized so that I could be more productive in that period of time. And that meant figuring out which parts were kind of peak energy times for me peak mental energy, and moving other things out of that space that would otherwise dominate that space. So I needed to rework my schedule for that purpose. So I’ve done quite a lot to try to make it more available to me, not the opposite.

Art Gelwicks 9:37
You talking about these situations, reminds me of a challenge that I face, trying to adjust related to if we want to segment it productive time versus social time, because my productive time is so heavily slanted to the morning. And earlier in the day. If I want to maintain social time later in the evening, I basically have to decide that I’m going to sacrifice the next day. Because if I stay up really late, just to be socially interactive, I’m not going to be getting up at the same time the next morning, which throws that whole day’s schedule off. Now, if we think about like weekends, for example, everybody said, Oh, yeah, sleeping on the weekends. That’s actually not as easy as you would think. If you’re and lots of people are this way, if you’re wired like I am, where you have the, you know, the habitual wake up at 530 in the morning and start your day. Well, your internal clock doesn’t know the difference between Friday and Saturday, it just knows when the sun’s coming up. So if you’ve shifted or you’ve kind of sabotage your schedule, to encourage the social aspect in the previous evening, the next day is basically shot. I found, I hate to admit this, but found as I’ve been getting older, that’s a harder thing to recover from. It’s kind of the old, I could eat a full pizza. And now I’m lucky I can eat a piece. This is a chant challenge that I’m having to take into consideration. When I plan my day, something I never had to worry about before. If I’m looking at a schedule for three days, and I know I’m going to have social activities in the night, on one of the days, I have to say Okay, the next day after that, that morning is going to be pretty useless. So I don’t want to put anything on the schedule for that morning. It’s just it adds one more complicating factor, it’s important to understand it. But it’s another variable that I have to take into the into the equation.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:44
Yeah, I have to say that I relate very much to the if I if I sacrifice this evening that I’m sacrificing at least the good, good part of the next day’s productivity depends on whether I have meetings. But if I have, if I just have discretion, very productive time, that usually has to be moved. You know, by the time I’m, I’m done with the evenings activities. If, if for some reason I’ve had wine or I’ve been up too late, then then that whole next, that whole next morning is pretty much it’s just not going to be as productive for me, I’m going to find myself more distracted, I’m going to find myself producing less quality work. And so for the most part, I try not to compromise that. So I’m with you. I totally understand

Art Gelwicks 12:31
that here. Here’s a question though. And this is something that I’ve started doing. I’m not consistent about it yet, but I’ve been trying to start doing it is changing the type of work based on what I think will be my energy level during a time period. So if let’s take our Friday, Saturday example, started normal Friday starts at five 30 in the morning, runs the full day work. My technical work finishes it up around three. So I want to have some social time the evening all the sudden it’s 11 o’clock before I get back in the house. Now that’s been a long day. Yeah, I know. I’m old 11 o’clock. Not that late, but bear with me. So now I have to say okay, what am I going to be able to do the next morning, I don’t, I’ve tried to get into the habit of not planning things that are going to require a great deal of mental focus and energy to accomplish. But the physical part maybe Okay, so instead of planning the next morning that I’m going to get up and do writing or write some podcast, podcast scripts or anything like that. It’s going to be I’m going to get up I’m going to do cleaning around the house I’m going to do yard work I’m going to do physical motion activities, rather than cognitive activities because I know my cognitive capabilities are going to be pretty much mush for a few hours the next morning that’s been helpful when I’m able to get myself to do it but it does require adding even that much more into my planning cycle. I’m curious if you guys do anything similar

Augusto Pinaud 14:09
that is a problem is the extra planning because he’s also not if you will planet every Friday I will do social life so every Saturday I need to plan for that then it will get into a more semi automatic process that right now it’s as you describe is a base it on when that happened it but it’s interesting because for me as I said, I’m a wolf. Okay, so when I did my what kills me is the lion, not the wolf, I can go into social life come home late, okay, and then be fully ready to go into my home office and work for two more hours. Okay, because my problem is the life of the lion, you know, is what constrain me as soon as I that’s the reason I need to decompress, but as soon as I’m relaxed, then that wealth can go on and go for a really, really long time. The problem is, as I said, I tried to leave the life of a lion. So when I even that I have a great time, the next morning when I cannot recover as fast as I used to sadly, okay, but to what happened now is that lie on suffers because the because it’s not alive is really, you know, I was waking up early, and I feel more like Willy Kajaki than really a world that is even sadder. But But what I have been able to do that has been successful is I can plan is small burst of wealth work, okay. And then I plan, okay, I’m going to get Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, okay, and I’m going to go into a wolf schedule, and then Sunday, it’s going to be for recovery. So that way, Monday, I can go back to that lioness capsule. And when I’m able to do that, then I’m able to get a significant amount of things moving forward. And I leave that Sunday for things that are maintenance, low brain power, low physical, okay. And in so many cases, you know, I, I recommend this, I have recommend this for years, I believe you need to have a day where you do all your low priority stuff, care as many as you can. So when I go into those cycles, where I can get two or three days in a row, to the wall, then the next day, the fourth day is for, it’s perfect for those low priority things that then I am not on the brain of saying this need to move. But I’m well this is wait three months, you know, if it’s, if take me an hour to get it done, it will be okay. And then I’m not giving pressure to the lion. But the wall was really happy the last three days.

Art Gelwicks 17:03
You know, you just used an interesting phrase that kind of stuck in my head, you threw out the phrase wolf work. And I wonder if as we start to think about credit types more deeply. If it wouldn’t benefit us to start to identify the types of work we have associated with the krona type that it’s most likely to be able to be done that may didn’t make any sense. Let me explain. work like, for example, my writing, if I have to do some writing, I find that the best time for me to do writing is actually either around 11 o’clock in the morning or around two o’clock in the afternoon. Well, those are both technically, Lion times. But I find that my podcast recording is best in the late evening. So that’s, that’s really wolf work. If I think about it, maybe by identifying when that stuff fits, we can plan around how to best put it into our cycle, rather than here’s what I’m worried about, we’re getting into a concept where we say that the only time we can truly be productive is during our prototype, during that identify period. And I don’t believe that’s the case at all, I wrote an article recently about 24 hour productivity and and I truly believe that I think we can be productive all the time, if we set expectations around what productive truly means. So but I think tying these to the chrono types might be helpful for people to be able to put these in boxes to work with, or I could be completely off target.

Augusto Pinaud 18:47
No, I I actually agree with you completely. That’s one of the challenging things is to understand when you can be productive on what you know. And that’s one and two is what tools you need to be productive with. For example, my writing, I can write in a different times if and only if I can put loud music. You can doesn’t matter if you give me the morning doesn’t matter if you cannot play loud music, for some reason I struggle with writing. So that makes it hard what I’m trying to do it, you’re not two in the morning, and my family do not appreciate me playing loud music at that time. But he’s, but if you plan it properly, then you can go into what what you just said the 24 hour high productivity stages, because what you do, what you can do was figure it out what productive means one, you know, when I said you should have at least one day a month when you do low priority stuff. For most people perspective that is completely unproductive. Why? Why am going to spend time doing low product low priority stuff. And the reason for that is because it gets the stickiness out of your system. Okay, otherwise you have things on your systems that are not valid anymore. Okay. Everybody has to stop under system that has days that has months, even years. Okay, that are low priority, that’s a recent are still there. Okay. But when you look at that you don’t delete it. You look around and say, Oh, yeah, I need to still do this someday. Okay, then why do you want to spend half a day at least or a day? A month? Okay, where did you now go and flip your system upside down and and start from that low priority. And the expectation is that I’m not doing anything important. Today, I’m cleaning the low priority thing. And when you play with the corner type, and you flip them that way, or you go to their social life, as you were just discussing, and you know, you’re going to be not on your prime. Okay, that’s the perfect time to plan to plug. Although things because now if it takes you if you are on your high productive time, and you spend an hour doing something low priority, it feels as if you were completely inefficient. But if you know you are going to be slower, tired,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 21:35
okay, not in not in the top of your condition, then that’s a perfect time, because doesn’t matter how long it takes, what matter he said, He’s getting out of the system, things that may have had been in the system, something that I frequently have talked to everybody who listened, which is that they need to, in some way, shape or form, create awareness of their, of what they do throughout the day. And the only way that I’ve learned to understand that is objectively through collecting data, we’ve done episodes on data tracking, active and passive data tracking. So I suggest people go back to those. But if you want to know more about yourself, so that you could be more productive, you need to spend some time tracking, there’s the heat mapping tool from productive flourishing, there are so many great ways in which you can track just enough data so that you know enough about yourself to then inform how you’re going to know what your energies are. And knowing what kind of as art was saying, you know, Chrono type based work needs to be done, whether it’s wolf work, or dolphin work, or I hope nobody has any dolphin work. Um, well, I guess I guess you could have dolphin work since their their peak period is, is that mid mid morning to early afternoon time, you know, or whatever you need to, you need to know when your peak periods are so that you’re able to then align the right work with the right time of day, in conjunction with the with your current calendar, because you’ll know that if you’re going to have a productive day, and you have a meeting, at that time, when you’re supposed to be most effective mentally, well, maybe move the meeting, right? If it’s not, if it’s not as important for you to meet to talk about the budget at 10am. And 10am, is your really the best time of day for you to do this thing. And if it’s going to be just as fine for you to have the budget meeting at 1pm. Then do that maybe, you know just depends on what the what the outcomes are and and take into account Dan Pink’s perspective on this, which is that if there needs to be some important decision made, that important decisions should be made earlier in the day than later people make decisions, you know, more positive decisions later in the day. So if you’re trying to get something approved in your budget, then maybe you do want to keep that meeting earlier and the day before whomever has to make the decision is hungry. So, you know, I think I think that’s a that’s a key point in all of this, I wanted to turn us over in the last part of our conversation regarding the changing nature of work today. There are, at least in my perspective, there are many discussions happening among many different audiences. I know that the New York Times recently had an event about the changing world of work, everyone’s talking about the future of work. And there have been several seminars and conferences that I’ve attended on that subject. And a lot of this is based on the fact that we have a number of different things happening, we have a job market that is changing, based on automation and globalization, we have more people getting the offer opportunity to do remote work. I think more people are becoming aware of different job opportunities at a younger age. And those job opportunities are morphing faster than ever before. You know, when when I came into the work world, I thought you had one job, you did that job, and then you died. And I’ve been very surprised in my own career by the fact that I now have had several careers in, you know, a short period of time and short span of life, I suppose. And so I’m curious from from you both. And in terms of how that’s going to affect Chrono types, how that is going to affect how we decide what ideal ideal daily schedules are from this perspective. So think about it this way, if everybody thinks about the bear, as the data, the you know, the standard, they’re the norm, because they’re they’re the majority. And we all kind of work around the bears schedule, we all pun intended, lionize the lion, you know, Chrono type, because they’re the ones who are the early risers, and there’s so many articles that praise early risers, when in reality, that is bunk. And

Unknown Speaker 26:26
yet,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 26:28
as as we get more people working remotely on their own schedules, and pay for performance is now a thing, we are seeing more people more concerned about their results than they are about showing up at their desk at 9am. And looking like they’re productive when their boss walks in the door. So now that we actually have some of the pieces there are we going to see changes in the way in which people operate, because the norms and the mores are changing? Well,

Art Gelwicks 27:02
I definitely think we’re going to start to see some change there. There’s, the struggle is not so much from my perspective on the people doing the work. It’s on leadership and management. And here’s what I mean, if I’m a project manager, and I’m assembling a team, that has the option to do remote work, is in an environment that is results focused rather than time executed for focus, you know, not punching the time clock is per se, one of the best things I could do for myself, would be to figure out the corona types of every member of my team, and make sure that the expectations of delivery match their greatest periods of productivity. So I’ll take a couple of typical roles. software developers, by nature are typically and again, I’m generalizing here, typically, wolves, because they they have a tendency to work later on in the app in the evenings, they work late into the night. It’s just the way they execute. Whereas most administrative focus people, like project managers are more lions, they’re focused earlier in the day primarily because they’re compelled to be in standard business, our meetings, so that what you wind up with this dichotomy between the two groups that you have to plan for? I think, as we start to see the workplace change, and move towards finally recognizing that being at the desk for 40 hours means nothing, when it comes to getting work done. We’ll finally start to understand that optimizing for people’s best way to execute is the best way to work, working from home working remotely. It it’s the way it has to be, we have the technology now compared to 10 years, even even five years ago, where people can work anywhere, at any time and do whatever they need. The challenge of that is that we have this mindset that if you can work, you should be working. And I I jump all over that because I think if you can work and you’re doing it smart, you shouldn’t have to be, you should be able to do this in a way that boosts that quality of life that you have that, you know, honestly, I think many of our our previous generation sacrifice to be able to do those 4045 5060

Unknown Speaker 29:43
hour weeks

Art Gelwicks 29:46
to get things done. Whereas now we can accomplish the same in less time. If we do it right. If we think right, if we provide some insight and intellect around these problems, we don’t have to spend eight hours a day, five days a week at the same desk, we can work on it. At home, we can work on things in a coffee shop we can work on now, I know that’s not the case for everybody. But I think as we move closer to that we have to start talking to and this is where I’m going to get on my education soapbox, we have to start talking to kids in the classroom to get them to understand that just because they go to school for a fixed amount of time each day, that’s not the way they have to work once they’re out of school.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 30:36
Yeah, there’s definitely two pieces there. Right there’s, there’s the management and management has their hands full, because you need to not only be and do what you’re talking about, which is identifying the types of workers that you have on your team. But you also need to motivate them by helping them using kind of the fun, trendy term, like living their best life. People are motivated when you’re helping them. And and then the other side is in education, we need to we need to make sure that that kids are getting educated. So I absolutely agree with you, those are two very important things to me

Augusto Pinaud 31:17
for some very survival sometime and don’t ask me when, okay, people got into this idea that you need to be, you know, only one career so you can get to be the expert, so you can be good, so you can be successful. Okay. And I remember as a kid, my parents telling me that, you know, Hey, dude, you need to focus into into be one one career. Right? I remember the first time I read the biography of Benjamin Franklin. Okay, and how he not only had multiple careers, but multiple interesting careers. Yeah, and I remember the excitement when I bring the book to my back, say, look, look, this is what I meant to I want to do, okay, my parents were not that I’m used to still to this day. But that concept that you can have a main line on maybe side jobs and maybe different careers, it’s now a lot more accepted, not because the acceptance necessarily has change. But because we know now have more success cases that we can use an example used to be that those people who were jumping from career to career work because either more failures than successes, therefore, people were advice and you to avoid that, like the plague. Now we are seeing, we have been able to see a lot of more, more of those successes happening constantly. So that way people is more interested into See, to experience that firsthand.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:05
My thoughts here are, are very much aligned with what art said in terms of the fact that we need to work on both ends of the spectrum, the current active employed population, and or the employable population, because I’m sure there’s a there’s a group of people who are unemployed, who also need to be brought into the work environment, as we see more automation and globalization take hold, and we need, we need everybody at the table to really, you know, help make productivity, a discussion at the table. Because ultimately, not maybe ultimately, but pen ultimately, it is what allows the the driving of sales and deliverables, which, you know, is kind of the point of having a business. And so if we, if we can, we can deal with things on that end, and we can deal with the education, you know, what I would consider a broken education system, one that does not facilitate teaching children how to be productive in the future workforce that they’re going to join, while not teaching them fulfillment, how to be fulfilled in life. I think that’s kind of the point of, of, of an education system is preparing them for those two pieces. And, and there can be a healthy, I think, healthy argument for and against those points, but I think it’s one that needs to be had. So, I will say that, you know, we are we are definitely seeing and experiencing the the relics of what was once upon a time, really, you know, most of culture and, and and work culture today, we are experiencing through laws that were passed by Congress and signed into law by by the president of the time, the reality is, is that we can change fairly quickly too, if the right I don’t want to say necessarily rules, we don’t necessarily need laws in order to make these things happen. But through good guidelines through, you know, everybody coming together, sitting at the table and saying, Okay, let’s all do this together, there can be market change, very, very quickly. And and I think that that will help us all I think we really do need, I think we do need it. I mean, that’s just my perspective, from a, from a personal productivity perspective. I mean, you know, there’s there are good arguments on all sides about some of these topics. But if if the, if the true path forward is a more productive and fulfilling life, then we all need to figure out how to help our you know, all of us do that together. And so all right. Well, this has been fun. This has been a great episode. So for those of you who have been listening, if you have a question or a comment about this cast this topic, or something else we discussed, you can, if you’re on the podcast website, we have a comment section at the bottom of every episode, feel free to leave us a comment there, and one of us will be glad to respond. If you have a question you want to send to us that’s not related to a specific episode, feel free to head over to productivity cast.net, forward slash contact, and you can fill out the form or record an audio or voice message directly in your browser. And that’ll be sent off to us there at productivity cast.net, you’ll also find the show notes, which have links to everything that we discussed. If there’s something missing, let me know. And we’ll make sure we get that up there. And there also is all the information on how to subscribe to the podcast on the website. And with that, if you are listening in Apple podcasts or Stitcher or another app that gives you the ability to leave a rating or review please do that, that helps to grow our personal productivity listening community. And so it’s very helpful to us. And thank you. That brings us to the close of this episode of productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity, thanks to Augusto and Art for joining me here on this cast. And take care. Here’s your productive life, everybody.

Voiceover Artist 37:22
And that’s it for this ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.