When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

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.

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.

Nor did it matter whether people were tweeting on a Monday or a Thursday. Each weekday was basically the same. Weekend results differed slightly. Positive affect was generally a bit higher on Saturdays and Sundays—and the morning peak began about two hours later than on weekdays—but the overall shape stayed the same.

Since de Mairan’s discovery nearly three centuries ago, scientists have established that nearly all living things—from single-cell organisms that lurk in ponds to multicellular organisms that drive minivans—have biological clocks. These internal timekeepers play an essential role in proper functioning. They govern a collection of what are called circadian rhythms (from the Latin circa [around] and diem [day]) that set the daily backbeat of every creature’s life.

First, our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change—often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others. Second, these daily fluctuations are more extreme than we realize. “[T]he performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol,” according to Russell Foster, a neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford.15 Other research has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20 percent of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.16 Third, how we do depends on what we’re doing. “Perhaps the main conclusion to be drawn from studies on the effects of time of day on performance,” says British psychologist Simon Folkard, “is that the best time to perform a particular task depends on the nature of that task.”

When we wake up, our body temperature slowly rises. That rising temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness—and that, in turn, enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate, and our powers of deduction. For most of us, those sharp-minded analytic capacities peak in the late morning or around noon.17

Each of us has a “chronotype”—a personal pattern of circadian rhythms that influences our physiology and psychology. The Edisons among us are late chronotypes. They wake long after sunrise, detest mornings, and don’t begin peaking until late afternoon or early evening. Others of us are early chronotypes. They rise easily and feel energized during the day but wear out by evening. Some of us are owls; others of us are larks.

Let’s begin with personality, including what social scientists call the “Big Five” traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Much of the research shows morning people to be pleasant, productive folks—“introverted, conscientious, agreeable, persistent, and emotionally stable” women and men who take initiative, suppress ugly impulses, and plan for the future.33 Morning types also tend to be high in positive affect—that is, many are as happy as larks.34 Owls, meanwhile, display some darker tendencies. They’re more open and extroverted than larks. But they’re also more neurotic—and are often impulsive, sensation-seeking, live-for-the-moment hedonists.35 They’re more likely than larks to use nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine—not to mention marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine.36 They’re also more prone to addiction, eating disorders, diabetes, depression, and infidelity.37 No wonder they don’t show their faces during the day. And no wonder bosses consider employees who come in early as dedicated and competent and give late starters lower performance ratings.38 Benjamin Franklin had it right: Early to bed and early to rise makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Well, not exactly. When scholars have tested Franklin’s “gnomic wisdom,” they found no “justification for early risers to affect moral superiority.”39 Those nefarious owls actually tend to display greater creativity, show superior working memory, and post higher scores on intelligence tests such as the GMAT.40 They even have a better sense of humor.41 The problem is that our corporate, government, and education cultures are configured for the 75 or 80 percent of people who are larks or third birds. Owls are like left-handers in a right-handed world—forced to use scissors and writing desks and catcher’s mitts designed for others. How they respond is the final piece of the puzzle in divining the rhythms of the day.

Yes, early risers display the morning morality effect. But night owls are more ethical at night than in the morning. “[T]he fit between a person’s chronotype and the time of day offers a more complete predictor of that person’s ethicality than does time of day alone,” these scholars write.

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.

To probe this idea, I asked my colleague, researcher Cameron French, to analyze the daily rhythms of a collection of artists, writers, and inventors. His source material was a remarkable book, edited by Mason Currey, titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work that chronicles the everyday patterns of work and rest of 161 creators, from Jane Austen to Jackson Pollock to Anthony Trollope to Toni Morrison. French read their daily work schedules and coded each element as either heads-down work, no work at all, or less intense work—something close to the pattern of peak, trough, and recovery.

After coding these creators’ daily schedules and tabulating who did what when, French found what we now realize is a predictable distribution. About 62 percent of the creators followed the peak-trough-recovery pattern, where serious heads-down work happened in the morning followed by not much work at all, and then a shorter burst of less taxing work. About 20 percent of the sample displayed the reverse pattern—recovering in the mornings and getting down to business much later in the day à la Flaubert. And about 18 percent were more idiosyncratic or lacked sufficient data and therefore displayed neither pattern. Separate out that third group and the chronotype ratio holds. For every three peak-trough-rebound patterns, there is one rebound-trough-peak pattern.

Figure out your type, understand your task, and then select the appropriate time. Is your own hidden daily pattern peak-trough-rebound? Or is it rebound-trough-peak? Then look for synchrony. If you have even modest control over your schedule, try to nudge your most important work, which usually requires vigilance and clear thinking, into the peak and push your second-most important work, or tasks that benefit from disinhibition, into the rebound period. Whatever you do, do not let mundane tasks creep into your peak period.

Exercise in the morning to: Lose weight: When we first wake up, having not eaten for at least eight hours, our blood sugar is low. Since we need blood sugar to fuel a run, morning exercise will use the fat stored in our tissues to supply the energy we need. (When we exercise after eating, we use the energy from the food we’ve just consumed.) In many cases, morning exercise may burn 20 percent more fat than later, post-food workouts.1 Boost mood: Cardio workouts—swimming, running, even walking the dog—can elevate mood. When we exercise in the morning, we enjoy these effects all day. If you wait to exercise until the evening, you’ll end up sleeping through some of the good feelings. Keep to your routine: Some studies suggest that we’re more likely to adhere to our workout routine when we do it in the morning.2 So if you find yourself struggling to stick with a plan, morning exercise, especially if you enlist a regular partner, can help you form a habit. Build strength: Our physiology changes throughout the day. One example: the hormone testosterone, whose levels peak in the morning. Testosterone helps build muscle, so if you’re doing weight training, schedule your workout for those early-morning hours.

Exercise in the late afternoon or evening to: Avoid injury: When our muscles are warm, they’re more elastic and less prone to injury. That’s why they call what we do at the beginning of our workout a “warm-up.” Our body temperature is low when we first wake up, rises steadily throughout the day, and peaks in the late afternoon and early evening. That means that in later-in-the-day workouts our muscles are warmer and injuries are less common.3 Perform your best: Working out in the afternoons not only means that you’re less likely to get injured, it also helps you sprint faster and lift more. Lung function is highest this time of the day, so your circulation system can distribute more oxygen and nutrients.4 This is also the time of day when strength peaks, reaction time quickens, hand-eye coordination sharpens, and heart rate and blood pressure drop. These factors make it a great time to put on your best athletic performance. In fact, a disproportionate number of Olympic records, especially in running and swimming, are set in the late afternoon and early evening.5 Enjoy the workout a bit more: People typically perceive that they’re exerting themselves a little less in the afternoon even if they’re doing exactly the same exercise routine as in the morning.6 This suggests that afternoons may make workouts a little less taxing on the mind and soul.

FOUR TIPS FOR A BETTER MORNING 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 its magic.7 If you’re looking for an afternoon boost, head to the coffee shop between about 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., when cortisol levels dip...

I call time-outs like these “vigilance breaks”—brief pauses before high-stakes encounters to review instructions and guard against error.

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.

Taking a test in the afternoon without a break produces scores that are equivalent to spending less time in school each year and having parents with lower incomes and less education. But taking the same test after a twenty- to thirty-minute break leads to scores that are equivalent to students spending three additional weeks in the classroom and having somewhat wealthier and better-educated parents. And the benefits were the greatest for the lowest-performing students.

But look what happens after the judges take a break. Immediately after that first break, for lunch, they become more forgiving—more willing to deviate from the default—only to sink into a more hard-line attitude after a few hours. But, as happened with the Danish schoolchildren, look what occurs when those judges then get a second break—a midafternoon restorative pause to drink some juice or play on the judicial jungle gym. They return to the same rate of favorable decisions they displayed first thing in the morning.

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 to have discovered a golden ratio of work and rest. High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes. DeskTime never published the data in a peer-reviewed journal, so your mileage may vary. But the evidence is overwhelming that short breaks are effective—and deliver considerable bang for their limited buck. Even “micro-breaks” can be helpful.

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 that the researchers suggest that organizations “introduce physically active breaks during the workday routine.”20 Regular short walking breaks in the workplace also increase motivation and concentration and enhance creativity.

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 with coworkers about something other than work—are more effective at reducing stress and improving mood than either cognitive breaks (answering e-mail) or nutrition breaks (getting a snack).

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 a wall or your cubicle. Even taking a break indoors amid plants is better than doing so in a green-free zone.

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 (stretching or daydreaming) eased stress and boosted mood in a way that multitasking breaks did not.27 Tech-free breaks also “increase vigor and reduce emotional exhaustion.”28 Or, as other researchers put it, “Psychological detachment from work, in addition to physical detachment, is crucial, as continuing to think about job demands during breaks may result in strain.”29

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

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.

Done right, naps can be a shrewd response to the trough and a valuable break. Naps, research shows, confer two key benefits: They improve cognitive performance and they boost mental and physical health.

ten-minute naps had positive effects that lasted nearly three hours. Slightly longer naps were also effective. But once the nap lasted beyond about the twenty-minute mark, our body and brain began to pay a price.52 That price is known as “sleep inertia”—the confused, boggy feeling I typically had upon waking.

Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign of strength.

As I explained in chapter 1, young people begin undergoing the most profound change in chronobiology of their lifetimes around puberty. They fall asleep later in the evening and, left to their own biological imperatives, wake up later in the morning—a period of peak owliness that stretches into their early twenties.

Yet most secondary schools around the world force these extreme owls into schedules designed for chirpy seven-year-old larks. The result is that teenage students sacrifice sleep and suffer the consequences. “Adolescents who get less sleep than they need are at higher risk for depression, suicide, substance abuse and car crashes,” according to the journal Pediatrics.

When these men began their careers strongly determined where they went and how far they traveled. Those who entered the job market in weak economies earned less at the beginning of their careers than those who started in strong economies—no big surprise. But this early disadvantage didn’t fade. It persisted for as long as twenty years.

Four Situations When You Should Go First 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 If you’re not the default choice—for example, if you’re pitching against a firm that already has the account you’re seeking—going first can help you get a fresh look from the decision-makers.3 If there are relatively few competitors (say, five or fewer), going first can help you take advantage of the “primacy effect,” the tendency people have to remember the first thing in a series better than those that come later.4 If you’re interviewing for a job and you’re up against several strong candidates, you might gain an edge from being first. Uri Simonsohn and Francesca Gino examined more than 9,000 MBA admissions interviews and found that interviewers often engage in “narrow bracketing”—assuming small sets of candidates represent the entire field. So if they encounter several strong applicants early in the process, they might more aggressively look for flaws in the later ones.5

Four Situations When You Should Not Go First If you are the default choice, don’t go first. Recall from the previous chapter: Judges are more likely to stick with the default late in the day (when they’re fatigued) rather than early or after a break (when they’re revived).6 If there are many competitors (not necessarily strong ones, just a large number of them), going later can confer a small advantage and going last can confer a huge one. In a study of more than 1,500 live Idol performances in eight countries, researchers found that the singer who performed last advanced to the next round roughly 90 percent of the time. An almost identical pattern occurs in elite figure skating and even in wine tastings. At the beginning of competitions, judges hold an idealized standard of excellence, say social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer. As the competition proceeds, a new, more realistic baseline develops, which favors later competitors, who gain the added advantage of seeing what others have done.7 If you’re operating in an uncertain environment, not being first can work to your benefit. If you don’t know what the decision-maker expects, letting others proceed could allow the criteria to sharpen into focus both for the selector and you.8 If the competition is meager, going toward the end can give you an edge by highlighting your differences. “If it was a weak day with many bad candidates, it’s a really good idea to go last,” says Simonsohn.9

In short, we dip in the middle because we’re lousy forecasters. In youth, our expectations are too high. In older age, they’re too low.

FIVE WAYS TO REAWAKEN YOUR MOTIVATION DURING A MIDPOINT SLUMP If you’ve reached the midpoint of a project or assignment, and the uh-oh effect hasn’t kicked in, here are some straightforward, proven ways to dig yourself out of the slump: 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 ...

The motivating power of endings is one reason that deadlines are often, though not always, effective.

Think of this phenomenon as a first cousin of the fresh start effect—the fast finish effect. When we near the end, we kick a little harder.

People tend to rate lives like the first scenario (a short life that ends on an upswing) more highly than those like the second (a longer life that ends on a downswing).

“We label this the James Dean Effect because a life that is short but intensely exciting, such as the storied life led by the actor James Dean, is seen as most positive.”

The James Dean effect is another example of how endings alter our perception. They help us encode—that is, to evaluate and record—entire experiences.

You might have heard of the “peak-end rule.” Formulated in the early 1990s by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues including Don Redelmeier and Barbara Fredrickson, who studied patient experiences during colonoscopies and other unpleasant experiences, the rule says that when we remember an event we assign the greatest weight to its most intense moment (the peak) and how it culminates (the end).16 So a shorter colonoscopy in which the final moments are painful is remembered as being worse than a longer colonoscopy that happens to end less unpleasantly even if the latter procedure delivers substantially more total pain.17 We downplay how long an episode lasts—Kahneman calls it “duration neglect”—and magnify what happens at the end.

The researchers gave half their participants the bad-guy-to-good-guy bio and half the good-guy-to-bad-guy bio, and asked both groups to evaluate Jim’s overall moral character. Across multiple versions of the study, people assessed Jim’s morality based largely on how he behaved at the end of his life. Indeed, they evaluated a life with twenty-nine years of treachery and six months of goodness the same as a life with twenty-nine years of goodness and six months of treachery. “[P]eople are willing to override a relatively long period of one kind of behavior with a relatively short period of another kind just because it occurred at the end of one’s life.”

As we get older, when we become conscious of the ultimate ending, we edit our friends.

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.”

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.

Moreover, what spurs editing isn’t aging per se, Carstensen found, but endings of any sort. For example, when she compared college seniors with new college students, students in their final year displayed the same kind of social-network pruning as their seventy-something grandparents. When people are about to switch jobs or move to a new city, they edit their immediate social networks because their time in that setting is ending. Even political transitions have this effect. In a study of people in Hong Kong four months before the territory’s handover from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, both young people and older folks narrowed their circles of friends.

Yet, when endings become salient—whenever we enter an act three of any kind—we sharpen our existential red pencils and scratch out anyone or anything nonessential. Well before the curtain falls, we edit.