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Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing. —MILES DAVIS
This is a book about timing. We all know that timing is everything. Trouble is, we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives present a never-ending stream of “when” decisions—when to change careers, deliver bad news, schedule a class, end a marriage, go for a run, or get serious about a project or a person. But most of these decisions emanate from a steamy bog of intuition and guesswork. Timing, we believe, is an art. I will show that timing is really a science—an emerging body of multifaceted, multidisciplinary research that offers fresh insights into the human condition and useful
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What Macy and Golder found, and published in the eminent journal Science, was a remarkably consistent pattern across people’s waking hours. Positive affect—language revealing that tweeters felt active, engaged, and hopeful—generally rose in the morning, plummeted in the afternoon, and climbed back up again in the early evening. Whether a tweeter was North American or Asian, Muslim or atheist, black or white or brown, didn’t matter. “The temporal affective pattern is similarly shaped across disparate cultures and geographic locations,” they write. Nor did it matter whether people were tweeting
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Across continents and time zones, as predictable as the ocean tides, was the same daily oscillation—a peak, a trough, and a rebound.
So in what would become an act of historically productive procrastination, de Mairan removed the plant from the windowsill, stuck it in a cabinet, and shut the door to seal off light. The following morning, he opened the cabinet to check on the plant and—mon Dieu!—the leaves had unfurled despite being in complete darkness. He continued his investigation for a few more weeks, draping black curtains over his windows to prevent even a sliver of light from penetrating the office. The pattern remained. The Mimosa pudica’s leaves opened in the morning, closed in the evening. The plant wasn’t
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afternoon calls “were more negative, irritable, and combative” than morning calls.9
“[A]n important takeaway from our study for corporate executives is that communications with investors, and probably other critical managerial decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day.”11
When researchers have posed the Linda problem at different times of day—for instance, at 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. in one well-known experiment—timing often predicted whether participants arrived at the correct answer or slipped on a cognitive banana peel. People were much more likely to get it right earlier in the day than later.
The same pattern held for stereotypes. Researchers asked other participants to assess the guilt of a fictitious criminal defendant. All the “jurors” read the same set of facts. But for half of them, the defendant’s name was Robert Garner, and for the other half, it was Roberto Garcia. When people made their decisions in the morning, there was no difference in guilty verdicts between the two defendants. However, when they rendered their verdicts later in the day, they were much more likely to believe that Garcia was guilty and Garner was innocent.
For this group of participants, mental keenness, as shown by rationally evaluating evidence, was greater early in the day. And mental squishiness, as evidenced by resorting to stereotypes, increased as the day wore on.14
When Harvard’s Francesca Gino and two Danish researchers looked at four years of test results for two million Danish schoolchildren and matched the scores to the time of day the students took the test, they found an interesting, if disturbing, correlation. Students scored higher in the mornings than in the afternoons. Indeed, for every hour later in the day the tests were administered, scores fell a little more. The effects of later-in-the-day testing were similar to having parents with slightly lower incomes or less education—or missing two weeks of a school year.19 Timing wasn’t everything.
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While Pope says it isn’t clear exactly why this is happening, “the results tend to show that students are more productive earlier in the school day, especially in math” and that schools could boost
learning “with a simple rearrangement of when tasks are performed.”20
Two American psychologists, Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks, presented this and other insight problems to a group of people who said they did their best thinking in the morning. The researchers tested half the group between 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. and the other half between 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. These morning thinkers were more likely to figure out the coin problem . . . in the afternoon. “Participants who solved insight problems during their non-optimal time of day . . . were more successful than participants at their optimal time of day,” Wieth and Zacks found.21 What’s going on? The answer
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Some have called this phenomenon the “inspiration paradox”—the idea that “innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms.”23 And
that students would fare better taking analytic subjects such as math in the morning, Wieth and Zacks say their work “suggests that students designing their class schedules might perform best in classes such as art and creative writi...
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Munich Chronotype Questionnaire (MCTQ), which distinguishes between people’s sleep patterns on “work days” (when we usually must be awake by a certain hour) and “free days” (when we can awaken when we choose). People respond to questions and then receive a numerical score. For example, when I took the MCTQ, I landed in the most common category—a “slightly early type.”
What time do you usually go to sleep? What time do you usually wake up? What is the middle of those two times—that is, what is your midpoint of sleep? (For instance, if you typically fall asleep around 11:30 p.m. and wake up at 7:30 a.m., your midpoint is 3:30 a.m.) Now find your position on the following chart, which I’ve repurposed from Roenneberg’s research.
In brief, high school– and college-aged people are disproportionately owls, just as people over sixty and under twelve are disproportionately larks. Men are generally owlier than women. Yet, regardless of age or gender, most people are neither strong larks nor strong owls but are middle-of-the-nest third birds. Still, around 20 to 25 percent of the population are solid evening types—and they display both a personality and a set of behaviors that we must reckon with to understand the hidden pattern of a day.
alone,” these scholars write.47 In short, all of us experience the day in three stages—a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And about three-quarters of us (larks and third birds) experience it in that order. But about one in four people, those whose genes or age make them night owls, experience the day in something closer to the reverse order—recovery, trough, peak.
For instance, composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky would typically awaken between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., and then read, drink tea, and take a walk. At 9:30, he went to his piano to compose for a few hours. Then he broke for lunch and another stroll during the afternoon. (He believed walks, sometimes two hours long, were essential for creativity.) At 5 p.m., he settled back in for a few more hours of work before eating supper at 8 p.m. One hundred fifty years later, writer Joyce Carol Oates operates on a similar rhythm. She “generally writes from 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning until about 1:00 p.m. Then
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First, determine your chronotype, using the three-question method here or by completing the MCTQ questionnaire online (http://www.danpink.com/MCTQ).
Your Daily When Chart Lark Third Bird Owl Analytic tasks Early morning Early to midmorning Late afternoon and evening Insight tasks Late afternoon/ early evening Late afternoon/ early evening Morning Making an impression Morning Morning Morning (sorry, owls) Making a decision Early morning Early to midmorning Late afternoon and evening
For a more granular sense of your daily when, track your behavior systematically for a week. Set your phone alarm to beep every ninety minutes. Each time you hear the alarm, answer these three questions: What are you doing? On a scale of 1 to 10, how mentally alert do you feel right now? On a scale of 1 to 10, how physically energetic do you feel right now?
For example, if you’re a lark and you’re writing a novel, get up early, write until 1 p.m., and save your grocery shopping and dry-cleaning pickup for the afternoon.
Drink a glass of water when you wake up. How often during a day do you go eight hours without drinking anything at all? Yet that’s what it’s like for most of us overnight.
Between the water we exhale and the water that evaporates from our skin, not to mention a trip or two to the bathroom, we wake up mildly dehydrated. Throw back a glass of water first thing to rehydrate, control early morning hunger pangs, and help you wake up.
Don’t drink coffee immediately after you wake up. The moment we awaken, our bodies begin producing cortisol, a stress hormone that kick-starts our groggy souls. But it turns out that caffeine interferes with the production of cortisol—so starting the day immediately with a cup of coffee barely boosts our wakefulness. Worse, early-morning coffee increases our tolerance for caffeine, which means we must gulp ever more to obtain its benefits. The better approach is to drink that first cup an hour or ninety minutes after waking up, once our cortisol production has peaked and the caffeine can do
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Schedule talk-therapy appointments for the morning. Research in the emerging field of psychoneuroendocrinology has shown that therapy sessions may be most effective in the morning.8 The reason goes back to cortisol. Yes, it’s a stress hormone. But it also enhances learning. During therapy sessions in the morning, when cortisol levels are highest, patients are more focused and absorb advice more deeply.
Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days. Across many domains, the trough represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health. Anesthesia is one example. Researchers at Duke Medical Center reviewed about 90,000 surgeries at the hospital and identified what they called “anesthetic adverse events”—either mistakes anesthesiologists made, harm they caused to patients, or both. The trough was especially treacherous. Adverse events were significantly “more frequent for cases starting during the 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. hours.” The probability of a problem at 9 a.m. was about 1 percent. At
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Worse, the caregivers, most of whom began their shifts in the morning, were even less likely to sanitize their hands in the afternoons. This decline from the relative diligence of the mornings to the relative neglect of the afternoon was as great as 38 percent. That is, for every ten times they washed their hands in the morning, they did so only six times in the afternoon.6 The consequences are grave. “The decrease in hand hygiene compliance that we detected during a typical work
Afternoons can also be deadly beyond the white walls of a hospital. In the United Kingdom, sleep-related vehicle accidents peak twice during every twenty-four-hour period. One is between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., the middle of the night. The other is between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., the middle of the afternoon. Researchers have found the same pattern of traffic accidents in the United States, Israel, Finland, France, and other countries.
When the Danish students had a twenty- to thirty-minute break “to eat, play, and chat” before a test, their scores did not decline. In fact, they increased. As the researchers note, “A break causes an improvement that is larger than the hourly deterioration.”12 That is, scores go down after noon. But scores go up by a higher amount after breaks.
So if the trough is the poison and restorative breaks are the antidote, what should those breaks look like? There’s no single answer, but science offers five guiding principles.
Something beats nothing. One problem with afternoons is that if we stick with a task too long, we lose sight of the goal we’re trying to achieve, a process known as “habituation.” Short breaks from a task can prevent habituation, help us maintain focus, and reactivate our commitment to a goal.17 And frequent short breaks are more effective than occasional ones.18 DeskTime, a company that makes productivity-tracking software, says that “what the most productive 10% of our users have in common is their ability to take effective breaks.” Specifically, after analyzing its own data, DeskTime claims
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Moving beats stationary.
Sitting, we’ve been told, is the new smoking—a clear and present danger to our health. But it also leaves us more susceptible to the dangers of the trough, which is why simply standing up and walking around for five minutes every hour during the workday can be potent. One study showed that hourly five-minute walking breaks boosted energy levels, sharpened focus, and “improved mood throughout the day and reduced feelings of fatigue in the late afternoon.” These “microbursts of activity,” as the researchers call them, were also more effective than a single thirty-minute walking break—so much so
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Social beats solo. Time alone can be replenishing, especially for us introverts. But much of the research on restorative breaks points toward the greater power of being with others, particularly when we’re free to choose with whom we spend the time. In high-stress occupations like nursing, social and collective rest breaks not only minimize physical strain and cut down on medical errors, they also reduce turnover; nurses who take these sorts of breaks are more likely to stay at their jobs.22 Likewise, research in South Korean workplaces shows that social breaks—talking
Outside beats inside. Nature breaks may replenish us the most.24 Being close to trees, plants, rivers, and streams is a powerful mental restorative, one whose potency most of us don’t appreciate.25 For example, people who take short walks outdoors return with better moods and greater replenishment than people who walk indoors. What’s more, while people predicted they’d be happier being outside, they underestimated how much happier.26 Taking a few minutes to be in nature is better than spending those minutes in a building. Looking out a window into nature is a better micro-break than looking at
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Fully detached beats semidetached. By now, it’s well known that 99 percent of us cannot multitask. Yet, when we take a break, we often try to combine it with another cognitively demanding activity—perhaps checking our text messages or talking to a colleague about a work issue. That’s a mistake. In the same South Korean study mentioned earlier, relaxation breaks
So if you’re looking for the Platonic ideal of a restorative break, the perfect combination of scarf, hat, and gloves to insulate yourself from the cold breath of the afternoon, consider a short walk outside with a friend during which you discuss something other than work.
“Lunch breaks,” the researchers say, “offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—particularly for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”35 For groups that require high levels of cooperation—say, firefighters—eating together also enhances team performance.36
Not just any lunch will do, however. The most powerful lunch breaks have two key ingredients—autonomy and detachment. Autonomy—exercising some control over what you do, how you do it, when you do it, and whom you do it with—is critical for high performance, especially on complex tasks. But it’s equally crucial when we take breaks from complex tasks. “The extent to which employees can determine how they utilize their lunch breaks may be just as important as what employees do during their lunch,” says one set of researchers.37
Naps also improve our overall health. A large study in Greece, which followed more than 23,000 people over six years, found that, controlling for other risk factors, 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
With brief ten- to twenty-minute naps, the effect on cognitive functioning is positive from the moment of awakening. But with slightly longer snoozes, the napper begins in negative territory—that’s sleep inertia—and must dig herself out. And with naps of more than an hour, cognitive functioning drops for even longer before it reaches a prenap state and eventually turns positive.53
