When are you sharper: 10:00 AM or 3:00 PM?

The answer to this question (which is probably 10:00 AM) has surprising implications for your professional life.

As I’ve learned more and more about productivity over the past few years, the idea that certain times of day are best matched with certain kinds of work has come up again and again. Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals is replete with examples of writers, scientists, and great creative minds who hewed to a strikingly similar daily schedule: creative work from mid-morning until early afternoon, then administrative work (then, for many of them, getting really drunk. But I digress).

I quit Facebook about a year ago.

I’m not on Instagram or LinkedIn.

Reddit and YouTube are blocked on my devices.

I do have a Twitter account for automatically sharing blog posts, but nothing more.

Do the previous four sentences sound like the opening to a self-righteous article full of phrases like “wake up, sheeple” and “reclaim your brain”?

Well, this is not that article (at least, I hope it’s not). Yes, life without social media is better (I’ll argue) than life with social media. But it’s not perfect, and there are certainly tradeoffs to consider. Let’s talk about the pros and cons of quitting social media.

Picture this.

You arrive at work raring to go. There’s a lot on your plate, and you’re feeling motivated to do it. Today is going to be a productive day. You even planned out your workday last night, as you’ve been doing lately. You start working right on time, but your first task takes longer than you’d planned. The workday has just begun, you note with some frustration, and you’re already behind. You press on. Then, mid-morning, a minor office crisis bubbles up, and you’ve got to drop everything to pitch in. You’re now two hours behind, according to the schedule you made last night. You are not a happy camper.

I’d like to share with you a useful skill I picked up from a one-of-a-kind book called How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler. Jim Rohn hipped me to this book years ago in one of his recorded seminars, and it’s very much worth a read. In philosophical yet accessible language (Adler was a philosopher who aimed his work at the average person), Adler dissects the art of reading and explains how to do it well. His system is multilayered, but one of the steps he recommends is quite straightforward and can be used immediately: skimming.

In the early 2000s, an anesthesiologist named Peter Pronovost began studying a persistent problem in hospitals: central line infections.

A central line (or central venous catheter) is a type of IV, but instead of going into a vein in your arm, it goes into a major vein in the neck or chest. Central lines make it easier to give medication and to take blood, and they can stay in longer than normal IVs. For patients who are going to be in the hospital for a while, they’re common. And usually they’re inserted without incident.