10 Tips on the Right Time of Day for Your Personal Best

10 Tips on the Right Time of Day for Your Personal Best By Eve Abbott,the Organizer Extraordinaire Excerpted from her new book "How to Do Space Age Work with a Stone Age Brain" TM Can choosing which time we do an activity really make a difference in our performance? Have you ever wondered what would be the best time of day (or week) to do different kinds of work? Every person's internal clock runs on the Human Circadian Timeline. Except those who have been on graveyard shift for years! This is the schedule by which our body systems (including our brain) 'take care of business'. Every work day is divided into cycles that match our naturally heightened abilities - both physically and mentally. The trick is to take advantage of identifying and using this information to schedule your work and life activities accordingly. Circadian rhythms are present at birth and the body temperature cycle emerges between 6 to 9 months for infants. By the age of three the adrenal system is coordinating a complete daily cycle or timeline. The adrenal glands in coordination with our pituitary, hypothalamus, pineal glands control both our internal clock and our stress reaction. This means our stress levels are in direct proportion to how far off we are from our natural time cycle. Body temperature cycle doesn't vary so much from person to person. But, studies show our natural rhythms do shorten as we age. Mental conditions like depression in which sleep disturbance is common and physical illness of any kind disrupt the daily cycle. However, healthy people keep their innate circadian cycle throughout their life. Although each body system has its own rhythm, generally cell replacement peaks between noon and nine pm. The skin and the liver are the only organs which replenish worn out tissues with new ones at night and this process peaks by midnight. The brain is the only organ that functions without cell replacement - So, we'd better take better care of the one we have! Setting Your Internal Clock To work and live at our best, we need our internal circadian rhythm in harmony or synchronized with the environmental cues (i.e., light and dark, temperature etc). Human beings grow faster, produce more offspring, enjoy better health, do better work and live longer when time setting environment cycles match. This makes it easy to understand the fact that graveyard shift (midnight to eight am) workers experience more accidents than day and evening shifts combined. Also, more of the worst auto accidents occur after midnight. Our bodies 'know' we should be asleep! One night of short sleep does not affect overall performance. However, several nights of sleep deprivation leads to dull sensory perceptions (vision, hearing etc.). Plus, longer reaction time, slower motor coordination, reduced memory retrieval, combined with lowered new memorization ability, as well as increased irritability. These are exactly the functions we need to do good work - including decreased irritability. Light is the number one influence