At a previous ConantLeadership BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit—a virtual meeting of top leadership minds and business luminaries—Dan Pink (bestselling author of The Power of Regret, To Sell is Human, and When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing) spoke with Doug Conant (founder of ConantLeadership, former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, and bestselling author of The Blueprint and TouchPoints) about the evidence-based ways to plan your day for maximum impact.

Enjoy the following tips and takeaways from their conversation in the recap below. You can also watch the recording of their discussion (skip to roughly minute 7 to skip intros and housekeeping).

And join us on 9/15 – 9/19 for our fall BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit where we are honored to welcome Dan Pink back as a featured keynote panelist. Register here (full lineup and agenda to be announced soon).

Start with Curiosity and Intellectual Humility

Every leader is a scientist of sorts. Or at least, they can be, says Dan Pink—a New York Times bestselling author of several books about business, creativity, and human behavior. In his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink helps leaders get curious about the psychological, biological, and economic implications of daily patterns. He says that succeeding as a leader “requires a degree of intellectual humility,” and enough curiosity to make evidence-based decisions about how to structure both your day and your overall leadership approach. Impeccable timing, Pink argues, often has more to do with intention than intuition.

It was intention that first led Conant to Pink’s work. Conant was in his ninth year as CEO of Campbell Soup Company, where he had dramatically transformed the culture and increased market value and shareholder return. In alignment with this forward momentum, Conant remained eager to help his global leadership team think in “a more enlightened way.” He was well aware that the old “carrot and stick motivations” had lost their effectiveness, so he sought out a speaker who could challenge and motivate his team of leaders at their global leadership meeting. The two panelists have been on each other’s radar ever since.

“Evidence tells us that professionals take breaks . . . amateurs don’t.”

Structure Your Day in 3 Phases

Conant recalls the overarching themes Pink first imparted to his global leadership team at Campbell: Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The first theme, autonomy, offers a great segue into Pink’s research on timing. Conant asks his co-panelist to explain what science tells us about how to effectively manage our workday, especially as hybrid and remote arrangements become more common.

Pink acknowledges the grand scope of Conant’s question—and before diving in, adds a contextual note that when we talk about autonomy in the workplace, there are varying degrees. Leaders must acknowledge that less than half of the U.S. workforce is able to work from home, yet the “notions of autonomy and self-direction [should] apply to everybody in the workplace.” Even in a job with less flexibility, you must take a deep sense of ownership and accountability around how you choose to structure your day, make decisions, and develop your skills.

Pink says there’s “a rich body of evidence, a rich body of science . . . spread over many disciplines [that] gives us the guidance to make better, smarter, more strategic decisions about when to do things.” And he makes explicit what some leaders may have naturally sensed, that “our brainpower doesn’t remain constant over the course of the day.” There are fluctuations in our capacity: Take, for example, the infamous midday slump that many of us try to caffeinate and power our way through.

Pink points to more evidence of these peaks and valleys in our energy—much of which he includes in his book, When. Researchers at New York University analyzed the transcripts of more than 26,000 quarterly earnings calls during which executives spoke with investors about company performance. The researchers found that calls in the morning yielded more positive conversations than in the afternoon—so much so that the timing of these calls temporarily affected stock prices.

Simply put, “the best time to do something depends on what you’re doing,” says Pink. He specifies that all of us have a “daily high point” and a “daily low point” and that “about 80 percent of us move through the workday in three stages,” which he describes as:

1. Peak (morning). This is when most people are “vigilant [and] able to bat away distractions.” It’s the ideal time to do analytic work that benefits from a “heads-down focus.”

2. Trough (early to mid-afternoon). Most of us experience a decrease in performance in the afternoon. It’s a good time to take care of more monotonous or routine tasks.

3. Recovery (late afternoon into evening). For most people, this is when “our mood is up, but our vigilance is down.” It’s a time ripe for brainstorming sessions and perspective shifting, or for pursuing self-reflection work (incidentally, an essential part of Conant’s personal leadership approach).

There are some exceptions to these general rules: Some people, the ‘night owls’ among us, have what Pink refers to as “an evening chronotype.” For this group, their peak hits in the evening or well into the night. The other stages of their workday follow suit. And there’s a third type of person too, a mix between both.

Figuring out your chronotype requires some personal research and reflection about how and when you do your best work. Again, simplicity is key. Follow the evidence, experiment with timing, and learn from the research in Pink’s book. “When we reconfigure our schedules to be a little bit more aligned with” our natural rhythms, “people do better and feel better,” he says.

“Small wins are how stuff happens.”

Professionals Take Breaks. Amateurs Don’t.

Conant shares a timeless truth, inspired by Viktor Frankl, that the late Stephen Covey once imparted to him: “Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. And in that space is the power of choice. We all have the opportunity to choose our response to any and every stimuli . . . [it is] our ‘response-ability’ to choose.”

In another display of perfect timing, Covey first offered that pearl of wisdom years ago, when Conant was “in a highly reactive mode” at work. Covey’s influence, among others, inspired Conant to get “really well anchored” in his foundation through the power of inner reflection—one of six essential steps he later went on to write about in his book for leaders, The Blueprint.

Without looking inward to build your foundation, you run the risk of leading by the seat of your pants. Whereas a rock-solid foundation anchored in who you are and what you believe, Conant says, supports your ability to lead with the courage of your convictions—a game plan he’s championed and taught for decades. This runs parallel to Pink’s advice to make decisions with both “intention and evidence.”

One piece of evidence to be especially intentional about? The need to take breaks, not only to carefully choose your response to incoming stimuli, but to rejuvenate throughout the day; Pink calls this a “woefully undervalued” necessity for leaders at any stage of their career. During his research, he says he was “blown away” by how beneficial breaks can be to performance and productivity.

The old adage is true: You can’t pour from an empty cup. Still, the glorification of busyness remains a curiously popular phenomenon, says Pink. He points out that people tend to have a “bizarre, distorted notion of moral virtue,” that comes from “powering through” the day without taking helpful pauses. It may feel counterintuitive, but he advises leaders to flip their mindset, to regard breaks “as part of our performance, not a deviation” from it, especially since the evidence is clear and “tells us that professionals take breaks, and it’s the amateurs that don’t.”

Given all the evidence, Pink recommends that leaders intentionally carve out time for restorative breaks, even if it’s just 15 minutes a day. Our need for recess doesn’t end after elementary school, he says. Go for a walk, call a friend, take a catnap, play a game—and whatever you do, make it stick. “Even that very small practice is powerful . . . in a way, it’s proof that you’re a professional.”

Add to Calendar: The ‘Fresh Start Effect’

Conant reinforces that anybody can “reimagine” or “gently restructure” their day, and brings up the related “fresh start effect” described in Pink’s book. Pink refers to this effect as the idea and study of “temporal landmarks” that trigger or promote behavior change—similar to how physical landmarks affect when, where, or how we navigate the world.

The data on temporal landmarks tells us that people are more likely to successfully implement a new habit or routine when the calendar starts fresh too. As Pink puts it, “you’re gonna have better odds on some days versus others.” He says these “fresh start” dates include Mondays, the first day of the month, the start of a new season, and the day after your birthday. These are the days we should “open up a fresh ledger on ourselves” and put new ink on the page.

Pink tells leaders that they are “in the business of behavior change.” If you’re committed to a more meaningful pursuit of high performance, be willing to adapt your approach (and your calendar)—and encourage your people to do the same. Leadership, after all, “is the art and science of influencing others in a specific direction,” says Conant.

Pink closes the conversation with the reminder that society has long overvalued “moving and thinking fast,” and undervalued “patience in the long game.” Even in the face of “short-term pressures,” he’s convinced that the power of intention is key: “Small wins [are] how stuff happens.” Sometimes the only way to shoot for the moon is to stay grounded.

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Enjoyed these insights?

Watch the full recording of this interview to get more details, including insights from an audience Q&A. You can also watch videos of past BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit sessions, including illuminating conversations with Brené Brown, Susan Cain, Indra Nooyi, Stephen M.R. Covey, Amy Edmonson, Bill George, Barbara Humpton, and many more.

Registration is now open for the next BLUEPRINT Leadership Summit 9/15/25-9/19/25, featuring Dan Pink as a distinguished keynote panelist. Secure your FREE spot here.

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About the Author: Vanessa Bradford, a featured contributor to ConantLeadership, is a freelance content writer and copywriter, and C3PR’s Content Marketing Director.

(Header photo by Towfiqu Barbhuiya on Unsplash)