When

This is a classic improv warm-up exercise. Form a circle. The first person turns to his right and makes eye contact with the second person. Then they both clap at the same time. Next, person number two turns to her right, makes eye contact with person number three, and those two clap in unison. (That is, number two passes the clap to number three.)

Endings offer good news and bad news about our behavior and judgment. I’ll give you the bad news first, of course. Endings help us encode, but they can sometimes twist our memory and cloud our perception by overweighting final moments and neglecting the totality. But endings can also be a positive force. They can help energize us to reach a goal. T

“punctuated equilibrium.”12 Evolution’s path wasn’t a smooth upward climb. The true trajectory was less linear: periods of dull stability punctuated by swift explosions of change. The Eldredge-Gould theory was itself a form of punctuated equilibrium—a massive conceptual explosion that interrupted a previously sleepy stretch in evolutionary biology

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?

For most of us, those sharpminded analytic capacities peak in the late morning or around noon.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (2010) By Laura Vanderkam

Suppose you’re a venture capitalist and I pitch you the following business idea: It’s a lunch-delivery service. Homemade meals picked up at people’s apartments and delivered precisely at lunchtime to the desk of their family member on the other side of town. That town, by the way, is the world’s tenth largest city, with twice the population of New

For most of us, mornings are when those guards are on alert, ready to repel any invaders. Such vigilance—often called “inhibitory control”—helps our brains to solve analytic problems by keeping out distractions.22 But insight problems are different. They require less vigilance and fewer inhibitions. That “flash of illuminance” is more likely to occ

“[A]n important takeaway from our study for corporate executives is that communications with investors, and probably other critical managerial decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day.”11