When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

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 guidance on working smarter and living better.

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.

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

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.

Detachment—both psychological and physical—is also critical. Staying focused on work during lunch, or even using one’s phone for social media, can intensify fatigue, according to multiple studies, but shifting one’s focus away from the office has the opposite effect.

We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what. Imagine if schools suffered the same problems wrought by early start times—stunted learning and worsening health—but the cause was an airborne virus that was infecting classrooms. Parents would march to the schoolhouse to demand action and quarantine their children at home until the problem was solved.

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.”32 The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, looking at these early indicators, warned that “those who begin their careers during such a weak labor market recovery may see permanent negative effects on their wages.”33

A new job can be daunting because it requires establishing yourself in the organization’s hierarchy. Many individuals overcompensate for their initial nervousness and assert themselves too quickly and too soon. That can be counterproductive. Research from UCLA’s Corinne Bendersky suggests that over time extroverts lose status in groups.13 So, at the outset, concentrate on accomplishing a few meaningful achievements, and once you’ve gained status by demonstrating excellence, feel free to be more assertive.

Study after study across an astonishing range of socioeconomic, demographic, and life circumstances has reached the same conclusion: Happiness climbs high early in adulthood but begins to slide downward in the late thirties and early forties, dipping to a low in the fifties.6 (Blanchflower and Oswald found that “subjective well-being among American males bottoms out at an estimated 52.9 years.”7) But we recover quickly from this slump, and well-being later in life often exceeds that of our younger years.

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.

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.

Start by identifying something about yourself that fills you with regret, shame, or disappointment. (Maybe you were fired from a job, flunked a class, undermined a relationship, ruined your finances.) Then write down some specifics about how it makes you feel. Then, in two paragraphs, write yourself an e-mail expressing compassion or understanding for this element of your life. Imagine what someone who cares about you might say. He would likely be more forgiving than you. Indeed, University of Texas professor Kristin Neff suggests you write your letter “from the perspective of an unconditionally loving imaginary friend.” But mix understanding with action. Add a few sentences on what changes you can make to your life and how you can improve in the future. A self-compassion letter operates like the converse corollary of the Golden Rule: It offers a way to treat yourself as you would others.

Carstensen called her theory “socioemotional selectivity.” She argued that our perspective on time shapes the orientation of our lives and therefore the goals we pursue. When time is expansive and open-ended, as it is in acts one and two of our lives, we orient to the future and pursue “knowledge-related goals.” We form social networks that are wide and loose, hoping to gather information and forge relationships that can help us in the future. But as the horizon nears, when the future is shorter than the past, our perspective changes. While many believe that older people pine for yesteryear, Carstensen’s body of work shows something else. “The primary age difference in time orientation concerns not the past but the present,” she wrote.

The example he used was “Time flies like an arrow.” The sentence might mean that time moves with the swiftness of an arrow swooping through the sky. But as Oettinger explained, “time” could also be an imperative verb—a stern instruction to an insect-speed researcher “to take out his stopwatch and time flies with great dispatch, or like an arrow.” Or it could be describing a certain species of flying bug—time flies—that exhibit a fondness for arrows.

They do—in somewhat stunning fashion. Chen found that speakers of weak-future languages—those that did not mark explicit differences between present and future—were 30 percent more likely to save for retirement and 24 percent less likely to smoke. They also practiced safer sex, exercised more regularly, and were both healthier and wealthier in retirement.