When

“Timing is everything.”

Pink offers valuable lessons about why it matters to give questions of when-to as much consideration as you give questions of how to. He builds his book around the central premise that timing affects the choices everyone makes on a regular basis. Whether to focus on a person or project, to marry, to change jobs, to share good or bad news or simply to go for a run are all types of “when decisions.” Though timing is everything, most people make these decisions based on guesswork or intuition instead of deliberate consideration. People often treat timing as an art, but Pink provides research and case studies demonstrating that timing is actually a science. Findings from varied disciplines – anesthesiology, anthropology, endocrinology, chronobiology, economics, social psychology, and more – provide insight into how better timing can help people work smarter and improve their lives. To incorporate these ideas into your life, Pink advises, begin considering decisions based on “when-to” questions, rather than the how-to perspective prevalent in most time-management methods. With this new when-to strategy in mind, you may gain a better grasp on how the divisions of time within a day, project, career or lifetime create a framework and can lead to meaningful consequences.