Composing your day to fit your rhythm
Your body has a rise and fall throughout the day. Dance with it.
To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
—Craig Arnold, from “Meditation on a Grapefruit”
It shouldn’t surprise any arts manager that compelling human stories have a shape – the characters rise and fall in their fortunes and their feelings on the journey from beginning to end. Author and creative curmudgeon Kurt Vonnegut suggested these shapes could be captured on a graph, and offered eight archetypes that appear across literature, stage, and screen.
And yet, so many arts managers approach their days, weeks, seasons, and years as if they were immune from such rises and falls. They take meetings whenever. They cram generative work into random scraps of time. They make difficult and demanding decisions at any hour. And they expect their teams to do the same.
Centuries of discovery have demonstrated that “nearly all living things—from single-cell organisms that lurk in ponds to multicellular organisms that drive minivans—have biological clocks” (Pink 2019). Energy, emotion, and cognitive capacity all shift over the course of a day, week, or season. And those patterns shift over the course of a life.
Rather than ignoring these rhythms, an attuned arts manager can dance with them and support their team in doing the same.
One approach to learning those rhythms is to know your chronotype – the particular pattern of your internal body clock. The exploration of chronotypes began in molecular biology (Ehret 1974) but evolved to focus on human biology and behavior. As Roenneberg, Wirz-Justice, and Merrow (2003) described our complex relationship with time:
Our daily life is organized by three different clocks: a solar clock, providing light and warmer temperatures during the day; a social clock, which we see or hear first thing on a working day; and a biological clock, which we sense most vividly when jet lagged, during shift work, or when adjusting to daylight savings time.
Reonneberg and team eventually defined three chronotypes (patterns of individual biological clocks) that appeared across cultures, genders, and contexts.
Larks (about 14% of the population) - “People, who get tired earlier than most and wake up long before others…”
Owls (about 21% of the population) - “People who can stay up long after midnight and can sleep into the day (not necessarily longer but simply later)…”
Doves (about 65% of the population, Daniel Pink calls these “third birds”) - People who live between the extremes.
As Pink (2019) summarizes the evidence: “Genetics explains at least half the variability in chronotype, suggesting that larks and owls are born, not made.” Beyond genetics, season of birth also plays a role – with people born in fall or winter more likely to be larks, and people born in spring or summer more likely to be owls.
You can get a rough idea of your chronotype by finding the midpoint between when you generally go to sleep and wake up on “free days” – that is, days without work or other time-based commitments (see chart).
Your chronotype informs the shape of your energy and affect through the course of an average day. So, once you know your chronotype, you can craft your days accordingly. Larks and doves will be better at analytic tasks in the morning, and insight/connective tasks later in the day. Owls will be the opposite. Pink offers a compilation of the research recommendations in the table below (his name for “doves” is “third birds”).
Of course, the ability to sculpt your day is a privilege that many jobs and life circumstances don’t allow. But there are often ways to nudge things, especially if you collaborate with your team to do so. And if you do have autonomy in organizing your days, take full advantage by crafting your calendar to match the rises and falls of your internal clock.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Spaces & Systems
Spaces & Systems involves selecting, securing, stewarding, and harnessing the built environment and technological infrastructure.
Framework of the Week: Ladder of Control
The Ladder of Control is a communications tool for supervisors and their direct reports to help calibrate reporting relationship across different kinds of work. The ladder offers seven levels of authority, from the least agency ("Tell me what to do…") to the most agency ("I've been doing…").
Photo by Rachel Loughman on Unsplash
Sources
Big Think. “Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 ‘Shapes’ of Stories,” June 13, 2022.
Ehret, Charles F. “The Sense of Time: Evidence for Its Molecular Basis in the Eukaryotic Gene-Action System.” In Advances in Biological and Medical Physics, edited by JOHN H. Lawrence and JOHN W. Gofman, 15:47–77. Elsevier, 1974.
Pink, Daniel H. When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Reprint edition. Riverhead Books, 2019.
Roenneberg, Till, Anna Wirz-Justice, and Martha Merrow. “Life between Clocks: Daily Temporal Patterns of Human Chronotypes.” Journal of Biological Rhythms 18, no. 1 (February 2003): 80–90.