I’m just noticing that I’m entering that perfect groove of Friday afternoon. I’ve stopped travelling for the week and I’m back at my desk. My head is buzzing with ideas from the week’s accumulated activities. I have got Fip.fr on the radio and for a precious few moments, there’s no barrier between me and the page.
I talk quite often in my creativity training about finding the right moment to do the right kind of work. A few years ago I heard Tim Ferris interview Dan Pink about his book ‘When’. Pink was writing about trends in what kind of work suits what times of day for different people. If memory serves correctly, he was suggesting that for many people, the morning is a more analytical time, the early afternoon is a post-lunch slump (ideal in my mind for doing expenses) and the late afternoon and early evening are ideal for more creative thinking.
He doesn’t say this is true of everyone, but says it is a common for many.
In my thinking about regenerative design, the idea of working with living cycles comes up often. I see this tuning into what work suits what time of day as another manifestation of this idea of a living cycle. Right now as I settle into my Friday afternoon groove I know that I’m working with the cycle, everything aligns and it is little extra effort to carry on moving forwards.
For me the questions are: where are we working with the direction of a system and when are we working against it. Sometimes we need to against the flow to make change. But working constantly against the flow is hard work and comes with an energy cost that one day we must repay.
The only problem I have with listening to Fip.fr in the afternoon is that the times are in French and every so often I forget and think it is one hour later than it really is.
