Books I am Reading

📅 November 2022¶

I haven't had a lot of time to read this month. However, I've added three new books to my reading list.

• Dr Christian Busch - The Serendipity Mindset
• Michael J. Mauboussin - The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing
• Richard Wiseman - The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind-Arrow

Recently, I was inspired to check out this book, When by Daniel Pink after learning about your time of the day chronotype. Here's my interepretation of the book-

📑 WHEN by Daniel Pink¶

• It is normal to feel a mid-day slump sometime between 2 pm to 3 pm when nothing productive gets done for an average person who goes to sleep at 11 am and wakes up at 7 am
• It is, thus much, better to instead allow yourself the room to recharge during this time.
• There are multiple ways to recharge. However, two core ways to recharge would be. First, Taking a nappucino. Consuming a cappuchino and hitting a 25 minute nap so you wake up feeling that caffeine rush inside your body and more alert than before. Second, is to do organizing tasks that allow you to re-align your priorities for the rest of the day. This could be sorting, cleaning, updating stuff or running errands. Make sure you're following a step by step checklist to avoid making costly mistakes
• There are two kinds of problems we deal with through the day i.e. Logical Problems eg coding, research, editing and Insight Problems eg brainstorming, creative writing
• All of your jobs in today's day and time require us to wear multiple hats. Thus, you aren't always working on a single type of problems. But in any job, you are constantly working on both kinds of problems. For eg. for a content creator they have to be doing content research, filming, editing as well as content writing. While content research, filming and editing is best done in your first half of the day, content writing or anything that requires you to pause and reflect is best addressed towards the later half of the day.
• That said, it doesn't hold true for everyone. There are about 75% people who fall into this early chronotype but still a substantial 25% who fall into the late chronotype.
• The late chronotype people are able to accomplish the insight/creative work (writing, brainstorming, designing) right after waking up, and performing best on the logical work (researching, programming, reasoning) towards the later half of the day.
• I fall under the late chronotype where I find writing or learning something new almost a herculian task if I schedule it in the evening. However, coding in the evening is almost addictive, if not, incredibly relaxing for me but stressful thing to do if scheduled as my to-do right after waking up.
• As a content creator, I am also expected to film content and edit it. Filming content in the morning is easier for me as I tend not to overthink but editing it is much more peaceful when done in the evening as pausing feels more natural, a few hours before bed. That said, I don't always schedule things this way and I feel like different tasks may incite different emotions in people and it may not be as simple as that. For eg. as an OCD, I find coding pretty relaxing as an activity because it is partly repetitive in nature and requires you to pause and think. This may not be true for someone else who may find coding a very strenous and high-strung task.
• Also, what may seem like an artistic task, say writing, might not be artistic for a professional writer who may have come to develop their unique systems around it. So, my hypothesis is that the way we choose to classify a certain activity always does depends on our mastery of that task and that changes the game when you think of it with respect to the categories Daniel has defined in his book.
• Howeever, with that said, there is something to be taken away from the book, if not a lot and that is the awareness of the nature of our tasks, the need to batch similar tasks together so you aren't constantly context switching from one mode to another and also understanding our different capacities to handle chaos and uncertainity at different times during the day.
• Some people are able to do more uncertain tasks in the morning when their decision making abilities are still at peak leaving only more structured tasks for the evening whereas others prefer to accomplish more structured tasks in the morning where there is a clearly defined set of guidelines around what is expected and how to go about it.