When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

When researchers have studied scenarios like these, they’ve uncovered something strange. People tend to rate lives like the first scenario (a short life that ends on an upswing) more highly than those like the second (a longer life that ends on a downswing). Considered in purely utilitarian terms, this conclusion is bizarre. After all, in the hypothetical, Jimmy lives thirty years longer! And those extra years aren’t choked with misery; they’re simply less spectacular than the early ones. The cumulative amount of positivity of that longer life (which still includes those early years as a star) is indisputably higher. “The suggestion that adding mildly pleasant years to a very positive life does not enhance, but decreases, perceptions of the quality of life is counterintuitive,” write social scientists Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi. “We label this the James Dean Effect because a life that is short but intensely exciting, such as the storied life led by the actor James Dean, is seen as most positive.”15 The James Dean effect is another example of how endings alter our perception. They help us encode—that is, to evaluate and record—entire experiences. You might have heard of the “peak-end rule.” Formulated in the early 1990s by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues including Don Redelmeier and Barbara Fredrickson, who studied patient experiences during colonoscopies and other unpleasant experiences, the rule says that when we remember an event we assign the greatest ...

good-guy bio and half the good-guy-to-bad-guy bio, and asked both groups to evaluate Jim’s overall moral character. Across multiple versions of the study, people assessed Jim’s morality based largely on how he behaved at the end of his life. Indeed, they evaluated a life with twenty-nine years of treachery and six months of goodness the same as a life with twenty-nine years of goodness and six months of treachery. “[P]eople are willing to override a relatively long period of one kind of behavior with a relatively short period of another kind just because it occurred at the end of one’s life.”22 This “end of life bias,” as the researchers call it, suggests that we believe people’s true selves are revealed at the end—even if their death is unexpected and the bulk of their lives evinced a far different self.

Carstensen began developing this idea in 1999 when she (and two of her former students) published a paper titled “Taking Time Seriously.” “As people move through life,” she wrote, “they become increasingly aware that time is in some sense ‘running out.’ More social contacts feel superficial—trivial—in contrast to the ever-deepening ties of existing close relationships. It becomes increasingly important to make the ‘right’ choice, not to waste time on gradually diminishing future payoffs.”24

When time is constrained and limited, as it is in act three, we attune to the now. We pursue different goals—emotional satisfaction, an appreciation for life, a sense of meaning. And these updated goals make people “highly selective in their choice of social partners” and prompt them to “systematically hone their social networks.” We edit our relationships. We omit needless people. We choose to spend our remaining years with networks that are small, tight, and populated with those who satisfy higher needs.26

Moreover, what spurs editing isn’t aging per se, Carstensen found, but endings of any sort. For example, when she compared college seniors with new college students, students in their final year displayed the same kind of social-network pruning as their seventy-something grandparents. When people are about to switch jobs or move to a new city, they edit their immediate social networks because their time in that setting is ending.

Just as intriguing, the converse is also true: Expanding people’s time horizons arrests their editing behavior. Carstensen conducted an experiment in which she asked people to “imagine that they had just received a telephone call from their physician, who had informed them of a new medical breakthrough that would likely add 20 years to their life.” Under these conditions, older people were no more likely than younger ones to prune their social networks.27

Chances are, you opted to hear the bad news first. Several studies over several decades have found that roughly four out of five people “prefer to begin with a loss or negative outcome and ultimately end with a gain or positive outcome, rather than the reverse.”

We blunder—I blunder—because we fail to understand the final principle of endings: Given a choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. The science of timing has found—repeatedly—what seems to be an innate preference for happy endings.30

In one of their studies, the researchers approached Stanford seniors on graduation day to survey them about how they felt. To one group, they gave the following instructions: “Keeping in mind your current experiences, please rate the degree to which you feel each of the following emotions,” and then gave them a list of nineteen emotions. To the other group, they added one sentence to the instructions to raise the significance that something was ending: “As a graduating senior, today is the last day that you will be a student at Stanford. Keeping that in mind, please rate the degree to which you feel each of the following emotions.”34 The researchers found that at the core of meaningful endings is one of the most complex emotions humans experience: poignancy, a mix of happiness and sadness.

Adding a small component of sadness to an otherwise happy moment elevates that moment rather than diminishes it. “Poignancy,” the researchers write, “seems to be particular to the experience of endings.” The best endings don’t leave us happy. Instead, they produce something richer—a rush of unexpected insight, a fleeting moment of transcendence, the possibility that by discarding what we wanted we’ve gotten what we need.

In literature, opening lines bear a mighty burden. They must hook the reader and lure her into the book. That’s why opening lines are heavily scrutinized and long remembered.

The final words of a work are just as important and deserve comparable reverence. Last lines can elevate and encode—by encapsulating a theme, resolving a question, leaving the story lingering in the reader’s head. Hemingway said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms no fewer than thirty-nine times.

Many “when” decisions involve endings. And one of the biggest is when to leave a job that just isn’t working out. That’s a big step, a risky move, and not always a choice for some people. But if you’re contemplating this option, here are five questions to help you decide. If your answer to two or more of these is no, it might be time to craft an end.

Do you want to be in this job on your next work anniversary?

People are most likely to leave a job on their one-year work anniversary. The second most likely time? Their two-year anniversary. The third? Their three-year anniversary.1 You get the idea. If you dread the thought of being at your job on your next work annivers...

Is your current job both demanding and in your control? The most fulfilling jobs share a common trait: They prod us to work at our highest level but in a way that we, not someone else, control. Jobs that are demanding but don’t offer autonomy burn us out. Jobs that offer autonomy but little challenge bore us. (And jobs that are neither demanding nor in our control are the worst of all.) If your job doesn’t ...

Does your boss allow you to do your best work? In his excellent book Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best . . . and Learn from the Worst, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Robert Sutton explains the qualities that make someone worth working for. If your boss has your back, takes responsibility instead of blaming others, encourages your efforts but also gets out of your way, and displays a sense of humor rather th...

Are you outside the three- to five-year salary bump window? One of the best ways to boost your pay is to switch organizations. And the best time to do that is often three to five years after you’ve started. ADP, the massive human resources management company, found that this period represents the sweet spot for pay increases.3 Fewer than three years might be too little time to develop the most marketable skills. More than five years is when employees start b...

Does your daily work align with your long-term goals? Ample research from many countries shows that when your individual goals align with those of your organization, you’re happier and more productive.4 So take a moment and list your top two or three goals for the next five years and ten years. If your...

If we’re conscious of the power of closing moments and our ability to shape them, we can craft more memorable and meaningful endings in many realms of life. Here are four ideas:

The workday

But the science of endings suggests that instead of fleeing we’re better off reserving the final five minutes of work for a few small deliberate actions that bring the day to a fulfilling close. Begin by taking two or three minutes to write down what you accomplished since the morning. Making progress is the single largest day-to-day motivator on the job.7 But without tracking our “dones,” we often don’t know whether we’re progressing. Ending the day by recording what you’ve achieved can encode the entire day more positively. (Testimonial: I’ve been doing this for four years and I swear by the practice. On good days, the exercise delivers feelings of completion; on bad days, it often shows me I got more done than I suspected.) Now use the other two or three minutes to lay out your plan for the following day. This will help close the door on today and energize you for tomorrow. Bonus: If you’ve got an extra minute left, send someone—anyone—a thank-you e-mail. I mentioned in chapter 2 that gratitude is a powerful restorative. It’s an equally powerful form of elevation.

A vacation How a vacation ends shapes the stories we later tell about the experience.

As you plan your next vacation, you needn’t save all the best for last. But you’ll enjoy the vacation more, both in the moment and in retrospect, if you consciously create an elevating final experience.

Road Trip!—a two-and-a-half-hour show of more than twenty American songs and medleys.

Left on our own—say, by spending months in an underground chamber not exposed to light or other people, as in some experiments—our behavior gradually drifts so that before long we’re asleep in the afternoons and wide-awake at night.4 What prevents such misalignment in the aboveground world are environmental and social signals such as sunrise and alarm clocks. The process by which our internal clocks synch up with external cues so we wake up in time for work or go to sleep at a reasonable hour is called “entrainment.”

Even swinging in time with another child on a swing set increased subsequent cooperation and collaborative skills.

Cooking, eating, and cleaning up by yourself can be a drag. But doing it together requires synchronization and can deliver uplift (not to mention a decent meal). Find tandem-cooking tips at https://www.acouplecooks.com/menu-for-a-cooking-date-tips-for-cooking-together/.

E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1

Stories of failure and vulnerability also foster a sense of belongingness.

Consider the past. It’s something we’re told not to dwell on, but research makes it clear that thinking in the past tense can lead to a greater understanding of ourselves. For instance, nostalgia—contemplating and sometimes aching for the past—was once considered a pathology, an impairment that diverted us from current goals. Scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thought it was a physical ailment—“a cerebral disease of essentially demonic cause” spurred by “the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through [the] fibers of the middle brain.”

Today, thanks to the work of psychologist Constantine Sedikides of the University of Southampton and others, nostalgia has been redeemed. Sedikides calls it “a vital intrapersonal resource that contributes to psychological equanimity . . . a repository of psychological sustenance.” The benefits of thinking fondly about the past are vast because nostalgia delivers two ingredients essential to well-being: a sense of meaning and a connection to others. When we think nostalgically, we often feature ourselves as the protagonist in a momentous event (a wedding or a graduation, for instance) that involves the people we care about most deeply.7 Nostalgia, research shows, can foster positive mood, protect against anxiety and stress, and boost creativity.8 It can heighten optimism, deepen empathy, and alleviate boredom.9 Nostalgia can even increase physiological feelings of comfort and warmth. We’re more likely to feel nostalgic on chillier days. And when experimenters induce nostalgia—through music or smell, for instance—people are more tolerant of cold and perceive the temperature to be higher.10 Like poignancy, nostalgia is a “bittersweet but predominantly positive and fundamentally social emotion.” Thinking in the past tense offers “a window into the intrinsic self,” a portal to who we really are.11 It makes the present meaningful. The same principle applies to the future. Two prominent social scientists—Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University and Timothy Wilson of the University o...

The product of writing—this book—contains more answers than questions. But the process of writing is the opposite. Writing is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe. I used to believe in ignoring the waves of the day. Now I believe in surfing them. I used to believe that lunch breaks, naps, and taking walks were niceties. Now I believe they’re necessities. I used to believe that the best way to overcome a bad start at work, at school, or at home was to shake it off and move on. Now I believe the better approach is to start again or start together. I used to believe that midpoints didn’t matter—mostly because I was oblivious to their very existence. Now I believe that midpoints illustrate something fundamental about how people behave and how the world works. I used to believe in the value of happy endings. Now I believe that the power of endings rests not in their unmitigated sunniness but in their poignancy and meaning. I used to believe that synchronizing with others was merely a mechanical process. Now I believe that it requires a sense of belonging, rewards a sense of purpose, and reveals a part of our nature. I used to believe that timing was everything. Now I believe that everything is timing.

168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (2010) By Laura Vanderkam We each get the same allotment: 168 hours each week. Vanderkam offers shrewd, actionable advice on how to make the most of those hours by setting priorities, eliminating nonessentials, and focusing on what truly matters.

Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired (2012) By Till Roenneberg If you’re going to read one book about chronobiology, make it this one. You’ll learn more from this smart, concise work—organized into twenty-four chapters to represent the twenty-four hours of the day—than from any other single source.