When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

Prioritize your top goals (the Buffett technique). As billionaires go, Warren Buffett seems like a pretty good guy. He’s pledged his multibillion-dollar fortune to charity. He maintains a modest lifestyle. And he continues to work hard well into his eighties. But the Oracle of Omaha also turns out to be oracular in dealing with the midlife slump. As legend has it, one day Buffett was talking with his private pilot, who was frustrated that he hadn’t achieved all he’d hoped. Buffett prescribed a three-step remedy.

First, he said, write down your top twenty-five goals for the rest of your life. Second, look at the list and circle your top five goals, those that are unquestionably your highest priority. That will give you two lists—one with your top five goals, the other with the next twenty. Third, immediately start planning how to achieve those top five goals. And the other twenty? Get rid of them. Avoid them at all costs. Don’t even look at them until you’ve achieved the top five, which might take a long time. Doing a few important things well is far more likely to propel you out of the slump than a dozen half-assed and half-finished projects are.

forty-nine, Andy Morozovsky at age fifty-nine. All four of them were what social psychologists Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield call “9-enders,” people in the last year of a life decade. They each pushed themselves to do something at ages twenty-nine, thirty-nine, forty-nine, and fifty-nine that they didn’t do, didn’t even consider, at ages twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-eight. Reaching the end of a decade somehow rattled their thinking and redirected their actions. Endings have that effect. Like beginnings and midpoints, endings quietly steer what we do and how we do it. Indeed, endings of all kinds—of experiences, projects, semesters, negotiations, stages of life—shape our behavior in four predictable ways. They help us energize. They help us encode. They help us edit. And they help us elevate.

“As participants aged, there was a decline in the number of peripheral partners . . . but great stability in the number of close social partners into late life,” English and Carstensen found. However, the outer and middle circle friends didn’t quietly creep offstage in act three. “They were actively eliminated,” the researchers say. Older people have fewer total friends not because of circumstance but because they’ve begun a process of “active pruning, that is, removing peripheral partners with whom interactions are less emotionally meaningful.”23

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

As two of the researchers who’ve studied this issue say, “Our findings suggest that the doctors, teachers, and partners . . . might do a poor job of giving good and bad news because they forget for a moment how they want to hear news when they are patients, students, and spouses.”29

For example, social psychologists Ed O’Brien and Phoebe Ellsworth of the University of Michigan wanted to see how endings shaped people’s judgment. So they packed a bag full of Hershey’s Kisses and headed to a busy area of the Ann Arbor campus. They set up a table and told students

they were conducting a taste test of some new varieties of Kisses that contained local ingredients. People sidled up to the table, and a research assistant, who didn’t know what O’Brien and Ellsworth were measuring, pulled a chocolate out of the bag and asked a participant to taste it and rate it on a 0-to-10 scale. Then the research assistant said, “Here is your next chocolate,” gave the participant another candy, and asked her to rate that one. Then the experimenter and her participant did the same thing again for three more chocolates, bringing the total number of candies to five. (The tasters never knew how many total chocolates they would be sampling.) The crux of the experiment came just before people tasted the fifth chocolate. To half the participants, the research assistant said, “Here is your next chocolate.” But to the other half of the group, she said, “Here is your last chocolate.” The people informed that the fifth chocolate was the last—that the supposed taste test was now ending—reported liking that chocolate much more than the people who knew it was simply next. In fact, people informed that a chocolate was last liked it significantly more than any other chocolate they’d sampled. They chose chocolate number five as their favorite chocolate 64 percent of the time (compared with the “next” group, which chose that chocolate as their favorite 22 percent of the time). “Participants who knew they were eating the final chocolate of a

taste test enjoyed it more, preferred it to other chocolates, and rated the overall experience as more enjoyable than other participants who thought they were ju...

Screenwriters understand the importance of endings that elevate, but they also know that the very best endings are not always happy in the traditional sense. Often, like a final chocolate, they’re bittersweet. “Anyone can deliver a happy ending—just give the characters everything they want,” says screenplay guru Robert McKee. “An artist gives us the emotion he’s promised . . . but with a rush of unexpected insight.”32 That often comes when the main character finally understands an emotionally complex truth. John August, who wrote the screenplay for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and ot...

“Every Pixar movie has its protagonist achieving the goal he wants only to realize it is not what the protagonist needs. Typically, this leads the protagonist to let go of what he wants (a house, the Piston Cup, Andy) to get what he needs (a true yet unlikely companion; real friends; a lifetime together with friends).”33 Such emotional complexity turns out to be central to the most elevated endings.

Competitive rowing is one of the only racing sports where the athletes have their backs to the finish line. Only one teammate faces forward.

The boat can’t move at its fastest pace without the eight rowers exquisitely synchronized with one another. But they can’t synch effectively without Barber. Their speed depends on someone who never touches an oar, just as the Congressional Chorus’s sound hinges on Simmons, who never sings a note. For group timing, the boss is above, apart, and essential.

For example, a few years ago University of California-Berkeley researchers tried to predict the success of NBA basketball teams by examining their use of this tactile language. They watched every team play an early-season game and counted how often the players touched one another—a list that included “fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.” Then they monitored team performance over the rest of the season. Even after controlling for the obvious factors that affect basketball outcomes—for example, the quality of players—they found that touch predicted both individual and team performance. “Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution,” they write. “[T]ouch increases cooperative behavior within groups, which in turn enables better group performance.” Touching is a form of synching, a primal way to indicate where you are and where you’re going. “Basketball has evolved its own language of touch,” they write. “High fives and fist bumps, seemingly small dramatic demonstrations during group interactions, have a lot to say about the cooperative

Choral singing might be the new exercise. The research on the benefits of singing in groups is stunning. Choral singing calms heart rates and boosts endorphin levels.16 It improves lung function.17 It increases pain thresholds and reduces the need for pain medication.18 It even alleviates symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome.19 Group singing—not just performances but also practices—increases the production of immunoglobulin, making it easier to fight infections.20 In fact, cancer patients who sing in choirs show an improved immune response after just one rehearsal.21 And while the physiological payoffs are many, the psychological ones might be even greater. Several studies demonstrate that choral singing delivers a significant

boost to positive mood.22 It also lifts self-esteem while reducing feelings of stress and symptoms of depression.23 It enhances one’s sense of purpose and meaning, and increases sensitivity toward others.24 And these effects come not from singing per se but from singing in a group. For example, people who sing in choirs report far higher well-being than those who sing solo.25

Other Oxford research, conducted on members of the university’s crew team, found elevated pain thresholds when people rowed together but less elevated ones when individuals rowed alone. They even call this state of mind, in which synchronized participants become less susceptible to pain, “rowers’ high.”27

The book The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, which tells the story of a nine-person crew team from the University of Washington that won a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, offers an especially vivid description: And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy.28

FOUR TECHNIQUES FOR PROMOTING BELONGING IN YOUR GROUP Reply quickly to e-mail. When I asked Congressional Chorus artistic director David Simmons what strategies he used to promote belonging, his answer surprised me. “You reply to their e-mails,” he said. The research backs up Simmons’s instincts. 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

Tell stories about struggle. One way that groups cohere is through storytelling. But the stories your group tells should not only be tales of triumph. Stories of failure and vulnerability also foster a sense of belongingness. For instance, Gregory Walton of Stanford University has found that for individuals who might feel apart from a group—for instance, women in a predominantly male environment or students of color in a largely white university—these types of stories can be powerful.2 Simply reading an account of another student whose freshman year didn’t go perfectly but who eventually found her place boosted subsequent feelings of belongingness.

Nurture self-organized group rituals. Cohesive and coordinated groups all have rituals, which help fuse identity and deepen belongingness. But not all rituals have equal power. The most valuable emerge from the people in the group, instead of being orchestrated or imposed by those at the top. For rowers, maybe it’s a song they all sing during warm-ups. For choir members, maybe’s it’s a coffee shop where everyone gathers before each rehearsal. As Stanford’s Robb Willer has discovered, “Workplace social functions are less effective if initiated by the manager. What’s better are worker-established engagements set at times and places that are convenient for the team.”3 Organic rituals, not artificial ones, generate cohesion.

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

In fact, according to Oxford University Press researchers, “time” is the most common noun in the English language.5

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

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 other study examined the effect of awe. Awe lives “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” as two scholars put it. It “is a little studied emotion . . . central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art.”19 It has two key attributes: vastness (the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures). Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker found that the experience of awe—the sight of the Grand Canyon, the birth of a child, a spectacular thunderstorm—changes our perception of time. When we experience awe, time slows down. It expands. We feel like we have more of it. And that sensation lifts our well-being. “Experiences of awe bring people into the present moment, and being in the present moment underlies awe’s capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, and make life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.”20

Taken together, all of these studies suggest that the path to a life of meaning and significance isn’t to “live in the present” as so many spiritual gurus have advised. It is to integrate