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Whilst Daniel Pink’s “When” might have suffered a bit from the scientific replication crisis that plagues books of this era, I think it makes an interesting if slightly obvious point — work out what time of day you do your best work, and then work out how to ensure that time is when you do work. I think that perhaps the general trend towards working from home makes this a bit more possible than it would otherwise be, but it’s certainly true that employers of even remote employees do love to impose a schedule based largely on ideas from a different century. Ironically, I say this as someone who naturally gets up early and is pretty smashed by about 9pm. That is, the traditional work day works quite well for me.

One technique Pink advocates for is finding “temporal landmarks” to help kick off new habits — the New Year New Diet stereotype for example might be a stereotype because it works. The advice is effectively to find ways that dates significant to you can help prompt the new behavior you want to reinforce, which makes sense to me especially when you’re trying to build habits.

That said, I have bad news. According to this book, we were meant to have our midlife crises at 35. We’re running quite late and I might need a catch up crisis or two. Also, apparently everyone is unhappy in their forties, regardless of race, demographics, or wealth. I find this vaguely reassuring. I also like that he likes naps, because I too like naps.

Overall, an interesting book which is easy to read. It does feel a little padded though in that it just keeps making the same points over and over.