Daniel Pink will be a Closing Session speaker at the AMTA 2019 National Convention, speaking Saturday, October 26 in Indianapolis, Indiana, and will help attendees better understand the science of timing. Specifically speaking about how research shows timing can help us make smarter decisions, enhance productivity, and boost performance.

It is an exciting moment in time for massage therapy as the profession evolves and continues to improve the quality of life for so many people. Massage Today spoke with Pink to ask about timing and how massage therapists can use timing to their advantage, both to advance the massage therapy profession and their own professional and personal lives.

MT: How can the science of timing affect our professional or personal lives?

DP: In so many ways. But one of the most important is to recognize that we don’t perform the same at different times of day. Our brain power changes during the course of a day. It doesn’t remain static, and can change in significant ways. Different times of day are better for different kinds of tasks. The key is to be intentional about when we do things—not just what we do and how we do them

MT: Can you describe one way massage therapists could organize their day that would significantly change their personal and/or professional life?

DP: One possibility: find out your clients’ chronotypes—and schedule  them accordingly. Chronotype is a term from a field call chronobiology, and it represents the scientific underpinnings of “morning people” and “evening people.” That’s not just folklore. Some of us naturally get up early and go to sleep early. Others of us naturally wake up late and fall asleep late. About 15 percent of us are strong morning people, called larks. Approximately 20 percent of us are strong evening people, referred to as owls. About two-thirds of us are more or less in the middle.

My hunch is that clients will respond differently to massage therapy at different times of day, so testing that out could be very useful. For instance, we already know that for most people, talk therapy is more effective in the morning than later in the day. There might be particular times of day when people are more responsive to massage therapy.

In his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink talks about being intentional about the timing of making decisions and completing tasks. Across more than a dozen fields—economics, social psychology, endocrinology, chronobiology, cognitive science, and more—researchers are uncovering a huge batch of exciting evidence that allows for systematically better “when” decisions, he explains. Pink further shows how the research reveals the effects of time of day on our mood and our performance, as well as offering insight into the episodic nature of life. It shows how beginnings affect people, how midpoints can either fire us up or bring us down, and how endings shape our motivation and memory. What’s more, the research shows how groups coordinate and synchronize, and even how the very way we think about time can affect our behavior.