About the Book
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT TIMING IS EVERYTHING.
But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending
stream of ‘when’ decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get
serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and
guesswork.
Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology and
economics, Daniel H. Pink reveals how we can use the hidden patterns of the
day to build the ideal schedule. How can we turn a stumbling beginning into
a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon?
Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And
what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers or get married?
WHEN is a fascinating and readable narrative with compelling insights into
how we can lead richer, more engaged lives.
‘Pink is rapidly acquiring international guru status.’
Financial Times
Time isn’t the main thing. It’s the only thing.
—MILES DAVIS
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Introduction: Captain Turner’s Decision
PART ONE. THE DAY
1. The Hidden Pattern of Everyday Life
“Across continents and time zones, as predictable as the ocean tides, was the same
daily oscillation—a peak, a trough, and a rebound.”
2. Afternoons and Coffee Spoons: The Power of Breaks, the Promise of
Lunch, and the Case for a Modern Siesta
“A growing body of science makes it clear: Breaks are not a sign of sloth but a sign
of strength.”
PART TWO. BEGINNINGS, ENDINGS, AND IN
BETWEEN
3. Beginnings: Starting Right, Starting Again, and Starting Together
“Most of us have harbored a sense that beginnings are signicant. Now the science
of timing has shown that they’re even more powerful than we suspected.
Beginnings stay with us far longer than we know; their effects linger to the end.”
4. Midpoints: What Hanukkah Candles and Midlife Malaise Can Teach
Us About Motivation
“When we reach a midpoint, sometimes we slump, but other times we jump. A
mental siren alerts us that we’ve squandered half of our time.”
5. Endings: Marathons, Chocolates, and the Power of Poignancy
“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.”
PART THREE. SYNCHING AND THINKING
6. Synching Fast and Slow: The Secrets of Group Timing
“Synchronizing makes us feel good—and feeling good helps a group’s wheels turn
more smoothly. Coordinating with others also makes us do good—and doing good
enhances synchronization.”
7. Thinking in Tenses: A Few Final Words
“Most of the world’s languages mark verbs with time using tenses—especially
past, present, and future—to convey meaning and reveal thinking. Nearly every
phrase we utter is tinged with time.”
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Praise for Daniel H. Pink
Copyright Page
Index
INTRODUCTION: CAPTAIN
TURNER’S DECISION
Half past noon on Saturday, May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner pulled away
from Pier 54 on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River and set off for
Liverpool, England. Some of the 1,959 passengers and crew aboard the
enormous British ship no doubt felt a bit queasy—though less from the tides
than from the times.
Great Britain was at war with Germany, World War I having broken out
the previous summer. Germany had recently declared the waters adjacent to
the British Isles, through which this ship had to pass, a war zone. In the
weeks before the scheduled departure, the German embassy in the United
States even placed ads in American newspapers warning prospective
passengers that those who entered those waters “on ships of Great Britain or
her allies do so at their own risk.”1
Yet only a few passengers canceled their trips. After all, this liner had
made more than two hundred transatlantic crossings without incident. It was
one of the largest and fastest passenger ships in the world, equipped with a
wireless telegraph and well stocked with lifeboats (thanks in part to lessons
from the Titanic, which had gone down three years earlier). And, perhaps
most important, in charge of the ship was Captain William Thomas Turner,
one of the most seasoned seamen in the industry—a gruff fifty-eight-year-old
with a career full of accolades and “the physique of a bank safe.”2
The ship traversed the Atlantic Ocean for five uneventful days. But on
May 6, as the hulking vessel pushed toward the coast of Ireland, Turner
received word that German submarines, or U-boats, were roaming the area.
He soon left the captain’s deck and stationed himself on the bridge in order to
scan the horizon and be ready to make swift decisions.
On Friday morning, May 7, with the liner now just one hundred miles from
the coast, a thick fog settled in, so Turner reduced the ship’s speed from
twenty-one knots to fifteen knots. By noon, though, the fog had lifted, and
Turner could spy the shoreline in the distance. The skies were clear. The seas
were calm.
However, at 1 p.m., unbeknownst to captain or crew, German U-boat
commander Walther Schwieger spotted the ship. And in the next hour, Turner
made two inexplicable decisions. First, he increased the ship’s speed a bit to
eighteen knots but not to its maximum speed of twenty-one knots, even
though his visibility was sound, the waters were steady, and he knew
submarines might be lurking. During the voyage, he had assured passengers
that he would run the ship fast because at its top speed this ocean liner could
easily outrace any submarine. Second, at around 1:45 p.m., in order to
calculate his position, Turner executed what’s called a “four-point bearing,” a
maneuver that took forty minutes, rather than carry out a simpler bearing
maneuver that would have taken only five minutes. And because of the fourpoint bearing, Turner had to pilot the ship in a straight line rather than steer a
zigzag course, which was the best way to dodge U-boats and elude their
torpedoes.
At 2:10 p.m., a German torpedo ripped into the starboard side of the ship,
tearing open an immense hole. A geyser of seawater erupted, raining
shattered equipment and ship parts on the deck. Minutes later, one boiler
room flooded, then another. The destruction triggered a second explosion.
Turner was knocked overboard. Passengers screamed and dived for lifeboats.
Then, just eighteen minutes after being hit, the ship rolled on its side and
began to sink.
Seeing the devastation he had wrought, submarine commander Schwieger
headed out to sea. He had sunk the Lusitania.
Nearly 1,200 people perished in the attack, including 123 of the 141
Americans aboard. The incident escalated World War I, rewrote the rules of
naval engagement, and later helped draw the United States into the war. But
what exactly took place that May afternoon a century ago remains something
of a mystery. Two inquiries in the immediate aftermath of the attack were
unsatisfying. British officials halted the first one so as not to reveal military
secrets. The second, led by John Charles Bigham, a British jurist known as
Lord Mersey, who had also investigated the Titanic disaster, exonerated
Captain Turner and the shipping company of any wrongdoing. Yet, days after
the hearings ended, Lord Mersey resigned from the case and refused payment
for his service, saying, “The Lusitania case was a damned, dirty business!”3
During the last century, journalists have pored over news clippings and
passenger diaries, and divers have probed the wreckage searching for clues
about what really happened. Authors and filmmakers continue to produce
books and documentaries that blaze with speculation.
Had Britain intentionally placed the Lusitania in harm’s way, or even
conspired to sink the ship, to drag the United States into the war? Was the
ship, which carried some small munitions, actually being used to transport a
larger and more powerful cache of arms for the British war effort? Was
Britain’s top naval official, a forty-year-old named Winston Churchill,
somehow involved? Was Captain Turner, who survived the attack, just a
pawn of more influential men, “a chump [who] invited disaster,” as one
surviving passenger called him? Or had he suffered a small stroke that
impaired his judgment, as others alleged? Were the inquests and
investigations, the full records of which still haven’t been released, massive
cover-ups?4
Nobody knows for sure. More than one hundred years of investigative
reporting, historical analysis, and raw speculation haven’t yielded a definitive
answer. But maybe there’s a simpler explanation that no one has considered.
Maybe, seen through the fresh lens of twenty-first-century behavioral and
biological science, the explanation for one of the most consequential disasters
in maritime history is less sinister. Maybe Captain Turner just made some
bad decisions. And maybe those decisions were bad because he made them in
the afternoon.
This is a book about timing. We all know that timing is everything. Trouble
is, we don’t know much about timing itself. 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.
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.
Visit any bookstore or library, and you will see a shelf (or twelve) stacked
with books about how to do various things—from win friends and influence
people to speak Tagalog in a month. The output is so massive that these
volumes require their own category: how-to. Think of this book as a new
genre altogether—a when-to book.
For the last two years, two intrepid researchers and I have read and
analyzed more than seven hundred studies—in the fields of economics and
anesthesiology, anthropology and endocrinology, chronobiology and social
psychology—to unearth the hidden science of timing. Over the next two
hundred pages, I will use that research to examine questions that span the
human experience but often remain hidden from our view. Why do
beginnings—whether we get off to a fast start or a false start—matter so
much? And how can we make a fresh start if we stumble out of the starting
blocks? Why does reaching the midpoint—of a project, a game, even a life—
sometimes bring us down and other times fire us up? Why do endings
energize us to kick harder to reach the finish line yet also inspire us to slow
down and seek meaning? How do we synchronize in time with other people
—whether we’re designing software or singing in a choir? Why do some
school schedules impede learning but certain kinds of breaks improve student
test scores? Why does thinking about the past cause us to behave one way,
but thinking about the future steer us in a different direction? And, ultimately,
how can we build organizations, schools, and lives that take into account the
invisible power of timing—that recognize, to paraphrase Miles Davis, that
timing isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing?
This book covers a lot of science. You’ll read about plenty of studies, all of
them cited in the notes so you can dive deeper (or check my work). But this is
also a practical book. At the end of each chapter is what I call a “Time
Hacker’s Handbook,” a collection of tools, exercises, and tips to help put the
insights into action.
So where do we begin?
The place to start our inquiry is with time itself. Study the history of time
—from the first sundials in ancient Egypt to the early mechanical clocks of
sixteenth-century Europe to the advent of time zones in the nineteenth
century—and you’ll soon realize that much of what we assume are “natural”
units of time are really fences our ancestors constructed in order to corral
time. Seconds, hours, and weeks are all human inventions. Only by marking
them off, wrote historian Daniel Boorstin, “would mankind be liberated from
the cyclical monotony of nature.”5
But one unit of time remains beyond our control, the epitome of Boorstin’s
cyclical monotony. We inhabit a planet that turns on its axis at a steady speed
in a regular pattern, exposing us to regular periods of light and dark. We call
each rotation of Earth a day. The day is perhaps the most important way we
divide, configure, and evaluate our time. So part one of this book starts our
exploration of timing here. What have scientists learned about the rhythm of
a day? How can we use that knowledge to improve our performance, enhance
our health, and deepen our satisfaction? And why, as Captain Turner showed,
should we never make important decisions in the afternoon?
1.
THE HIDDEN PATTERN OF
EVERYDAY LIFE
What men daily do, not knowing what they do!
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Much Ado About Nothing
If you want to measure the world’s emotional state, to find a mood ring large
enough to encircle the globe, you could do worse than Twitter. Nearly one
billion human beings have accounts, and they post roughly 6,000 tweets
every second.1 The sheer volume of these minimessages—what people say
and how they say it—has produced an ocean of data that social scientists can
swim through to understand human behavior.
A few years ago, two Cornell University sociologists, Michael Macy and
Scott Golder, studied more than 500 million tweets that 2.4 million users in
eighty-four countries posted over a two-year period. They hoped to use this
trove to measure people’s emotions—in particular, how “positive affect”
(emotions such as enthusiasm, confidence, and alertness) and “negative
affect” (emotions such as anger, lethargy, and guilt) varied over time. The
researchers didn’t read those half a billion tweets one by one, of course.
Instead, they fed the posts into a powerful and widely used computerized
text-analysis program called LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) that
evaluated each word for the emotion it conveyed.
What Macy and Golder found, and published in the eminent journal
Science, was a remarkably consistent pattern across people’s waking hours.
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. Whether a tweeter was North
American or Asian, Muslim or atheist, black or white or brown, didn’t
matter. “The temporal affective pattern is similarly shaped across disparate
cultures and geographic locations,” they write. 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.2 Whether measured in a large, diverse country like the United
States or a smaller, more homogenous country like the United Arab Emirates,
the daily pattern remained weirdly similar. It looked like this:
Across continents and time zones, as predictable as the ocean tides, was
the same daily oscillation—a peak, a trough, and a rebound. Beneath the
surface of our everyday life is a hidden pattern: crucial, unexpected, and
revealing.
Understanding this pattern—where it comes from and what it means—begins
with a potted plant, a Mimosa pudica, to be exact, that perched on the
windowsill of an office in eighteenth-century France. Both the office and the
plant belonged to Jean-Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan, a prominent astronomer
of his time. Early one summer evening in 1729, de Mairan sat at his desk
doing what both eighteenth-century French astronomers and twenty-firstcentury American writers do when they have serious work to complete: He
was staring out the window. As twilight approached, de Mairan noticed that
the leaves of the plant sitting on his windowsill had closed up. Earlier in the
day, when sunlight streamed through the window, the leaves were spread
open. This pattern—leaves unfurled during the sunny morning and furled as
darkness loomed—spurred questions. How did the plant sense its
surroundings? And what would happen if that pattern of light and dark was
disrupted?
So in what would become an act of historically productive procrastination,
de Mairan removed the plant from the windowsill, stuck it in a cabinet, and
shut the door to seal off light. The following morning, he opened the cabinet
to check on the plant and—mon Dieu!—the leaves had unfurled despite being
in complete darkness. He continued his investigation for a few more weeks,
draping black curtains over his windows to prevent even a sliver of light from
penetrating the office. The pattern remained. The Mimosa pudica’s leaves
opened in the morning, closed in the evening. The plant wasn’t reacting to
external light. It was abiding by its own internal clock.3
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. (Indeed, from de Mairan’s potted plant eventually
bloomed an entirely new science of biological rhythms known as
chronobiology.)
For you and me, the biological Big Ben is the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or
SCN, a cluster of some 20,000 cells the size of a grain of rice in the
hypothalamus, which sits in the lower center of the brain. The SCN controls
the rise and fall of our body temperature, regulates our hormones, and helps
us fall asleep at night and awaken in the morning. The SCN’s daily timer runs
a bit longer than it takes for the Earth to make one full rotation—about
twenty-four hours and eleven minutes.4 So our built-in clock uses social cues
(office schedules and bus timetables) and environmental signals (sunrise and
sunset) to make small adjustments that bring the internal and external cycles
more or less in synch, a process called “entrainment.”
The result is that, like the plant on de Mairan’s windowsill, human beings
metaphorically “open” and “close” at regular times during each day. The
patterns aren’t identical for every person—just as my blood pressure and
pulse aren’t exactly the same as yours or even the same as mine were twenty
years ago or will be twenty years hence. But the broad contours are strikingly
similar. And where they’re not, they differ in predictable ways.
Chronobiologists and other researchers began by examining physiological
functions such as melatonin production and metabolic response, but the work
has now widened to include emotions and behavior. Their research is
unlocking some surprising time-based patterns in how we feel and how we
perform—which, in turn, yields guidance on how we can configure our own
daily lives.
MOOD SWINGS AND STOCK SWINGS
For all their volume, hundreds of millions of tweets cannot provide a perfect
window into our daily souls. While other studies using Twitter to measure
mood have found much the same patterns that Macy and Golder discovered,
both the medium and the methodology have limits.5 People often use social
media to present an ideal face to the world that might mask their true, and
perhaps less ideal, emotions. In addition, the industrial-strength analytic tools
necessary to interpret so much data can’t always detect irony, sarcasm, and
other subtle human tricks.
Fortunately, behavioral scientists have other methods to understand what
we are thinking and feeling, and one is especially good for charting hour-tohour changes in how we feel. It’s called the Day Reconstruction Method
(DRM), the creation of a quintet of researchers that included Daniel
Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Alan Krueger, who
served as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under
Barack Obama. With the DRM, participants reconstruct the previous day—
chronicling everything they did and how they felt while doing it. DRM
research, for instance, has shown that during any given day people typically
are least happy while commuting and most happy while canoodling.6
In 2006, Kahneman, Krueger, and crew enlisted the DRM to measure “a
quality of affect that is often overlooked: its rhythmicity over the course of a
day.” They asked more than nine hundred American women—a mix of races,
ages, household incomes, and education levels—to think about the previous
“day as a continuous series of scenes or episodes in a film,” each one lasting
between about fifteen minutes and two hours. The women then described
what they were doing during each episode and chose from a list of twelve
adjectives (happy, frustrated, enjoying myself, annoyed, and so on) to
characterize their emotions during that time.
When the researchers crunched the numbers, they found a “consistent and
strong bimodal pattern”—twin peaks—during the day. The women’s positive
affect climbed in the morning hours until it reached an “optimal emotional
point” around midday. Then their good mood quickly plummeted and stayed
low throughout the afternoon only to rise again in the early evening.7
Here, for example, are charts for three positive emotions—happy, warm,
and enjoying myself. (The vertical axis represents the participants’ measure
of their mood, with higher numbers being more positive and lower numbers
less positive. The horizontal axis shows the time of day, from 7 a.m. to 9
p.m.)
The three charts are obviously not identical, but they all share the same
essential shape. What’s more, that shape—and the cycle of the day it
represents—looks a lot like the one on page 10. An early spike, a big drop,
and a subsequent recovery.
On a matter as elusive as human emotion, no study or methodology is
definitive. This DRM looked only at women. In addition, what and when can
be difficult to untangle. One reason “enjoying myself” is high at noon and
low at 5 p.m. is that we tend to dig socializing (which people do around
lunchtime) and detest battling traffic (which people often do in the early
evening). Yet the pattern is so regular, and has been replicated so many
times, that it’s difficult to ignore.
So far I’ve described only what DRM researchers found about positive
affect. The ups and downs of negative emotions—feeling frustrated, worried,
or hassled—were not as pronounced, but they typically showed a reverse
pattern, rising in the afternoon and sinking as the day drew to a close. But
when the researchers combined the two emotions, the effect was especially
stark. The following graph depicts what you might think of as “net good
mood.” It takes the hourly ratings for happiness and subtracts the ratings for
frustration.
Once again, a peak, a trough, and a rebound.
Moods are an internal state, but they have an external impact. Try as we
might to conceal our emotions, they inevitably leak—and that shapes how
others respond to our words and actions.
Which leads us inexorably to canned soup.
If you’ve ever prepared a bowl of cream of tomato soup for lunch, Doug
Conant might be the reason why. From 2001 to 2011, Conant was the CEO of
Campbell Soup Company, the iconic brand with those iconic cans. During his
tenure, Conant helped to revitalize the company and return it to steady
growth. Like all CEOs, Conant juggled multiple duties. But one he handled
with particular calm and aplomb is the rite of corporate life known as the
quarterly earnings call.
Every three months, Conant and two or three lieutenants (usually the
company’s chief financial officer, controller, and head of investor relations)
would walk into a boardroom in Campbell’s Camden, New Jersey,
headquarters. Each person would take a seat along one of the sides of a long
rectangular table. At the center of the table sat a speakerphone, the staging
ground for a one-hour conference call. At the other end of the speakerphone
were one hundred or so investors, journalists, and, most important, stock
analysts, whose job is to assess a company’s strengths and weaknesses. In the
first half hour, Conant would report on Campbell’s revenue, expenses, and
earnings the previous quarter. In the second half hour, the executives would
answer questions posed by analysts, who would probe for clues about the
company’s performance.
At Campbell Soup and all public companies, the stakes are high for
earnings calls. How analysts react—did the CEO’s comments leave them
bullish or bearish about the company’s prospects?—can send a stock soaring
or sinking. “You have to thread the needle,” Conant told me. “You have to be
responsible and unbiased, and report the facts. But you also have a chance to
champion the company and set the record straight.” Conant says his goal was
always to “take uncertainty out of an uncertain marketplace. For me, these
calls introduced a sense of rhythmic certainty into my relationships with
investors.”
CEOs are human beings, of course, and therefore presumably subject to the
same daily changes in mood as the rest of us. But CEOs are also a stalwart
lot. They’re tough-minded and strategic. They know that millions of dollars
ride on every syllable they utter in these calls, so they arrive at these
encounters poised and prepared. Surely it couldn’t make any difference—to
the CEO’s performance or the company’s fortunes—when these calls occur?
Three American business school professors decided to find out. In a firstof-its-kind study, they analyzed more than 26,000 earnings calls from more
than 2,100 public companies over six and a half years using linguistic
algorithms similar to the ones employed in the Twitter study. They examined
whether the time of day influenced the emotional tenor of these critical
conversations—and, as a consequence, perhaps even the price of the
company’s stock.
Calls held first thing in the morning turned out to be reasonably upbeat and
positive. But as the day progressed, the “tone grew more negative and less
resolute.” Around lunchtime, mood rebounded slightly, probably because call
participants recharged their mental and emotional batteries, the professors
conjectured. But in the afternoon, negativity deepened again, with mood
recovering only after the market’s closing bell. Moreover, this pattern held
“even after controlling for factors such as industry norms, financial distress,
growth opportunities, and the news that companies were reporting.”8 In other
words, even when the researchers factored in economic news (a slowdown in
China that hindered a company’s exports) or firm fundamentals (a company
that reported abysmal quarterly earnings), afternoon calls “were more
negative, irritable, and combative” than morning calls.9
Perhaps more important, especially for investors, the time of the call and
the subsequent mood it engendered influenced companies’ stock prices.
Shares declined in response to negative tone—again, even after adjusting for
actual good news or bad news—“leading to temporary stock mispricing for
firms hosting earnings calls later in the day.”
While the share prices eventually righted themselves, these results are
remarkable. As the researchers note, “call participants represent the near
embodiment of the idealized homo economicus.” Both the analysts and the
executives know the stakes. It’s not merely the people on the call who are
listening. It’s the entire market. The wrong word, a clumsy answer, or an
unconvincing response can send a stock’s price spiraling downward,
imperiling the company’s prospects and the executives’ paychecks. These
hardheaded businesspeople have every incentive to act rationally, and I’m
sure they believe they do. But economic rationality is no match for a
biological clock forged during a few million years of evolution. Even
“sophisticated economic agents acting in real and highly incentivized settings
are influenced by diurnal rhythms in the performance of their professional
duties.”10
These findings have wide implications, say the researchers. The results
“are indicative of a much more pervasive phenomenon of diurnal rhythms
influencing corporate communications, decision-making and performance
across all employee ranks and business enterprises throughout the economy.”
So stark were the results that the authors do something rare in academic
papers: They offer specific, practical advice.
“[A]n important takeaway from our study for corporate executives is that
communications with investors, and probably other critical managerial
decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day.”11
Should the rest of us heed this counsel? (Campbell, as it happens, typically
held its earnings calls in the morning.) Our moods cycle in a regular pattern
—and, almost invisibly, that affects how corporate executives do their job. So
should those of us who haven’t ascended to the C-suite also frontload our
days and tackle our important work in the morning?
The answer is yes. And no.
VIGILANCE, INHIBITION, AND THE DAILY
SECRET TO HIGH PERFORMANCE
Meet Linda. She’s thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. In
college, Linda majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply
concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and participated in
antinuclear demonstrations.
Before I tell you more about Linda, let me ask you a question about her.
Which is more likely?
a. Linda is a bank teller.
b. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Faced with this question, most people answer (b). It makes intuitive sense,
right? A justice-seeking, antinuke philosophy major? That sure sounds like
someone who would be an active feminist. But (a) is—and must be—the
correct response. The answer isn’t a matter of fact. Linda isn’t real. Nor is it a
matter of opinion. It’s entirely a matter of logic. Bank tellers who are also
feminists—just like bank tellers who yodel or despise cilantro—are a subset
of all bank tellers, and subsets can never be larger than the full set they’re a
part of.* 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
When researchers have posed the Linda problem at different times of day
—for instance, at 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. in one well-known experiment—timing
often predicted whether participants arrived at the correct answer or slipped
on a cognitive banana peel. People were much more likely to get it right
earlier in the day than later. There was one intriguing and important
exception to the findings (which I’ll discuss soon). But as with executives on
earnings calls, performance was generally strong in the beginning of the day,
then worsened as the hours ticked by.13
The same pattern held for stereotypes. Researchers asked other participants
to assess the guilt of a fictitious criminal defendant. All the “jurors” read the
same set of facts. But for half of them, the defendant’s name was Robert
Garner, and for the other half, it was Roberto Garcia. When people made
their decisions in the morning, there was no difference in guilty verdicts
between the two defendants. However, when they rendered their verdicts later
in the day, they were much more likely to believe that Garcia was guilty and
Garner was innocent. For this group of participants, mental keenness, as
shown by rationally evaluating evidence, was greater early in the day. And
mental squishiness, as evidenced by resorting to stereotypes, increased as the
day wore on.14
Scientists began measuring the effect of time of day on brainpower more
than a century ago, when pioneering German psychologist Hermann
Ebbinghaus conducted experiments showing that people learned and
remembered strings of nonsense syllables more effectively in the morning
than at night. Since then, researchers have continued that investigation for a
range of mental pursuits—and they’ve drawn three key conclusions.
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.”
The Linda problem is an analytic task. It’s tricky, to be sure. But it doesn’t
require any special creativity or acumen. It has a single correct answer—and
you can reach it via logic. Ample evidence has shown that adults perform
best on this sort of thinking during the mornings. 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
One reason is that early in the day our minds are more vigilant. In the
Linda problem, the politically tinged material about Linda’s college
experiences is a distraction. It has no relevance in resolving the question
itself. When our minds are in vigilant mode, as they tend to be in the
mornings, we can keep such distractions outside our cerebral gates.
But vigilance has its limits. After standing watch hour after hour without a
break, our mental guards grow tired. They sneak out back for a smoke or a
pee break. And when they’re gone, interlopers—sloppy logic, dangerous
stereotypes, irrelevant information—slip by. 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. Our powers
of analysis, like leaves on certain plants, close up.
The effects can be significant but are often beneath our comprehension.
For instance, students in Denmark, like students everywhere, endure a battery
of yearly standardized tests to measure what they’re learning and how
schools are performing. Danish children take these tests on computers. But
because every school has fewer personal computers than students, pupils
can’t all take the test at the same time. Consequently, the timing of the test
depends on the vagaries of class schedules and the availability of desktop
machines. Some students take these tests in the morning, others later in the
day.
When Harvard’s Francesca Gino and two Danish researchers looked at
four years of test results for two million Danish schoolchildren and matched
the scores to the time of day the students took the test, they found an
interesting, if disturbing, correlation. Students scored higher in the mornings
than in the afternoons. Indeed, for every hour later in the day the tests were
administered, scores fell a little more. The effects of later-in-the-day testing
were similar to having parents with slightly lower incomes or less education
—or missing two weeks of a school year.19 Timing wasn’t everything. But it
was a big thing.
The same appears to be true in the United States. Nolan Pope, an
economist at the University of Chicago, looked at standardized test scores
and classroom grades for nearly two million students in Los Angeles.
Regardless of what time school actually started, “having math in the first two
periods of the school day instead of the last two periods increases the math
GPA of students” as well as their scores on California’s statewide tests.
While Pope says it isn’t clear exactly why this is happening, “the results tend
to show that students are more productive earlier in the school day, especially
in math” and that schools could boost learning “with a simple rearrangement
of when tasks are performed.”20
But before you go rearranging your own work schedules to cram all the
important stuff before lunchtime, beware. All brainwork is not the same. To
illustrate that, here’s another pop quiz.
Ernesto is a dealer in antique coins. One day someone brings him a beautiful bronze coin. The
coin has an emperor’s head on one side and the date 544 BC stamped on the other. Ernesto
examines the coin—but instead of buying it, he calls the police. Why?
This is what social scientists call an “insight problem.” Reasoning in a
methodical, algorithmic way won’t yield a correct answer. With insight
problems, people typically begin with that systematic, step-by-step approach.
But they eventually hit a wall. Some throw up their hands and quit, convinced
they can neither scale the wall nor bust through it. But others, stymied and
frustrated, eventually experience what’s called a “flash of
illuminance”—aha!—that helps them see the facts in a fresh light. They
recategorize the problem and quickly discover the solution.
(Still baffled by the coin puzzle? The answer will make you slap your
head. The date on the coin is 544 BC, or 544 years before Christ. That
designation couldn’t have been used then because Christ hadn’t been born—
and, of course, nobody knew that he would be born half a millennium later.
The coin is obviously a fraud.)
Two American psychologists, Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks, presented
this and other insight problems to a group of people who said they did their
best thinking in the morning. The researchers tested half the group between
8:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. and the other half between 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.
These morning thinkers were more likely to figure out the coin problem . . .
in the afternoon. “Participants who solved insight problems during their nonoptimal time of day . . . were more successful than participants at their
optimal time of day,” Wieth and Zacks found.21
What’s going on?
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. At
those looser moments, a few distractions can help us spot connections we
might have missed when our filters were tighter. For analytic problems, lack
of inhibitory control is a bug. For insight problems, it’s a feature.
Some have called this phenomenon the “inspiration paradox”—the idea
that “innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at
least with respect to our circadian rhythms.”23 And just as the studies of
school performance in Denmark and Los Angeles suggest that students would
fare better taking analytic subjects such as math in the morning, Wieth and
Zacks say their work “suggests that students designing their class schedules
might perform best in classes such as art and creative writing during their
non-optimal compared to optimal time of day.”24
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. (Midday troughs are good for very little, as I’ll explain in the next
chapter.) We are like mobile versions of de Mairan’s plant. Our capacities
open and close according to a clock we don’t control.
But you might have detected a slight hedge in my conclusion. Notice I said
“most of us.” There is an exception to the broad pattern, especially in
performance, and it’s an important one.
Imagine yourself standing alongside three people you know. One of you
four is probably a different kind of organism with a different kind of clock.
LARKS, OWLS, AND THIRD BIRDS
In the hours before dawn one day in 1879, Thomas Alva Edison sat in his
laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, pondering a problem. He had figured
out the basic principles of an electric lightbulb, but he still hadn’t found a
substance that worked as a low-cost, long-lasting filament. Alone in the lab
(his more sensible colleagues were home asleep), he absentmindedly picked
up a pinch of a sooty, carbon-based substance known as lampblack that had
been left out for another experiment, and he began rolling it between his
thumb and forefinger—the nineteenth-century equivalent of squeezing a
stress ball or trying to one-hop paper clips into a bowl.
Then Edison had—sorry to do this, folks—a lightbulb moment.
The thin thread of carbon that was emerging from his mindless finger
rolling might work as a filament. He tested it. It burned bright and long,
solving the problem. And now I’m writing this sentence, and perhaps you’re
reading it, in a room that might be dark but for the illumination of Edison’s
invention.
Thomas Edison was a night owl who enabled other night owls. “He was
more likely to be found hard at it in his laboratory at midnight than at
midday,” one early biographer wrote.25
Human beings don’t all experience a day in precisely the same way. 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.
You might have heard the larks and owls terminology before. It offers a
convenient shorthand for describing chronotypes, two simple avian categories
into which we can group the personalities and proclivities of our featherless
species. But the reality of chronotypes, as is often the case with reality, is
more nuanced.
The first systematic effort to measure differences in humans’ internal
clocks came in 1976 when two scientists, one Swedish, the other British,
published a nineteen-question chronotype assessment. Several years later,
two chronobiologists, American Martha Merrow and German Till
Roenneberg, developed what became an even more widely used assessment,
the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire (MCTQ), which distinguishes
between people’s sleep patterns on “work days” (when we usually must be
awake by a certain hour) and “free days” (when we can awaken when we
choose). People respond to questions and then receive a numerical score. For
example, when I took the MCTQ, I landed in the most common category—a
“slightly early type.”
However, Roenneberg, the world’s best-known chronobiologist, has
offered an even easier way to determine one’s chronotype. In fact, you can do
it right now.
Please think about your behavior during “free days”—days when you’re
not required to awaken at a specific time. Now answer these three questions:
1. What time do you usually go to sleep?
2. What time do you usually wake up?
3. What is the middle of those two times—that is, what is your midpoint of
sleep? (For instance, if you typically fall asleep around 11:30 p.m. and
wake up at 7:30 a.m., your midpoint is 3:30 a.m.)
Now find your position on the following chart, which I’ve repurposed from
Roenneberg’s research.
Chances are, you were neither a complete lark nor an utter owl, but
somewhere in the middle—what I call a “third bird.”* Roenneberg and others
have found that “[s]leep and wake times show a near-Gaussian (normal)
distribution in a given population.”26 That is, if you plot people’s
chronotypes on a graph, the result looks like a bell curve. The one difference,
as you can see from the chart, is that extreme owls outnumber extreme larks;
owls have, statistically if not physiologically, a longer tail. But most people
are neither larks nor owls. According to research over several decades and
across different continents, between about 60 percent and 80 percent of us are
third birds.27 “It’s like feet,” Roenneberg says. “Some people are born with
big feet and some with small feet, but most people are somewhere in the
middle.”28
Chronotypes are like feet in another way, too. There’s not much we can do
about their size or shape. Genetics explains at least half the variability in
chronotype, suggesting that larks and owls are born, not made.29 In fact, the
when of one’s birth plays a surprisingly powerful role. People born in the fall
and winter are more likely to be larks; people born in the spring and summer
are more likely to be owls.30
After genetics, the most important factor in one’s chronotype is age. As
parents know and lament, young children are generally larks. They wake up
early, buzz around throughout the day, but don’t last very long beyond the
early evening. Around puberty, those larks begin morphing into owls. They
wake up later—at least on free days—gain energy during the late afternoon
and evening, and fall asleep well after their parents. By some estimates,
teenagers’ midpoint of sleep is 6 a.m. or even 7 a.m., not exactly in synch
with most high school start times. They reach their peak owliness around age
twenty, then slowly return to larkiness over the rest of their lives.31 The
chronotypes of men and women also differ, especially in the first halves of
their lives. Men tend toward eveningness, women toward morningness.
However, those sex differences begin to disappear around the age of fifty.
And as Roenneberg notes, “People over 60 years of age, on average, become
even earlier chronotypes than they were as children.”32
In brief, high school– and college-aged people are disproportionately owls,
just as people over sixty and under twelve are disproportionately larks. Men
are generally owlier than women. Yet, regardless of age or gender, most
people are neither strong larks nor strong owls but are middle-of-the-nest
third birds. Still, around 20 to 25 percent of the population are solid evening
types—and they display both a personality and a set of behaviors that we
must reckon with to understand the hidden pattern of a day.
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.
SYNCHRONY AND THE THREE-STAGE DAY
Let’s return to the Linda problem. Basic logic holds that Linda is less likely
to be both a bank teller and a feminist than she is to be only a bank teller.
Most people solve Linda problems more readily at 8 a.m. than at 8 p.m. But
some people showed the reverse tendency. They were more likely to avoid
the conjunction fallacy and produce the correct answer at 8 p.m. than at 8
a.m. Who were these oddballs? Owls—people with evening chronotypes. It
was the same when owls served as jurors in that mock trial. While morning
and intermediate types resorted to stereotypes—declaring Garcia guilty and
Garner innocent using identical facts—later in the day, owls displayed the
opposite tendency. They resorted to stereotypes early in the day but became
more vigilant, fair, and logical as the hours passed.42
The ability to solve insight problems, like figuring out that a coin dated
544 BC must be fraudulent, also came with an exception. Larks and third
birds had their flashes of illuminance later in the day, during their less
optimal recovery stage when their inhibitions had fallen. But Edison-like
owls spotted the fraud more readily in the early mornings, their less optimal
time.43
What ultimately matters, then, is that type, task, and time align—what
social scientists call “the synchrony effect.”44 For instance, even though it’s
obviously more dangerous to drive at night, owls actually drive worse early
in the day because mornings are out of synch with their natural cycle of
vigilance and alertness.45 Younger people typically have keener memories
than older folks. But many of these age-based cognitive differences weaken,
and sometimes disappear, when synchrony is taken into account. 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.46
Synchrony even affects our ethical behavior. In 2014 two scholars
identified what they dubbed the “morning morality effect,” which showed
that people are less likely to lie and cheat on tasks in the morning than they
are later in the day. But subsequent research found that one explanation for
the effect is simply that most people are morning or intermediate
chronotypes. Factor in owliness and the effect is more nuanced. 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.47
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.
For instance, composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky would typically awaken
between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., and then read, drink tea, and take a walk. At 9:30,
he went to his piano to compose for a few hours. Then he broke for lunch and
another stroll during the afternoon. (He believed walks, sometimes two hours
long, were essential for creativity.) At 5 p.m., he settled back in for a few
more hours of work before eating supper at 8 p.m. One hundred fifty years
later, writer Joyce Carol Oates operates on a similar rhythm. She “generally
writes from 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning until about 1:00 p.m. Then she eats
lunch and allows herself an afternoon break before resuming work from 4:00
p.m. until dinner around 7:00.”48 Both Tchaikovsky and Oates are peaktrough-rebound kinds of people.
Other creators marched to a different diurnal drummer. Novelist Gustave
Flaubert, who lived much of his adult life in his mother’s house, would
typically not awaken until 10 a.m., after which he’d spend an hour bathing,
primping, and puffing his pipe. Around 11, “he would join the family in the
dining room for a late-morning meal that served as both his breakfast and
lunch.” He would then tutor his niece for a while and devote most of the
afternoon to resting and reading. At 7 p.m. he would have dinner, and
afterward, “he sat and talked with his mother” until she went to bed around 9
p.m. And then he did his writing. Night owl Flaubert’s day moved in an
opposite direction—from recovery to trough to peak.49
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.
So what does this mean for you?
At the end of this chapter is the first of six Time Hacker’s Handbooks,
which offer tactics, habits, and routines for applying the science of timing to
your daily life. But the essence is straightforward. 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.
If you’re a boss, understand these two patterns and allow people to protect
their peak. For example, Till Roenneberg conducted experiments at a German
auto plant and steel factory in which he rearranged work schedules to match
people’s chronotypes to their work schedules. The results: greater
productivity, reduced stress, and higher job satisfaction.50 If you’re an
educator, know that all times are not created equal: Think hard about which
classes and types of work you schedule in the morning and which you
schedule later in the day.
Equally important, no matter whether you spend your days making cars or
teaching children, beware of that middle period. The trough, as we’re about
to learn, is more dangerous than most of us realize.
_____________
* We can also explain this with some simple math. Suppose there’s a 2 percent chance
(.02) that Linda is a bank teller. If there’s even a whopping 99 percent chance (.99)
that she’s a feminist, the probability of her being both a bank teller and a feminist is
.0198 (.02 x .99)—which is less than 2 percent.
* Here’s an even simpler method. What time do you wake up on weekends (or free
days)? If it’s the same as weekdays, you’re probably a lark. If it’s a little later, you’re
probably a third bird. If it’s much later—ninety minutes or more—you’re probably an
owl.
HOW TO FIGURE OUT YOUR DAILY WHEN: A
THREE-STEP METHOD
This chapter has explored the science behind our daily patterns. Now
here’s a simple three-step technique—call it the type-task-time method
—for deploying that science to guide your daily timing decisions.
First, determine your chronotype, using the three-question method on
page 28 or by completing the MCTQ questionnaire online
(http://www.danpink.com/MCTQ).
Second, determine what you need to do. Does it involve heads-down
analysis or head-in-the-sky insight? (Of course, not all tasks divide
cleanly along the analysis-insight axis, so just make the call.) Are you
trying to make an impression on others in a job interview, knowing that
most of your interviewers are likely to be in a better mood in the
morning? Or are you trying to make a decision (whether you should
take the job you’ve just been offered), in which case your own
chronotype should govern?
Third, look at this chart to figure out the optimal time of day:
For example, if you’re a larkish lawyer drafting a brief, do your
research and writing fairly early in the morning. If you’re an owlish
software engineer, shift your less essential tasks to the morning and
begin your most important ones in the late afternoon and into the
evening. If you’re assembling a brainstorming group, go for the late
afternoon since most of your team members are likely to be third birds.
Once you know your type and task, it’s easier to figure out the time.
HOW TO FIGURE OUT YOUR DAILY WHEN:
THE ADVANCED VERSION
For a more granular sense of your daily when, track your behavior
systematically for a week. Set your phone alarm to beep every ninety
minutes. Each time you hear the alarm, answer these three questions:
1. What are you doing?
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how mentally alert do you feel right now?
3. On a scale of 1 to 10, how physically energetic do you feel right
now?
Do this for a week, then tabulate your results. You might see some
personal deviations from the broad pattern. For example, your trough
might arrive earlier in the afternoon than some people or your recovery
may kick in later.
To track your responses, you can scan and duplicate these pages,
download a PDF version from my website
(http://www.danpink.com/chapter1supplement).
7 a.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
8:30 a.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
10 a.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
11:30 a.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
1 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
2:30 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
4 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
5:30 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
7 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
8:30 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
10 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
11:30 p.m.
What I’m doing:
Mental alertness: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
Physical energy: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 NA
WHAT TO DO IF YOU DON’T HAVE
CONTROL OVER YOUR DAILY SCHEDULE
The harsh reality of work—whatever we do, whatever our title—is that
many of us don’t fully control our time. So what can you do when the
rhythms of your daily pattern don’t coincide with the demands of your
own daily schedule? I can’t offer a magic remedy, but I can suggest two
strategies to minimize the harm.
1. Be aware.
Simply knowing that you’re operating at a suboptimal time can be
helpful because you can correct for your chronotype in small but
powerful ways.
Suppose you’re an owl forced to attend an early-morning meeting.
Take some preventive measures. The night before, make a list of
everything you’ll need for the gathering. Before you sit down at the
conference table, go for a quick walk outside—ten minutes or so. Or do
a small good deed for a colleague—buy him a coffee or help him carry
some boxes—which will boost your mood. During the meeting, be
extra vigilant. For instance, if someone asks you a question, repeat it
before you answer to make sure you’ve gotten it right.
2. Work the margins.
Even if you can’t control the big things, you might still be able to
shape the little things. If 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. Try managing up, too.
Gently tell your boss when you work best, but put it in terms of what’s
good for the organization. (“I get the most done on the big project you
assigned me during the mornings—so maybe I should attend fewer
meetings before noon.”) And start small. You’ve heard of “casual
Fridays.” Maybe suggest “chronotype Fridays,” one Friday a month
when everyone can work at their preferred schedule. Or perhaps declare
your own chronotype Friday. Finally, take advantage of those times
when you do have control over your schedule. On weekends or
holidays, craft a schedule that maximizes the synchrony effect. For
example, if you’re a lark and you’re writing a novel, get up early, write
until 1 p.m., and save your grocery shopping and dry-cleaning pickup
for the afternoon.
WHEN TO EXERCISE: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE
I’ve focused mostly on the emotional and cognitive aspects of our lives.
But what about the physical? In particular, what’s the best time to
exercise? The answer depends in part on your goals. Here’s a simple
guide, based on exercise research, to help you decide.
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, postfood 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
1. 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.
2. 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
again.
3. Soak up the morning sun.
If you feel sluggish in the morning, get as much sunlight as you can.
The sun, unlike most lightbulbs, emits light that covers a wide swath of
the color spectrum. When these extra wavelengths hit your eyes, they
signal your brain to stop producing sleep hormones and start producing
alertness hormones.
4. Schedule talk-therapy appointments for the morning.
Research in the emerging field of psychoneuroendocrinology has
shown that therapy sessions may be most effective in the morning.8 The
reason goes back to cortisol. Yes, it’s a stress hormone. But it also
enhances learning. During therapy sessions in the morning, when
cortisol levels are highest, patients are more focused and absorb advice
more deeply.
2.
AFTERNOONS AND COFFEE
SPOONS
The Power of Breaks, the Promise of Lunch, and the
Case for a Modern Siesta
The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.
—ROBERT FROST
Come with me for a moment into the Hospital of Doom.
At this hospital, patients are three times more likely than at other hospitals
to receive a potentially fatal dosage of anesthesia and considerably more
likely to die within forty-eight hours of surgery. Gastroenterologists here find
fewer polyps during colonoscopies than their more scrupulous colleagues, so
cancerous growths go undetected. Internists are 26 percent more likely to
prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for viral infections, thereby fueling the rise
of drug-resistant superbugs. And throughout the facility, nurses and other
caregivers are nearly 10 percent less likely to wash their hands before treating
patients, increasing the probability that patients will contract an infection in
the hospital they didn’t have when they entered.
If I were a medical malpractice lawyer—and I’m thankful that I’m not—
I’d hang out a shingle across the street from such a place. If I were a husband
and parent—and I’m thankful that I am—I wouldn’t let any member of my
family walk through this hospital’s doors. And if I were advising you on how
to navigate your life—which, for better or worse, I’m doing in these pages—
I’d offer the following counsel: Stay away.
The Hospital of Doom may not be a real name. But it is a real place.
Everything I’ve described is what happens in modern medical centers during
the afternoons compared with the mornings. Most hospitals and health care
professionals do heroic work. Medical calamities are the exceptions rather
than the norm. But afternoons can be a dangerous time to be a patient.
Something happens during the trough, which often emerges about seven
hours after waking, that makes it far more perilous than any other time of the
day. This chapter will examine why so many of us—from anesthesiologists to
schoolchildren to the captain of the Lusitania—blunder in the afternoon.
Then we’ll look at some solutions for the problem—in particular, two simple
remedies that can keep patients safer, boost students’ test scores, and maybe
even make the justice system fairer. Along the way, we’ll learn why lunch
(not breakfast) is the most important meal of the day, how to take a perfect
nap, and why reviving a thousand-year-old practice may be just what we need
today to boost individual productivity and corporate performance.
But first let’s go into an actual hospital, where doom has been forestalled
by lime-green laminated cards.
BERMUDA TRIANGLES AND PLASTIC
RECTANGLES: THE POWER OF VIGILANCE
BREAKS
It’s a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and for the first
(and probably only) time in my life, I’m wearing hospital greens and
scrubbing in for surgery. Beside me is Dr. Kevin Tremper, an
anesthesiologist and professor who is chairman of the University of Michigan
Medical School’s Department of Anesthesiology.
“Each year, we put 90,000 people to sleep and wake them up,” he tells me.
“We paralyze them and start cutting them open.” Tremper oversees 150
physicians and another 150 medical residents who wield these magical
powers. In 2010 he changed how they do their jobs.
Flat on the operating room table is a twenty-something man with a
smashed jaw badly in need of repair. On a nearby wall is a large-screen
television with the names of the five other people in hospital greens—nurses,
physicians, a technician—who surround the table. At the top of the screen, in
maize letters against a blue background, is the patient’s name. The surgeon,
an intense, wiry man in his thirties, is itching to begin. But before anybody
does anything, as if this team were playing college basketball at the school’s
Crisler Center two miles away, they call a time-out.
Almost imperceptibly, each person takes one step backward. Then, looking
at either the big screen or a wallet-size plastic card hanging from their waists,
they introduce themselves to one another by first name and proceed through a
nine-step “Pre-Induction Verification” checklist that ensures they’ve got the
right patient, know his condition and any allergies, understand the
medications the anesthesiologist will use, and have any special equipment
they might need. When everyone is finished introducing themselves and all
the questions are answered—the whole process takes about three minutes—
the time-out ends and the young anesthesia resident cracks open supplies
from sealed pouches to begin to put the patient, already partly sedated, fully
to sleep. It’s not easy. The patient’s jaw is in such dreadful condition, the
resident must intubate him through the nose instead of the mouth, which
proves vexing. Tremper, who has the long, slender fingers of a pianist, steps
in and steers the tube into the nasal cavity and down the patient’s throat. Soon
the patient is out, his vital signs are stable, and the surgery can begin.
Then the team steps back from the operating table once again.
Each person reviews the steps on the “Pre-Incision Time Out” card to
make sure everyone is prepared. They regain their individual and collective
focus. And only then does everyone step back to the operating table and the
surgeon begins repairing the jaw.
I call time-outs like these “vigilance breaks”—brief pauses before highstakes encounters to review instructions and guard against error. Vigilance
breaks have gone a long way in preventing the University of Michigan
Medical Center from transmogrifying into the Hospital of Doom during the
afternoon trough. Tremper says that in the time since he implemented these
breaks, the quality of care has risen, complications have declined, and both
doctors and patients are more at ease.
Afternoons are the Bermuda Triangles of our days. Across many domains,
the trough represents a danger zone for productivity, ethics, and health.
Anesthesia is one example. Researchers at Duke Medical Center reviewed
about 90,000 surgeries at the hospital and identified what they called
“anesthetic adverse events”—either mistakes anesthesiologists made, harm
they caused to patients, or both. The trough was especially treacherous.
Adverse events were significantly “more frequent for cases starting during
the 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. hours.” The probability of a problem at 9 a.m. was
about 1 percent. At 4 p.m., 4.2 percent. In other words, the chance of
something going awry while someone is delivering drugs to knock you
unconscious was four times greater during the trough than during the peak.
On actual harm (not only a slipup but also something that hurts the patient),
the probability at 8 a.m. was 0.3 percent—three-tenths of one percent. But at
3 p.m., the probability was 1 percent—one in every one hundred cases, a
threefold increase. Afternoon circadian lows, the researchers concluded,
impair physician vigilance and “affect human performance of complex tasks
such as those required in anesthesia care.”1
Or consider colonoscopies. I’ve reached the age where prudence calls for
submitting to this procedure to detect the presence or possibility of colon
cancer. But now that I’ve read the research, I would never accept an
appointment that wasn’t before noon. For example, one oft-cited study of
more than 1,000 colonoscopies found that endoscopists are less likely to
detect polyps—small growths on the colon—as the day progresses. Every
hour that passed resulted in a nearly 5 percent reduction in polyp detection.
Some of the specific morning versus afternoon differences were stark. For
instance, at 11 a.m., doctors found an average of more than 1.1 polyps in
every exam. By 2 p.m., though, they were detecting barely half that number
even though afternoon patients were no different from the morning ones.2
Look at those numbers and tell me when you’d schedule a colonoscopy.3
What’s more, other research has shown that doctors are significantly less
likely even to fully complete a colonoscopy when they perform it in the
afternoon.4
Basic health care also suffers when its practitioners sail into the day’s
Bermuda Triangle. Doctors, for example, are much more likely to prescribe
antibiotics, including unnecessary ones, for acute respiratory infections in the
afternoons than in the mornings.5 As the cumulative effect of dealing with
patient after patient saps doctors’ decision-making resolve, it’s far easier just
to write the scrip than suss out whether the patient’s symptoms suggest a
bacterial infection, for which antibiotics might be appropriate, or a virus, for
which they’d have no effect.
We expect important encounters with experienced professionals like
physicians to turn on who is the patient and what is the problem. But many
outcomes depend even more forcefully on when is the appointment.
What’s going on is a decline in vigilance. In 2015, Hengchen Dai,
Katherine Milkman, David Hoffman, and Bradley Staats led a massive study
of handwashing at nearly three dozen U.S. hospitals. Using data from
sanitizer dispensers equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) to
communicate with RFID chips on employee badges, researchers could
monitor who washed their hands and who didn’t. In all, they studied more
than 4,000 caregivers (two-thirds of whom were nurses), who over the course
of the research had nearly 14 million “hand hygiene opportunities.” The
results were not pretty. On average, these employees washed their hands less
than half the time when they had an opportunity and a professional obligation
to do so. Worse, the caregivers, most of whom began their shifts in the
morning, were even less likely to sanitize their hands in the afternoons. This
decline from the relative diligence of the mornings to the relative neglect of
the afternoon was as great as 38 percent. That is, for every ten times they
washed their hands in the morning, they did so only six times in the
afternoon.6
The consequences are grave. “The decrease in hand hygiene compliance
that we detected during a typical work shift would contribute to
approximately 7,500 unnecessary infections per year at an annual cost of
approximately $150 million across the 34 hospitals included in this study,”
the authors write. Spread this rate across annual hospital admissions in the
United States, and the cost of the trough is massive: 600,000 unnecessary
infections, $12.5 billion in added costs, and up to 35,000 unnecessary
deaths.7
Afternoons can also be deadly beyond the white walls of a hospital. 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 British survey got even more precise when it found that the typical
worker reaches the most unproductive moment of the day at 2:55 p.m.9 When
we enter this region of the day, we often lose our bearings. In chapter 1, I
briefly discussed the “morning morality effect,” which found that people
were more likely to be dishonest in the afternoon because most of us are
“better able to resist opportunities to lie, cheat, steal and engage in other
unethical behavior in the morning than in the afternoon.”10 This phenomenon
depended in part on chronotype, with owls displaying a different pattern from
larks or third birds. But in that study, evening types proved more ethical
between midnight and 1:30 a.m., not during the afternoon. Regardless of our
chronotype, the afternoon can impair our professional and ethical judgment.
The good news is that vigilance breaks can loosen the trough’s grip on our
behavior. As the doctors at the University of Michigan demonstrate, inserting
regular mandatory vigilance breaks into tasks helps us regain the focus
needed to proceed with challenging work that must be done in the afternoon.
Imagine if Captain Turner, who hadn’t slept the night before his fateful
decisions, had taken a brief vigilance break with other crew members to
review how fast the Lusitania needed to travel and how best to calculate the
ship’s position in order to avoid U-boats.
This simple intervention is backed by heartening evidence. For instance,
the largest health care system in the United States is the Veterans Health
Administration, which operates about 170 hospitals across the country. In
response to the persistence of medical errors (many of which occurred in
afternoons), a team of physicians at the VA implemented a comprehensive
training system across the hospitals (on which Michigan modeled its own
efforts) that was built around the concept of more intentional and more
frequent breaks, and featured such tools as “laminated checklist cards,
whiteboards, paper forms, and wall mounted posters.” One year after the
training began, the surgical mortality rate (how often people died during or
shortly after surgery) dropped 18 percent.11
Still, for most people, work doesn’t involve paralyzing others and cutting
them open—or other life-on-the-line responsibilities such as flying a twentyseven-ton jet or guiding troops into battle. For the rest of us, another type of
break offers a simple way to steer around the dangers of the trough. Call them
“restorative breaks.” And to understand them, let’s leave the American
Midwest and head to Scandinavia and the Middle East.
FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO THE
COURTHOUSE: THE POWER OF RESTORATIVE
BREAKS
In chapter 1 we learned about some curious results on Denmark’s national
standardized exams. Danish schoolchildren who take the tests in the
afternoon score significantly worse than those who take the exams earlier in
the day. To a school principal or education policy maker, the response seems
obvious: Whatever it takes, move all the tests to the morning. However, the
researchers also discovered another remedy, one with applications beyond
schools and tests, that is remarkably easy to explain and implement.
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 lowestperforming students.
Unfortunately, Danish schools, like many around the world, offer only two
breaks each day. Worse, legions of school systems are cutting back on recess
and other restorative pauses for students in the name of rigor and—get ready
for the irony—higher test scores. But as Harvard’s Francesca Gino, one of
the study’s authors, puts it, “If there were a break after every hour, test scores
would actually improve over the course of the day.”13
Many younger students underperform during the trough, which risks both
providing teachers with an inaccurate sense of their progress and prompting
administrators to attribute to what and how students are learning something
that is really an issue of when they’re taking a test. “We believe these results
to have two important policy implications,” say the researchers who studied
the Danish experience. “[F]irst, cognitive fatigue should be taken into
consideration when deciding on the length of the school day and the
frequency and duration of breaks. Our results show that longer school days
can be justified, if they include an appropriate number of breaks. Second,
school accountability systems should control for the influence of external
factors on test scores . . . a more straightforward approach would be to plan
tests as closely after breaks as possible.”14
Perhaps it makes sense that a cup of apple juice and a few minutes to run
around works wonders for eight-year-olds solving arithmetic problems. But
restorative breaks have a similar power for adults with weightier
responsibilities.
In Israel, two judicial boards process about 40 percent of the country’s
parole requests. At their helm are individual judges whose job is to hear
prisoners’ cases one after another and make decisions about their fate. Should
this prisoner be released because she’s served enough time on her sentence
and shown sufficient signs of rehabilitation? Should that one, already granted
parole, now be permitted to move about without his tracking device?
Judges aspire to be rational, deliberative, and wise, to mete out justice
based on the facts and the law. But judges are also human beings subject to
the same daily rhythms as the rest of us. Their black robes don’t shelter them
from the trough. In 2011 three social scientists (two Israelis and one
American) used data from these two parole boards to examine judicial
decision-making. They found that, in general, judges were more likely to
issue a favorable ruling—granting the prisoner parole or allowing him to
remove an ankle monitor—in the morning than in the afternoon. (The study
controlled for the type of prisoner, the severity of the offense, and other
factors.) But the pattern of decision-making was more complicated, and more
intriguing, than a simple a.m./p.m. divide.
The following chart shows what happened. Early in the day, judges ruled
in favor of prisoners about 65 percent of the time. But as the morning wore
on, that rate declined. And by late morning, their favorable rulings dropped to
nearly zero. So a prisoner slotted for a 9 a.m. hearing was likely to get parole
while one slotted for 11:45 a.m. had essentially no chance at all—regardless
of the facts of the case. Put another way, since the default decision on boards
is typically not to grant parole, judges deviated from the status quo during
some hours and reinforced it during others.
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.
Ponder the consequences: If you happen to appear before a parole board
just before a break rather than just after one, you’ll likely spend a few more
years in jail—not because of the facts of the case but because of the time of
day. The researchers say they cannot identify precisely what’s driving this
phenomenon. It could be that eating restored judges’ glucose levels and
replenished their mental reserves. It could be that a little time away from the
bench lifted their mood. It could be that the judges were tired and that rest
reduced their fatigue. (Another study of U.S. federal courts found that on the
Mondays after the switch to Daylight Saving Time, when people on average
lose roughly forty minutes of sleep, judges rendered prison sentences that
were about 5 percent longer than the ones they handed down on typical
Mondays.15)
Whatever the explanation, a factor that should have been extraneous to
judicial decision-making and irrelevant to justice itself—whether and when a
judge took a break—was critical in deciding whether someone would go free
or remain behind bars. And the wider phenomenon—that breaks can often
mitigate the trough—likely applies “in other important sequential decisions
or judgments, such as legislative decisions . . . financial decisions, and
university admissions decisions.”16
So if the trough is the poison and restorative breaks are the antidote, what
should those breaks look like? There’s no single answer, but science offers
five guiding principles.
1. 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.19
2. 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.21
3. 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).23
4. 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.
5. 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
So if you’re looking for the Platonic ideal of a restorative break, the perfect
combination of scarf, hat, and gloves to insulate yourself from the cold breath
of the afternoon, consider a short walk outside with a friend during which
you discuss something other than work.
Vigilance breaks and restorative breaks offer us a chance to recharge and
replenish, whether we’re performing surgery or proofreading advertising
copy. But two other respites are also worth considering. Both were once
sturdy features of professional and personal life only to be dismissed more
recently as soft, frivolous, and antithetical to the head-down, laptop-up,
inbox-zero ethos of the twenty-first century. Now both are poised for a
comeback.
THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY
After you woke up this morning, some time before you began a day of filing
reports, making deliveries, or chasing children, you probably ate breakfast.
You might not have settled in for a full, proper meal, but I’ll bet you broke
the nighttime fast with something—a piece of toast maybe or a little yogurt,
perhaps washed down with coffee or tea. Breakfast fortifies our bodies and
fuels our brains. It’s also a guardrail for our metabolism; eating breakfast
restrains us from gorging the rest of the day, which keeps our weight down
and our cholesterol in check. These truths are so self-evident, these benefits
so manifest, that the principle has become a nutritional catechism. Say it with
me: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
As a devout breakfast eater, I endorse this principle. But as someone paid
to muck around in scientific journals, I’ve grown skeptical. Most of the
research showing the salvation of a morning meal and the sin of missing it
are observational studies rather than randomized controlled experiments.
Researchers follow people around, watching what they do, but they don’t
compare them to a control group.30 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). When scholars have applied more rigorous scientific
methods, breakfast’s benefits have been much more difficult to detect.
“A recommendation to eat or skip breakfast . . . contrary to widely
espoused views . . . had no discernable effect on weight loss,” says one.31
“The belief (in breakfast) . . . exceeds the strength of scientific evidence,”
says another.32 Layer in the fact that several studies showing the virtues of
breakfast were funded by industry groups and the skepticism deepens.
Should we all eat breakfast? The conventional view is a flaky and delicious
yes. But as a leading British nutritionist and statistician says, “[T]he current
state of scientific evidence means that, unfortunately, the simple answer is: I
don’t know.”33
So eat breakfast if you’d like. Or skip it if you’d prefer. But if you’re
concerned about the perils of the afternoon, start taking more seriously the
often-maligned and easily dismissed meal called lunch. (“Lunch is for
wimps,” 1980s cinematic supervillain Gordon Gekko famously declared.) By
one estimation, 62 percent of American office workers wolf down lunch in
the same spot where they work all day. These dismal scenes—smartphone in
one hand, soggy sandwich in the other, despair wafting from the cubicle—
even have a name: the sad desk lunch. And that name has given rise to a
small online movement in which people post photographs of their oh-sopathetic midday meals.34 But it’s time we paid more attention to lunch,
because social scientists are discovering that it’s far more important to our
performance than we realize.
For example, a 2016 study looked at more than eight hundred workers
(mostly in information technology, education, and media) from eleven
different organizations, some of whom regularly took lunch breaks away
from their desks and some of whom did not. The non–desk lunchers were
better able to contend with workplace stress and showed less exhaustion and
greater vigor not just during the remainder of the day but also a full one year
later.
“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
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. Longer lunch breaks and lunch
breaks away from the office can be prophylactic against afternoon peril.
Some of these researchers suggest that “organizations could promote
lunchtime recovery by giving options to spend lunch breaks in different ways
that enable detachment, such as spending a break in a non-work environment
or offering a space for relaxing activities.”38 Ever so slowly, organizations
are responding. For instance, in Toronto, CBRE, the large commercial real
estate firm, has banned desk lunches in the hope that employees will take a
proper lunch break.39
Given this evidence, as well as the dangers of the trough, it’s becoming
ever clearer that we must revise some oft-repeated advice. Say it with me
now, brothers and sisters: Lunch is the most important meal of the day.
SLEEPING ON THE JOB
I hate naps. Maybe I enjoyed them when I was a kid. But from the age of five
onward, I’ve considered them the behavioral equivalent of sippy cups—fine
for toddlers, pathetic for grown-ups. It’s not that I’ve never napped as an
adult. I have—sometimes intentionally, most times inadvertently. 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. To me, naps are less an ...
Purchase answer to see full
attachment