When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

One study makes this case. The experimenters divided participants into three groups and gave them all a thirty-minute midafternoon break before sitting them at a driving simulator. One group received a placebo pill. The second received two hundred milligrams of caffeine. The third received that same two hundred milligrams of caffeine and then took a brief nap. 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.56 As for me, after a few months of experimenting with twenty-minute afternoon naps, I’ve converted. I’ve gone from nap detractor to nap devotee, from someone ashamed to nap to someone who relishes the coffee-then-nap combination known as the “nappuccino.”*

Moving breaks—Most of us sit too much and move too little. So build more movement into your breaks. Some options: 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.

Nature break—This might sound tree hugger-y, but study after study has shown the replenishing effects of nature. What’s more, people consistently underestimate how much better nature makes them feel. Choose:

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.

Social break—Don’t go it alone. At least not always. Social breaks are effective, especially when you decide the who and how. A few ideas:

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

Anders Ericsson is “the world expert on world experts.”9 A psychologist who studies extraordinary performers, Ericsson found that elite performers have something in common: They’re really good at taking breaks.

Some 40 percent of U.S. schools (particularly schools with large numbers of low-income students of color) have eliminated recess or combined it with lunch.10 With futures on the line, the thinking goes, schools can’t afford the frivolity of playtime. For example, in 2016 the New Jersey legislature passed a bipartisan bill requiring merely twenty minutes of recess each day for grades kindergarten to 5 in the state’s schools. But Governor Chris Christie vetoed it, explaining in language reminiscent of a schoolyard, “That was a stupid bill.”11

Kids who have recess work harder, fidget less, and focus more intently.12 They often earn better grades than those with fewer recesses.13 They develop better social skills, show greater empathy, and cause fewer disruptions.14 They

What can schools do to take advantage of recess? Here are six pieces of guidance: Schedule recess before lunch. A fifteen-minute break suffices, and it’s the most helpful time for kids’ concentration. It also makes them hungrier, so they eat better at lunch. Go minimalist. Recess doesn’t have to be tightly structured, nor does it need specialized equipment. Kids derive benefits from negotiating their own rules. Don’t skimp. In Finland, a nation with one of the world’s highest-performing school systems, students get a fifteen-minute break every hour. Some U.S. schools—for instance, Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas—have followed the Finnish lead and increased learning by offering four recesses each day for younger students.16 Give teachers a break. Schedule recesses in shifts so teachers can alternate monitoring duties with breaks for themselves.

Don’t replace physical education. Structured PE is a separate part of learning, not a substitute for recess. Every kid, every day. Avoid using the denial of recess as a punishment. It’s essential to every kid’s success, even those who slip up. Ensure that every student gets recess every school day.

In the case of those teenagers, they were starting the school day far too early—and that was jeopardizing their ability to learn. In the case of those twenty-somethings, and even some of their mothers and fathers, they had begun their careers, through no fault of their own, during a recession—and that was depressing their earnings years and years beyond their first job.

younger students score higher on standardized tests scheduled in the morning, teenagers do better later in the day. Early start times correlate strongly with worse grades and lower test scores, especially in math and language.3 Indeed, a study from McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, both in Montreal, found that the amount and quality of sleep explained a sizable portion of the difference in student performance in—guess what?—French classes.4

For example, one study examined three years of data on 9,000 students from eight high schools in Minnesota, Colorado, and Wyoming that had changed their schedules to begin school after 8:35 a.m. At these schools, attendance rose and tardiness declined. Students earned higher grades “in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies” and improved their performance on state and national standardized tests.

Another study of 30,000 students across seven states found that two years after implementing a later start time high school graduation rates increased by more than 11 percent.7

At the United States Air Force Academy, delaying the school day’s start time by fifty minutes improved academic performance; the later that first period began, the higher the students’ grades.10 In fact, a study of university students in both the United States and the United Kingdom, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, concludes that the optimal time for most college classes is after 11 a.m.11

Today, fewer than one in five U.S. middle schools and high schools follow the AAP’s recommendation to begin school after 8:30 a.m.

The first day of the year is what social scientists call a “temporal landmark.”15 Just as human beings rely on landmarks to navigate space—“To get to my house, turn left at the Shell station”—we also use landmarks to navigate time. Certain dates function like that Shell station. They stand out from the ceaseless and forgettable march of other days, and their prominence helps us find our way.

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

spiked at the start of every calendar cycle—the first day of every month and the first day of every week. Searches even climbed 10 percent on the first day after a federal holiday. Something about days tha...

The researchers found a similar pattern at the gym. At a large northeastern university where students had to swipe a card to enter workout facilities, the researchers collected more than a year’s worth of data on daily gym attendance. As with the Google searches, gym visits increased “at the start of each new week, month, and year.” But those weren’t the only dates that got students out of the dorm and onto a treadmill. Undergraduates “exercised more both at the start of a new semester . . . and on the first day after a school break.” They also hit the gym more immediately after a birthday—with one glaring exception: “Students turning 21 tend to decrease their gym activity following their birthday.”16

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.”19 Think about those spatial landmarks again. You might drive for miles and barely notice your surroundings. But that glowing Shell station on the corner makes you pay attention. It’s the same with fresh start dates. 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

On average, even after fifteen years of work, people who’d graduated in high unemployment years were still earning 2.5 percent less than those who’d graduated in low unemployment years. In some cases, the wage difference between graduating in an especially strong year versus an especially weak one was 20 percent—not just immediately after college but even when these men had reached their late thirties.27 The total cost, in inflation-adjusted terms, of graduating in a bad year rather than a good year averaged about $100,000. Timing wasn’t everything—but it was a six-figure thing.

My sleep will remain undisturbed knowing that a swerving stock market steered some elite MBAs to jobs at McKinsey or Bain rather than at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley and thereby left them extremely rich rather than insanely wealthy. But the effects of beginnings on a large swath of the workforce is more troubling, especially since the early data on those who entered the job market during the 2007–2010 Great Recession look especially dim. Kahn and two Yale colleagues have found that the negative impact on students who graduated during 2010 and 2011 “was double what we would have expected given past patterns.”

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 However, in the last decade, teaching hospitals have worked to correct this. Instead of declaring bad beginnings an inevitable problem for an individual, they made it a preventable problem for a group. Now, at teaching hospitals like the one I visited at the University of Michigan, new residents begin their tenure by working as part of a team that includes seasoned nurses, physicians, and other professionals. By starting together, hospitals like this one have dramatically reduced the July effect.

The first day of the month (twelve) Mondays (fifty-two) The first day of spring, summer, fall, and winter (four) Your country’s Independence Day or the equivalent (one) The day of an important religious holiday—for example, Easter, Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr (one) Your birthday (one) A loved one’s birthday (one) The first day of school or the first day of a semester (two) The first day of a new job (one) The day after graduation (one) The first day back from vacation (two) The anniversary of your wedding, first date, or divorce (three) The anniversary of the day you started your job, the day you became a citizen, the day you

adopted your dog or cat, the day you graduated from school or university (four) The day you finish this book (one)

If you’re on a ballot (county commissioner, prom queen, the Oscars), being listed first gives you an edge. Researchers have studied this effect in thousands of elections—from school board to city council, from California to Texas—and voters consistently preferred the first name on the ballot.2

Stockpile your motivation. On your first day in a new role, you’ll be filled with energy. By day thirty? Maybe less so. Motivation comes in spurts—which is why Stanford psychologist B. J. Fogg recommends taking advantage of “motivation waves” so you can weather “motivation troughs.”14 If you’re a new salesman, use motivation waves

to set up leads, organize calls, and master new techniques. During troughs, you’ll have the luxury of working at your core role without worrying about less interesting peripheral tasks.

A decade later, a scholar named Connie Gersick was beginning to study another organism (human beings) in its natural habitat (conference rooms). She tracked small groups of people working on projects—a task force at a bank developing a new type of account, hospital administrators

planning a one-day retreat, university faculty and administrators designing a new institute for computer science—from their very first meeting to the moment they reached their final deadline. Management thinkers believed that teams working on projects moved gradually through a series of stages—and Gersick believed that by videotaping all the meetings and transcribing every word people uttered she could understand these consistent team processes in a more granular way. What she found instead was inconsistency. Teams did not progress steadily through a universal set of stages. They used wildly diverse and idiosyncratic approaches to getting work done. The hospital team evolved differently from the banking team, which evolved differently from the computer science team. However, she wrote, what remained the same, even when everything else was diverging, was “the timing of when groups formed, maintained, and changed.”13

Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania and Devin Pope of the University of Chicago analyzed more than 18,000 National Basketball Association games over fifteen years, paying special attention to the games’ scores at halftime. It’s not surprising that teams ahead at halftime won more games than teams that were behind. For example, a six-point halftime lead gives a team about an 80 percent probability of winning the game. However, Berger and Pope detected an exception to the rule: Teams that were behind by just one point were more likely to win. Indeed, being down by one at halftime was more advantageous than being up by one. Home teams with a one-point deficit at halftime won more than 58 percent of the time. Indeed, trailing by one point at halftime, weirdly, was equivalent to being ahead by two points.20 Berger and Pope then looked at ten years’ worth of NCAA matchups, nearly 46,000 games in all, and found the same, though somewhat smaller, effect. “Being slightly behind [at halftime] significantly increases a team’s chance of winning,” they write. And when they examined the scoring patterns in greater detail, they found that the trailing teams scored a disproportionate number of their points immediately after the halftime break. They came out strong at the start of the second half. Truckloads of sports data can reveal correlations, but they don’t tell us anything definitive about causes. So Berger and Pope conducted some simple experiments to identify the mechani...

Set interim goals. To maintain motivation, and perhaps reignite it, break large projects into smaller steps. In one study that looked at losing weight, running a race, and accumulating enough frequent-flier miles for a free ticket, researchers found that people’s motivation was strong at the beginning and end of the pursuit—but at the halfway mark became “stuck in the middle.”1 For instance, in the quest to amass 25,000 miles, people were more willing to work hard to accumulate miles when they had 4,000 or 21,000. When

they had 12,000, though, diligence flagged. One solution is to get your mind to look at the middle in a different way. Instead of thinking about all 25,000 miles, set a subgoal at the 12,000-mile mark to accumulate 15,000 and make that your focus. In a race, whether literal or metaphorical, instead of imagining your distance from the finish line, concentrate on getting to the next mile marker.

Publicly commit to those interim goals. Once you’ve set your subgoals, enlist the power of public commitment. We’re far more likely to stick to a goal if we have someone holding us accountable. One way to surmount a slump is to tell someone else how and when you’ll get something done. Suppose you’re halfway through writing a thesis, or designing a curriculum, or crafting your organization’s strategic plan. Send out a tweet or post to Facebook saying that you’ll finish your current section by a certain date. Ask your followers to check in with you when that time comes. With so many people expecting you to deliver, you’ll want to avoid public shame by reaching your subgoal.

Stop your sentence midway through.

Ernest Hemingway published fifteen books during his lifetime, and one of his favorite productivity techniques was one I’ve used myself (even to write this book). He often ended a writing session not at the end of a section or paragraph but smack in the middle of a sentence. That sense of incompletion lit a midpoint spark that helped him begin the following day with immediate momentum. One reason the Hemingway technique works is something called the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones.2 When you’re in the middle of a project, experiment by ending the day partway through a task with a clear next step. It might fuel your day-to-day motivation.

Don’t break the chain (the Seinfeld technique). Jerry Seinfeld makes a habit of writing every day. Not just the days when he feels inspired—every single damn day. To maintain focus, he prints a calendar with all 365 days of the year. He marks off each day he writes with a big red X. “After a few days, you’ll have a chain,” he told software developer Brad Isaac. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only

job next is to not break the chain.”3 Imagine feeling the midpoint slump but then looking up at that string of thirty, fifty, or one hundred Xs. You, like Seinfeld, will rise to the occasion.

Phase 1: Form and Storm. When teams first come together, they often enjoy a period of maximal harmony and minimal conflict. Use those early moments to develop a shared vision, establish group values, and generate ideas. Eventually, though, conflict will break through the sunny skies. (That’s Tuckman’s “storm.”) Some personalities may attempt to exert their influence and stifle quieter voices. Some people may contest their responsibilities and roles. As time passes, make sure all participants have a voice, that expectations are clear, and that all members can contribute.

Phase Two: The Midpoint. For all the Sturm und Drang of phase one, your team probably hasn’t accomplished much yet. That was Gersick’s key insight. So use the midpoint—and the uh-oh effect it brings—to set direction and accelerate

the pace. The University of Chicago’s Ayelet Fishbach, whose work on Hanukkah candles I described earlier, has found that when team commitment to achieving a goal is high, it’s best to emphasize the work that remains. But when team commitment is low, it’s wiser to emphasize progress that has already been made even if it’s not massive.5 Figure out your own team’s commitment and move accordingly. As you set the path, remember that teams generally become less open to new ideas and solutions after the midpoint.6 However,...

Phase Three: Perform. At this point, team members are motivated, confident about achieving the goal, and generally able to work together with minimal friction. Keep the progress going but be wary of regressing back to the “storm” stage. Let’s say you’re part of a car-design team where different designers generally get along but are starting to become hostile to one another. To maintain optimal performance, ask your colleagues to step back, respect one another’s roles, and reemphasize the shared vision they are moving toward. Be willing