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“[T]he performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol,� according to Russell Foster, a neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford.
For analytic problems, lack of inhibitory control is a bug. For insight problems, it’s a feature.
People born in the fall and winter are more likely to be larks; people born in the spring and summer are more likely to be owls.
The best endings don’t leave us happy. Instead, they produce something richer—a rush of unexpected insight, a fleeting moment of transcendence, the possibility that by discarding what we wanted we’ve gotten what we need.
But the science of endings suggests that instead of fleeing we’re better off reserving the final five minutes of work for a few small deliberate actions that bring the day to a fulfilling close. Begin by taking two or three minutes to write down what you accomplished since the morning. Making progress is the single largest day-to-day motivator on the job.7 But without tracking our “dones,� we often don’t know whether we’re progressing.
