In 2014 three scholars from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a breakthrough paper in the science of timing that broadened our understanding of how temporal landmarks operate and how we can use them to construct better beginnings. Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis began by analyzing eight and a half years of Google searches. They discovered that searches for the word “diet” always soared on January 1—by about 80 percent more than on a typical day. No surprise, perhaps. However, searches also
