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 signicant. 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 ...
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