When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

The overall benefits of napping to our brainpower are massive, especially the older we get.

[It] is particularly beneficial to performance on tasks, such as addition, logical reasoning, reaction time, and symbol recognition.”47 Napping even increases “flow,” that profoundly powerful source of engagement and creativity.48

people who napped were as much as 37 percent less likely as others to die from heart disease, “an effect of the same order of magnitude as taking an aspirin or exercising every day.”49 Napping strengthens our immune system.50 And one British study found that simply anticipating a nap can reduce blood pressure.51

While naps between thirty and ninety minutes can produce some long-term benefits, they come with steep costs. The ideal naps—those that combine effectiveness with efficiency—are far shorter, usually between ten and twenty minutes.

But once the nap lasted beyond about the twenty-minute mark, our body and brain began to pay a price.52 That price is known as “sleep inertia”—the confused, boggy feeling I typically had upon waking.

When it came time to perform, the caffeine-only group outperformed the placebo group. But the group that ingested caffeine and then had a nap easily bested them both.55 Since caffeine takes about twenty-five minutes to enter the bloodstream, they were getting a secondary boost from the drug by the time their naps were ending. Other researchers have found the same results—that caffeine, usually in the form of coffee, followed by a nap of ten to twenty minutes, is the ideal technique for staving off sleepiness and increasing performance.

You probably have a to-do list. Now it’s time to create a “break list,” give it equal attention, and treat it with equal respect. Each day, alongside your list of tasks to complete, meetings to attend, and deadlines to hit, make a list of the breaks you’re going to take. Start by trying three breaks per day. List when you’re going to take those breaks, how long they’re going to last, and what you’re going to do in each. Even better, put the breaks into your phone or computer calendar so one of those annoying pings will remind you. Remember: What gets scheduled gets done.

Just follow these five steps:

Find your afternoon trough time. The Mayo Clinic says that the best time for a nap is between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.1 But if you want to be more precise, take a week to chart your afternoon mood and energy levels, as described here. You’ll likely see a consistent block of time when things begin to go south, which for many people is about seven hours after waking. This is your optimal nap time.

Create a peaceful environment. Turn off your phone notifications. If you’ve got a door, close it. If you’ve got a couch, use it. To insulate yourself from sound and ligh...

Down a cup of coffee. Seriously. The most efficient nap ...

Set a timer on your phone for twenty-five minutes. If you nap for more than about a half hour, sleep inertia takes over and you need extra time to recover.

Repeat consistently. There’s some evidence that habitual nappers get more from their naps than infrequent nappers. So if you have the flexibility to take a regular afternoon nap, consider making it a common ritual.

Micro-breaks

The 20–20–20 rule—Before you begin a task, set a timer. Then, every twenty minutes, look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. If you’re working at a computer, this micro-break will rest your eyes and improve your posture, both of which can fight fatigue. Hydrate—You might already have a water bottle. Get a much smaller one. When it runs out—and of course it will, because of its size—walk to the water fountain and refill it. It’s a threefer: hydration, motion, and restoration. Wiggle your body to reset your mind—One of the simplest breaks of all: Stand up for sixty seconds, shake your arms and legs, flex your muscles, rotate your core, sit back down.

Moving breaks

Take a five-minute walk every hour—As we have learned, five-minute walk breaks are powerful. They’re feasible for most people. And they’re especially useful during the trough.

Push-ups—Yeah, push-ups. Do two a day for a week. Then four a day for the next week and six a day a week after that. You’ll boost your heart rate, shake off cognitive cobwebs, and maybe get a little stronger.

Nature break

Walk outside—If you’ve got a few minutes and are near a local park, take a lap through it. If you work at home and have a dog, take Fido for a walk. Go outside—If there are trees and a bench behind your building, sit there instead of inside. Pretend you’re outside—If the best you can do is look at some indoor plants or the trees outside your window—well, research suggests that will help, too.

Social break

Reach out and touch somebody—Call someone you haven’t talked to for a while and just catch up for five or ten minutes. Reawakening these “dormant ties” is also a great way to strengthen your network.3 Or use the moment to say thank you—via a note, an e-mail, or a quick visit—to someone who’s helped you. Gratitude—with its mighty combination of meaning and social connection—is a mighty restorative.4 Schedule it—Plan a regular walk or visit to a coffee joint or weekly gossip session with colleagues you like. A fringe benefit of social breaks is that you’re more likely to take one if someone else is counting on you. Or go Swedish and try what Swedes call a fika—a full-fledged coffee break that is the supposed key to Sweden’s high levels of employee satisfaction and productivity.5 Don’t schedule it—If your schedule is too tight for something regular, buy someone a coffee one day this week. Bring it to her. Sit and talk about something other than work for five minutes.

Mental gear-shifting break

Meditate—Meditation is one of the most effective breaks—and micro-breaks—of all.6 Check out material from UCLA (http://marc.ucla.edu/mindful-meditations), which offers guided meditations as short as three minutes. Controlled breathing—Have forty-five seconds? Then, as the New York Times explains: “Take a deep breath, expanding your belly. Pause. Exhale slowly to the count of five. Repeat four times.”7 It’s called controlled breathing, and it can tamp your stress hormones, sharpen your thinking, and maybe even boost your immune system—all in under a minute. Lighten up—Listen to a comedy podcast. Read a joke book. If you can find a little privacy, put on your headphones and jam out for a song or two. There’s even evidence from one study on the replenishing effects of watching dog videos.8 (No, really.)

that’s when it’s time for a vigilance break that combines a time-out with a checklist.

Plan for that time-out by creating a trough checklist modeled on the lime-green cards used at the University of Michigan Medical Center.

Everyone stops what they are doing, takes a step backward, and draws a deep breath. Each team member takes thirty seconds to report on their progress. Each team member takes thirty seconds to describe their next step. Each team member answers this question: What are we missing? Assign who will address the missing pieces. Schedule another time-out, if necessary.

elite performers have something in common: They’re really good at taking breaks.

Most expert musicians and athletes begin practicing in earnest around nine o’clock in the morning, hit their peak during the late morning, break in the afternoon, and then practice for a few more hours in the evening.

In Ericsson’s study, one factor that distinguished the best from the rest is that they took complete breaks during the afternoon (many even napped as part of their routine), whereas nonexperts were less rigorous about pauses. We might think that superstars power straight through the day for hours on end. In fact, they practice with intense focus for forty-five- to ninety-minute bursts, then take meaningful restorative breaks.

To establish a fresh start, people used two types of temporal landmarks—social and personal. The social landmarks were those that everyone shared: Mondays, the beginning of a new month, national holidays. The personal ones were unique to the individual: birthdays, anniversaries, job changes. But whether social or personal, these time markers served two purposes. First, they allowed people to open “new mental accounts” in the same way that a business closes the books at the end of one fiscal year and opens a fresh ledger for the new year.

The second purpose of these time markers is to shake us out of the tree so we can glimpse the forest. “Temporal landmarks interrupt attention to day-to-day minutiae, causing people to take a big picture view of their lives and thus focus on achieving their goals.”

Daniel Kahneman draws a distinction between thinking fast (making decisions anchored in instinct and distorted by cognitive biases) and thinking slow (making decisions rooted in reason and guided by careful deliberation). Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.20

Identifying one’s own personally meaningful days—a child’s birthday or the anniversary of your first date with your partner—can erase a false start and help us begin anew.

Organizations, too, can enlist this technique. Recent research has shown that the fresh start effect applies to teams.

Constructing our own temporal landmarks, especially those that are personally meaningful, gives us many more opportunities to recover from rough beginnings and start again.

For many years, teaching hospitals in the United States confronted what was known as the “July effect.” Each July, a fresh group of medical school graduates began their careers as physicians. Although these men and women had little experience beyond the classroom, teaching hospitals often gave them considerable responsibility for treating patients. That was how they learned their craft. The only downside of this approach is that patients often suffered from this on-the-job training—and July was the cruelest month. (In the UK, the month is later and the language more vivid. British physicians call the period when new doctors begin their jobs the “August killing season.”) For example, one study of more than twenty-five years of U.S. death certificates found that “in counties containing teaching hospitals, fatal medication errors spiked by 10% in July and in no other month. In contrast, there was no July spike in counties without teaching hospitals.”35 Other research in teaching hospitals found that patients in July and August had an 18 percent greater chance of surgery problems and a 41 percent greater chance of dying in surgery than patients did in April and May.36

One solution might be for governments and universities to institute a student-loan-forgiveness program keyed to the unemployment rate. If the unemployment rate topped, say, 7.5 percent, some portion of a newly graduating student’s loan would be forgiven.

Four Situations When You Should Go First

If you’re on a ballot (county commissioner, prom queen, the Oscars), being listed first gives you an edge.

If you’re not the default choice—for example, if you’re pitching against a firm that already has the account you’re seeking—going

If there are relatively few competitors (say, five or fewer), going first can help you take advantage of the “primacy effect,” the tendency people have to remember the first thing in a series better than those that come later.

If you’re interviewing for a job and you’re up against several strong candidates, you might gain an edge from being first.

Four Situations When You Should Not Go First

If you are the default choice, don’t go first. Recall from the previous chapter: Judges are more likely to stick with the default late in the day (when they’re fatigued) rather than early or after a break (when they’re revived).

If there are many competitors (not necessarily strong ones, just a large number of them), going later can confer a small advantage and going last can confer a huge one.

If you’re operating in an uncertain environment, not being first can work to your benefit. If you don’t know what the decision-maker expects,

If the competition is meager, going toward the end can give you an edge by highlighting your differences.

With that in mind, here are four research-backed recommendations for how to make a fast start in a new job.

Begin before you begin. Executive advisor Michael Watkins recommends picking a specific day and time when you visualize yourself “transforming” into your new role.10 It’s hard to get a fast start when your self-image is stuck in the past. By mentally picturing yourself “becoming” a new person even before you enter the front door, you’ll hit the carpet running.