According to the Dunn and Dunn Learning Style Model, the elements that affect learning and presentation can be grouped into five categories: environmental, emotional, sociological, physiological, and psychological. Of these categories, the physiological elements are of higher priority, because they are neglected most often, and people fail to recognize their importance readily. Working people, however, are normally able to reason the importance of environmental, emotional, sociological, or psychological factors without any need of supporting proof from research.
Your personal preference for timing becomes important for you to understand, because its significance is rarely discussed or defined. Even when the importance of physiological factors affecting learning and presentation are recognized, only the perceptual elements within physiological factors which affect your performance receive consideration.
Perceptual elements in learning and presentations include perceptual abilities related to auditory, visually graphical, visually textual, tactile and kinesthetic strengths and weaknesses. However, research has clearly found that in addition to perceptual preferences, three other elements affect us physiologically during learning and presentations: time of day, intake, and mobility. This is why knowing your own preferences for time is important and using that knowledge to schedule appropriate work helps to succeed.
Getting it in a simpler fashion
What I’m trying to tell you is not really difficult to understand. Simply put, we all have time-of-day performance peaks that repeat themselves with regularity. This has to do with a range of factors starting from circadian rhythms to hormonal cycles to the lunar cycle of influence on gravity. Usually, such time periods can be broadly divided as early morning, late morning, afternoon, early evening and late evening. At certain times of the day, we excel in certain activities. And it has been proved by research that productivity of an individual in the workplace is affected by such chrono-biological highs and lows, and also that students perform better on tests taken during their preferred time-of-day.
How to find your time-of-day preference for particular activities?
Doing this is easy enough. Maintain a log of activities along with columns for scoring grades for about 15 days. Just maintain the log without trying to alter your daily performance by extra effort – you are trying to find out more about yourself, not fool yourself. Every day, grade your activities according to how you felt you had performed.
After two weeks, scrutinize the log thoroughly to find out the times, when without the situation compelling you to work more, you naturally managed to perform better. Mark your patterns for performing small tasks, learning tasks, and activity involving heavy mental work and/or psychological tension. You would find times when you are ‘off’ and times when you come ‘alive,’ according to your natural preferences.
Knowing the times of the day, when you come ‘alive’ naturally and perform better in certain tasks, would allow you to influence the scheduling of tasks to match your natural preference pattern for time-of-the-day, thus increasing your overall performance and productivity.
Another thing, highly successful co-workers who subconsciously arrange their work pattern to match their natural preference for time-of-day are egocentric about their preferred times. They act in this manner because they are unaware of what they are doing, and lacking a reasonable explanation, they feel challenging their time-of-day pattern is an effort to hurt their performance. Most people, successful people at least, involuntarily try to match their natural time-of-day preference with their work patterns, without being aware of what they are actually doing. You can increase your chances of success by being aware of what you are doing, and doing it better.
