When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

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.

In 1983 Daniel Kahneman, he of Nobel Prize and DRM fame, and his late collaborator, Amos Tversky, introduced the Linda problem to illustrate what’s called the “conjunction fallacy,” one of the many ways our reasoning goes awry.12

Alertness and energy levels, which climb in the morning and reach their apex around noon, tend to plummet during the afternoons.18 And with that drop comes a corresponding fall in our ability to remain focused and constrain our inhibitions.

The answer goes back to those sentries guarding our cognitive castle. For most of us, mornings are when those guards are on alert, ready to repel any invaders. Such vigilance—often called “inhibitory control”—helps our brains to solve analytic problems by keeping out distractions.22 But insight problems are different. They require less vigilance and fewer inhibitions. That “flash of illuminance” is more likely to occur when the guards are gone.

For analytic problems, lack of inhibitory control is a bug. For insight problems, it’s a feature.

In short, our moods and performance oscillate during the day. For most of us, mood follows a common pattern: a peak, a trough, and a rebound. And that helps shape a dual pattern of performance. In the mornings, during the peak, most of us excel at Linda problems— analytic work that requires sharpness, vigilance, and focus. Later in the day, during the recovery, most of us do better on coin problems—insight work that requires less inhibition and resolve.

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

What ultimately matters, then, is that type, task, and time align—what social scientists call “the synchrony effect.”

In fact, some research has shown that for memory tasks older adults use the same regions of the brain as younger adults do when operating in the morning but different (and less effective) regions later in the day.

Figure out your type, understand your task, and then select the appropriate time.

you’re a lark or a third bird and happen to have a free hour in the morning, don’t fritter it away on e-mail. Spend those sixty minutes doing your most important work.

In many cases, morning exercise may burn 20 percent more fat than later, post-food workouts.

In the United Kingdom, sleep-related vehicle accidents peak twice during every twenty-four-hour period. One is between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m., the middle of the night. The other is between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., the middle of the afternoon. Researchers have found the same pattern of traffic accidents in the United States, Israel, Finland, France, and other countries.8

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.”

High performers, its research concludes, work for fifty-two minutes and then break for seventeen minutes.

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.”

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.

“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

That means their findings show correlation (people who eat breakfast might well be healthy) but not necessarily causation (maybe people who are already healthy are just more likely to eat breakfast).

“Lunch breaks,” the researchers say, “offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—particularly for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”35 For groups that require high levels of cooperation—say, firefighters— eating together also enhances team performance.36

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.

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. Longer lunch breaks and lunch breaks away from the office can be prophylactic against afternoon peril.

But when I’ve awoken from these slumbers, I usually feel woozy, wobbly, and befuddled—shrouded in a haze of grogginess and enveloped in a larger cloud of shame.

One well-known NASA study, for instance, found that pilots who napped for up to forty minutes subsequently showed a 34 percent improvement in reaction time and a twofold increase in alertness.40 The same benefit redounds to air traffic controllers: After a short nap, their alertness sharpens and their performance climbs.

However, the returns from napping extend beyond vigilance. An afternoon nap expands the brain’s capacity to learn, according to a University of California–Berkeley study.

The overall benefits of napping to our brainpower are massive, especially the older we get.

While naps between thirty and ninety minutes can produce some long-term benefits, they come with steep costs. The ideal naps— those that combine effectiveness with efficiency—are far shorter, usually between ten and twenty minutes.

“Siesta” derives from the Latin hora sexta, which means “sixth hour.” It was during the sixth hour after dawn that these breaks usually began. In ancient times, when most people worked outside and indoor air-conditioning was still a few thousand years away, escaping the midday sun was a physical imperative.

It might even mean following the lead of Ben & Jerry’s, Zappos, Uber, and Nike, all of which have created napping spaces for employees in their offices.

You’ll likely see a consistent block of time when things begin to go south, which for many people is about seven hours after waking. This is your optimal nap time.

Hydrate—You might already have a water bottle. Get a much smaller one. When it runs out—and of course it will, because of its size—walk to the water fountain and refill it. It’s a threefer: hydration, motion, and restoration.

Wiggle your body to reset your mind— One of the simplest breaks of all: Stand up for sixty seconds, shake your arms and legs, flex your muscles, rotate your core, sit back down.

Office yoga—You can do yoga poses right at your desk—chair rolls, wrist releases, forward folds—to relieve tension in your neck and lower back, limber up your typing fingers,

This may not be for everyone, but anyone can give it a try. Just stick “office yoga” into a search engine.

Push-ups—Yeah, push-ups. Do two a day for a week. Then four a day for the next week and six a day a week after that. You’ll boost your heart rate, shake off cognit...

Meditate—Meditation is one of the most effective breaks—and micro-breaks—of all.6 Check out material from UCLA (http:// marc.ucla.edu/mindful-meditations), which offers guided meditations as short as three minutes.

Controlled breathing—Have forty-five seconds? Then, as the New York Times explains: “Take a deep breath, expanding your belly. Pause. Exhale slowly to the count of five. Repeat four times.”7 It’s called controlled breathing, and it can tamp your stress hormones, sharpen your thinking, and maybe even boost your immune system—all in under a minute.

In Ericsson’s study, one factor that distinguished the best from the rest is that they took complete breaks during the afternoon (many even napped as part of their routine), whereas nonexperts were less rigorous about pauses. We might think that superstars power straight through the day for hours on end. In fact, they practice with intense focus for forty-five- to ninety-minute bursts, then take meaningful restorative breaks.

First, they allowed people to open “new mental accounts” in the same way that a business closes the books at the end of one fiscal year and opens a fresh ledger for the new year.

Suppose a company’s new quarter has a rough beginning. Rather than waiting until the next quarter, an obvious fresh start date, to smooth out the mess, leaders can find a meaningful moment occurring sooner—perhaps the anniversary of the launch of a key product—that would relegate previous screwups to the past and help the team get back on track.

Research shows that a month into a new year only 64 percent of resolutions continue to be pursued.26 Constructing our own temporal landmarks, especially those that are personally meaningful, gives us many more opportunities to recover from rough beginnings and start again.

Indeed, one of the fastest routes to higher pay early in a career is to switch jobs fairly often.

AVOID A FALSE START WITH A PREMORTEM The best way to recover from a false start is to avoid one in the first place. And the best technique for doing that is something called a “premortem.”

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 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.

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 4. 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.

Executive advisor Michael Watkins recommends picking a specific day and time when you visualize yourself “transforming” into your new role.10 It’s hard to get a fast start when your self-image is stuck in the past. By mentally picturing yourself “becoming” a new person even before you enter the front door, you’ll hit the carpet running. This is especially true when it comes to leadership roles. According to former Harvard professor Ram Charan, one of the toughest transitions lies in going from a specialist to a generalist.

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.

4. Sustain your morale with small wins Taking a new job isn’t exactly like recovering from an addiction, but programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous do offer some guidance. They don’t order members to embrace sobriety forever but instead ask them to succeed “24 hours at a time,”

In the middle, we relax our standards, perhaps because others relax their assessments of us.