In which season do you think you are most productive? - by David Perlmutter

David Perlmutter, QuantumListing/Perlmutter Properties

“All the leaves are brown, and the skies are grey,” and apparently most of us don’t feel like doing much. QuantumListing conducted a Twitter 24-hour, one question poll asking, “In which season of the year do you think you are most productive?” While each has its devotees, winter is the Martin O’Malley of the seasons. Our poll had a total of 32 responses. Spring was the winner with 31% of the vote, followed by summer with 28%, fall with 22% and winter with 19%.

Prior to the  poll, I might have guessed that winter was the most productive time with everyone hunkered down indoors getting their work done. Is it the constant stream of holidays giving us the opportunity to take vacations, three-day weekends and disruptive snow days? Is it an overarching case of seasonal affective disorder? Is it March madness? I don’t know, and perhaps we’ll have to plumb those depths in a future poll.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

Unless you’re a devotee of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, you are probably pretty fond of spring. Generally heralded for the rebirth of nature surrounding us, this is the time when we collectively get busy. The daffodils, tulips and budding of the trees inspire us to our own greater productivity. The milder weather and increased daylight make road trips and property showings easier to schedule. Deferred maintenance and construction projects can be tackled without having to make provisions for weather.

“In which season do you think you are most productive?” poll results based off of 32 votes.

“Summertime, and the living is easy,” but not for you go-getters in the world of commercial real estate. You may take it down a notch to get in a Monday golf outing, or take Friday off to beat the traffic to the beach, but you’re out there getting the job done. If you’re the chief executive officer, you might want to plan big new initiatives to start in the spring and carry forward into summer, when a combined 59% of us are at peak productivity.

And then, comes fall. “The falling leaves drift by the window, Autumn leaves of red and gold, I see your lips, the Summer kisses, the sun-burned hands I used to hold.” Sure, we get to enjoy the wonderful harvest resulting from our busy spring and summer, but a certain sentimental longing for the carefree days of summer creeps into our daily lives, as well as the foreboding of the winter ahead.

A statistician would rip this poll a new one for relying on such a small sample and giving it a highly subjective analysis. That’s okay. In fact we invite you to send us comments! And of course, follow @QuantumListing on Twitter so you won’t miss next month’s Quantum Query, so we can increase the sample size. But that still won’t keep me from my highly subjective analysis!

We will post the poll on the morning of March 1^st, and it will run for the next 24 hours.

David Perlmutter is the owner of QuantumListing/Perlmutter Properties, White Plains, N.Y.