βLast time we talked about people have different internal clocks. Having energy at different times of the day doesn't mean you're lazy or undisciplined. Not everyone is a morning person, and that's okay.
Your Most Alert Time Might Not Be Your Most Creative Time
In his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink explores how the time of day affects our thinking, energy, mood, and performance. Pink explains that many people move through three broad stages of mental energy during the day: a peak, a trough, and a recovery period.
During the peak, we're often better equipped for work requiring sustained concentration, careful judgment, and analytical thinking. This is the kind of mental activity involved in solving complicated problems, evaluating information, and making decisions.
The trough is that familiar slump when our energy and attention decline. For many people following conventional daytime schedules, it arrives sometime in the afternoon.
Then comes recovery, when our mood and mental energy may improve again. We may not be operating with quite the same sharp analytical focus, but we can be more relaxed and open to different possibilities.
The important thing is that these periods don't necessarily occur at the same clock time for everyone. Early birds and people with intermediate chronotypes often follow one pattern, while night owls may experience their strongest analytical performance much later in the day.
But there's another twist:
The mental state that makes you great at concentrating isn't always the same mental state that helps you come up with an original idea.
The Strange Benefits of a Slightly Sleepy Brain
In a 2011 study published in Thinking & Reasoning, researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks examined how people solved different kinds of problems at their optimal and non-optimal times of day.
They tested analytical problems, which require logical thinking, and insight problems, which often require a sudden mental leap or a new way of looking at something.
The researchers found that people performed better on certain insight problems during their non-optimal time of day.
In other words, being a little less mentally sharp sometimes helped people solve problems that required creativity. Why?
One possible explanation involves the way our brains filter information. When we're extremely focused, we're better at ignoring distractions and keeping our attention on the task at hand.
That's wonderfully useful when you're proofreading a manuscript or checking your plot for continuity problems. You don't want your mind wandering off to contemplate what would happen if your villain secretly collected garden gnomes.
But sometimes those strange, unexpected mental connections are exactly what creativity needs. When we're less tightly focused, our brains may be more willing to entertain unusual associations and possibilities. Ideas that would ordinarily get filtered out can sneak into our thinking.
For a writer, that might mean suddenly discovering an unexpected motivation for a character or realizing that two seemingly unrelated plot threads could connect.
There's an important distinction here. The researchers studied insight problems, not whether novelists produce better chapters when they're tired. Their findings don't mean you should deprive yourself of sleep or that exhausted writers are magically more creative.
They simply suggest that different kinds of thinking may benefit from different levels of mental alertness. Which leads to a rather delightful possibility. Maybe the best time to write a scene isn't necessarily the best time to dream up that scene.
Different Writing Tasks, Different Creative Hours
Writing isn't one single mental activity.
When we say we're going to spend two hours writing, that might mean brainstorming a new idea, outlining a novel, drafting dialogue, rewriting a chapter, researching historical details, fixing a plot hole, or proofreading the final manuscript.
Those tasks place different demands on our brains. Some call for intense focus and careful analysis, while others benefit from a willingness to make surprising associations. So instead of asking, "What's the best time of day to write?" it might be more useful to ask, "What's the best time of day for the kind of writing I'm doing?"
Work Requiring Concentration
If you're revising a complicated plot, checking continuity, or figuring out how to restructure the second act of your screenplay, you may want to tackle that work during your most mentally alert hours.
These tasks require you to hold several pieces of information in your mind at once, evaluate competing possibilities, and make decisions. They're often easier when you're focused and thinking clearly. The same might be true when you're drafting a difficult scene that requires careful coordination of action, dialogue, and character motivation.
Work Requiring Imagination
When you're brainstorming story ideas, exploring possible plot twists, or freewriting without a specific destination, experiment with a more relaxed time of day.
Take a walk. Sit outside. Let your mind wander while you're doing something that doesn't require intense concentration. You may discover that interesting story connections pop into your head when you're not staring at your computer demanding that inspiration arrive immediately.
Work That Doesn't Require Your Best Creative Energy
Then there are all those necessary tasks surrounding the writing itself: answering email, organizing files, updating your project notes, reviewing research, scheduling social media posts, and keeping track of the approximately nine thousand things involved in a creative career.
Most of these administration tasks don't require the same level of creative energy as developing a character arc or solving a difficult story problem. If you have control over your schedule, consider moving routine tasks into lower-energy periods and protecting your best hours for the work that matters most.
For me, that's exactly why mornings are so useful for reading, research, and email. I'm still getting important things accomplished, but I'm not demanding that my imagination perform acrobatics before breakfast.
These aren't rigid scientific rules for writing. They're ideas to test against your own experience.
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