When — Daniel Pink
Pink, of Drive (one of the first and most well-known behavioral economics airport books) fame broaches an interesting topic in When, namely that while most self-help books can be classified as “how-to” books, When is of a new genre of “when-to.” And having digested “more than seven hundred studies,” the conclusions he reaches are both significant and not obvious.
On circadian rhythms:
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.
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.
On breaks:
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.
On starting times:
At one school, the number of car crashes for teen drivers fell by 70 percent after it pushed its start time from 7:35 a.m. to 8:55 a.m.
and its effects on education:
When an economist studied the Wake County, North Carolina, school system, he found that “a 1 hour delay in start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading tests by three percentile points,” with the strongest effects on the weakest students.12 But being an economist, he also calculated the cost-benefit ratio of changing the schedule and concluded that later start times delivered more bang for the educational buck than almost any other initiative available to policy makers, a view echoed by a Brookings Institution analysis. Why the resistance? A key reason is that starting later is inconvenient for adults. Administrators must reconfigure bus schedules. Parents might not be able to drop off their kids on the way to work. Teachers must stay later in the afternoon. Coaches might have less time for sports practices. But beneath those excuses is a deeper, and equally troubling, explanation. We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what.
and employment:
[Lisa Kahn] harvested data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which each year asks a representative sample of American young people questions about their education, health, and employment. From the data, she selected white men who had graduated from college between 1979 and 1989—and examined what happened to them over the next twenty years.* Her big discovery: When these men began their careers strongly determined where they went and how far they traveled. Those who entered the job market in weak economies earned less at the beginning of their careers than those who started in strong economies—no big surprise. But this early disadvantage didn’t fade. It persisted for as long as twenty years. The total cost, in inflation-adjusted terms, of graduating in a bad year rather than a good year averaged about $100,000. Timing wasn’t everything—but it was a six-figure thing.
especially for Stanford MBAs who are more likely to work for nonprofits if they graduate in a bear market:
As a result, “a person who graduates in a bull market” and goes into investment banking earns an additional $1.5 to $5 million more than “that same person would have earned if he or she had graduated during a bear market” and therefore had shied away from a Wall Street job.
On endings:
For example, Kiva is a nonprofit organization that finances small low-interest or interest-free loans to micro-entrepreneurs. Prospective borrowers must complete a lengthy online application to be considered for a loan. Many of them begin the application but don’t finish it. Kiva enlisted the Common Cents Lab, a behavioral research laboratory, to come up with a solution. Their suggestion: Impose an ending. Give people a specific deadline a few weeks away for completing the application. On one level, this idea seems idiotic. A deadline surely means that some people won’t finish the application in time and therefore will be disqualified for the loan. But Kiva found that when it sent applicants a reminder message with a deadline, compared with a reminder message without a deadline, 24 percent more borrowers completed the application.
Notebook Export
When
ABOUT THE BOOK
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‘Pink is rapidly acquiring international guru status.’ Financial Times
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MarketWorld
INTRODUCTION: CAPTAIN TURNER’S DECISION
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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.
1. THE HIDDEN PATTERN OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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?
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Energy levels also caffeine intake
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Exercise in the morning to: • Lose weight: When we first wake up, having not eaten for at least eight hours, our blood sugar is low. Since we need blood sugar to fuel a run, morning exercise will use the fat stored in our tissues to supply the energy we need. (When we exercise after eating, we use the energy from the food we’ve just consumed.) In many cases, morning exercise may burn 20 percent more fat than later, post-food workouts.1 • Boost mood: Cardio workouts—swimming, running, even walking the dog—can elevate mood. When we exercise in the morning, we enjoy these effects all day. If you wait to exercise until the evening, you’ll end up sleeping through some of the good feelings. • Keep to your routine: Some studies suggest that we’re more likely to adhere to our workout routine when we do it in the morning.2 So if you find yourself struggling to stick with a plan, morning exercise, especially if you enlist a regular partner, can help you form a habit. • Build strength: Our physiology changes throughout the day. One example: the hormone testosterone, whose levels peak in the morning. Testosterone helps build muscle, so if you’re doing weight training, schedule your workout for those early-morning hours.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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“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.
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Italian police officers who took naps immediately before their afternoon and evening shifts had 48 percent fewer traffic accidents than those who didn’t nap.42 However, the returns from napping extend beyond vigilance. An afternoon nap expands the brain’s capacity to learn, according to a University of California–Berkeley study. Nappers easily outperformed non-nappers on their ability to retain information.43 In another experiment, nappers were twice as likely to solve a complex problem than people who hadn’t napped or who had spent the time in other activities.44 Napping boosts short-term memory as well as associative memory, the type of memory that allows us to match a face to a name.45 The overall benefits of napping to our brainpower are massive, especially the older we get.46 As one academic overview of the napping literature explains, “Even for individuals who generally get the sleep they need on a nightly basis, napping may lead to considerable benefits in terms of mood, alertness and cognitive performance. . . [It] is particularly beneficial to performance on tasks, such as addition, logical reasoning, reaction time, and symbol recognition.”47 Napping even increases “flow,” that profoundly powerful source of engagement and creativity.48
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We might think that superstars power straight through the day for hours on end. In fact, they practice with intense focus for forty-five-to ninety-minute bursts, then take meaningful restorative breaks. You can do the same. Pause like a pro and you might become one.
3. BEGINNINGS: STARTING RIGHT, STARTING AGAIN, AND STARTING TOGETHER
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Faced with problems as vexing as underperforming teenagers or flattened wages, we often search for solutions in the realm of what. What are people doing wrong? What can they do better? What can others do to help? But, more frequently than we realize, the most potent answers lurk in the realm of when. In particular, when we begin—the school day, a career—can play an outsize role in our personal and collective fortunes. For teenagers, beginning the school day before 8:30 a.m. can impair their health and hobble their grades, which, in turn, can limit their options and alter the trajectory of their lives. For somewhat older people, beginning a career in a weak economy can restrict opportunities and reduce earning power well into adulthood. Beginnings have a far greater impact than most of us understand. Beginnings, in fact, can matter to the end. Although we can’t always determine when we start, we can exert some influence on beginnings—and considerable influence on the consequences of less than ideal ones. The recipe is straightforward. In most endeavors, we should be awake to the power of beginnings and aim to make a strong start. If that fails, we can try to make a fresh start. And if the beginning is beyond our control, we can enlist others to attempt a group start. These are the three principles of successful beginnings: Start right. Start again. Start together.
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At one school, the number of car crashes for teen drivers fell by 70 percent after it pushed its start time from 7:35 a.m. to 8:55 a.m.6
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When an economist studied the Wake County, North Carolina, school system, he found that “a 1 hour delay in start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading tests by three percentile points,” with the strongest effects on the weakest students.12 But being an economist, he also calculated the cost-benefit ratio of changing the schedule and concluded that later start times delivered more bang for the educational buck than almost any other initiative available to policy makers, a view echoed by a Brookings Institution analysis.13 Yet the pleas of the nation’s pediatricians and its top public-health officials, as well as the experiences of schools that have challenged the status quo, have been largely ignored. Today, fewer than one in five U.S. middle schools and high schools follow the AAP’s recommendation to begin school after 8:30 a.m. The average start time for American adolescents remains 8:03 a.m., which means huge numbers of schools start in the 7 a.m. hour.14 Why the resistance? A key reason is that starting later is inconvenient for adults. Administrators must reconfigure bus schedules. Parents might not be able to drop off their kids on the way to work. Teachers must stay later in the afternoon. Coaches might have less time for sports practices. But beneath those excuses is a deeper, and equally troubling, explanation. We simply don’t take issues of when as seriously as we take questions of what. Imagine if schools suffered the same problems wrought by early start times—stunted learning and worsening health—but the cause was an airborne virus that was infecting classrooms. Parents would march to the schoolhouse to demand action and quarantine their children at home until the problem was solved. Every school district would snap into action. Now imagine if we could eradicate that virus and protect all those students with an already-known, reasonably priced, simply administered vaccine. The change would have already happened. Four out of five American school districts—more than 11,000—wouldn’t be ignoring the evidence and manufacturing excuses. Doing so would be morally repellent and politically untenable. Parents, teachers, and entire communities wouldn’t stand for it. The school start time issue isn’t new. But because it’s a when problem rather than a what problem such as viruses or terrorism, too many people find it easy to dismiss. “What difference can one hour possibly make?” ask the forty-and fifty-year-olds. Well, for some students, it means the difference between dropping out and completing high school.
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Lisa Kahn is more than a pretty good economist. She made her mark in the economics world by studying people like me—white males who graduated from college in the 1980s. Kahn, who teaches at the Yale School of Management, harvested data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which each year asks a representative sample of American young people questions about their education, health, and employment. From the data, she selected white men who had graduated from college between 1979 and 1989—and examined what happened to them over the next twenty years.* Her big discovery: When these men began their careers strongly determined where they went and how far they traveled. Those who entered the job market in weak economies earned less at the beginning of their careers than those who started in strong economies—no big surprise. But this early disadvantage didn’t fade. It persisted for as long as twenty years. “Graduating from college in a bad economy has a long-run, negative impact on wages,” she writes. The unlucky graduates who’d begun their careers in a sluggish economy earned less straight out of school than the lucky ones like me who’d graduated in robust times—and it often took them two decades to catch up. On average, even after fifteen years of work, people who’d graduated in high unemployment years were still earning 2.5 percent less than those who’d graduated in low unemployment years. In some cases, the wage difference between graduating in an especially strong year versus an especially weak one was 20 percent—not just immediately after college but even when these men had reached their late thirties.27 The total cost, in inflation-adjusted terms, of graduating in a bad year rather than a good year averaged about $100,000. Timing wasn’t everything—but it was a six-figure thing.
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Research on Stanford MBAs has found that the state of the stock market at the time of graduation shapes these graduates’ lifetime earnings. The chain of logic and circumstance here has three links. First, students are more likely to take jobs on Wall Street when they graduate in a bull market. By contrast, in bear markets, a sizable portion of graduates choose alternatives—consulting, entrepreneurship, or working for nonprofits. Second, people who work on Wall Street tend to remain working on Wall Street. Third, investment bankers and other financial professionals generally outearn those in other fields. As a result, “a person who graduates in a bull market” and goes into investment banking earns an additional $1.5 to $5 million more than “that same person would have earned if he or she had graduated during a bear market” and therefore had shied away from a Wall Street job.31
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Four Situations When You Should Go First 1. If you’re on a ballot (county commissioner, prom queen, the Oscars), being listed first gives you an edge. Researchers have studied this effect in thousands of elections—from school board to city council, from California to Texas—and voters consistently preferred the first name on the ballot.2 2. If you’re not the default choice—for example, if you’re pitching against a firm that already has the account you’re seeking—going first can help you get a fresh look from the decision-makers.3 3. If there are relatively few competitors (say, five or fewer), going first can help you take advantage of the “primacy effect,” the tendency people have to remember the first thing in a series better than those that come later.4 4. If you’re interviewing for a job and you’re up against several strong candidates, you might gain an edge from being first. Uri Simonsohn and Francesca Gino examined more than 9,000 MBA admissions interviews and found that interviewers often engage in “narrow bracketing”—assuming small sets of candidates represent the entire field. So if they encounter several strong applicants early in the process, they might more aggressively look for flaws in the later ones.5
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Four Situations When You Should Not Go First 1. If you are the default choice, don’t go first. Recall from the previous chapter: Judges are more likely to stick with the default late in the day (when they’re fatigued) rather than early or after a break (when they’re revived).6 2. If there are many competitors (not necessarily strong ones, just a large number of them), going later can confer a small advantage and going last can confer a huge one. In a study of more than 1,500 live Idol performances in eight countries, researchers found that the singer who performed last advanced to the next round roughly 90 percent of the time. An almost identical pattern occurs in elite figure skating and even in wine tastings. At the beginning of competitions, judges hold an idealized standard of excellence, say social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer. As the competition proceeds, a new, more realistic baseline develops, which favors later competitors, who gain the added advantage of seeing what others have done.7 3. If you’re operating in an uncertain environment, not being first can work to your benefit. If you don’t know what the decision-maker expects, letting others proceed could allow the criteria to sharpen into focus both for the selector and you.8 4. If the competition is meager, going toward the end can give you an edge by highlighting your differences. “If it was a weak day with many bad candidates, it’s a really good idea to go last,” says Simonsohn.9
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FOUR TIPS FOR MAKING A FAST START IN A NEW JOB You’ve read about the perils of graduating in a recession. We can’t do much to avoid that fate. But whenever we begin a new job—in a recession or a boom—we can influence how much we enjoy the job and how well we do. With that in mind, here are four research-backed recommendations for how to make a fast start in a new job. 1. Begin before you begin. Executive advisor Michael Watkins recommends picking a specific day and time when you visualize yourself “transforming” into your new role.10 It’s hard to get a fast start when your self-image is stuck in the past. By mentally picturing yourself “becoming” a new person even before you enter the front door, you’ll hit the carpet running. This is especially true when it comes to leadership roles. According to former Harvard professor Ram Charan, one of the toughest transitions lies in going from a specialist to a generalist.11 So as you think about your new role, don’t forget to see how it connects to the bigger picture. For one of the ultimate new jobs—becoming president of the United States—research has shown that one of the best predictors of presidential success is how early the transition began and how effectively it was handled.12 2. Let your results do the talking. A new job can be daunting because it requires establishing yourself in the organization’s hierarchy. Many individuals overcompensate for their initial nervousness and assert themselves too quickly and too soon. That can be counterproductive. Research from UCLA’s Corinne Bendersky suggests that over time extroverts lose status in groups.13 So, at the outset, concentrate on accomplishing a few meaningful achievements, and once you’ve gained status by demonstrating excellence, feel free to be more assertive. 3. Stockpile your motivation. On your first day in a new role, you’ll be filled with energy. By day thirty? Maybe less so. Motivation comes in spurts—which is why Stanford psychologist B. J. Fogg recommends taking advantage of “motivation waves” so you can weather “motivation troughs.”14 If you’re a new salesman, use motivation waves to set up leads, organize calls, and master new techniques. During troughs, you’ll have the luxury of working at your core role without worrying about less interesting peripheral tasks. 4. Sustain your morale with small wins. Taking a new job isn’t exactly like recovering from an addiction, but programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous do offer some guidance. They don’t order members to embrace sobriety forever but instead ask them to succeed “24 hours at a time,” something Karl Weick noted in his seminal work on “small wins.”15 Harvard professor Teresa Amabile concurs. After examining 12,000 daily diary entries by several hundred workers, she found that the single largest motivator was making progress in meaningful work.16 Wins needn’t be large to be meaningful. When you enter a new role, set up small “high-probability” targets and celebrate when you hit them. They’ll give you the motivation and energy to take on more daunting challenges further down the highway.
4. MIDPOINTS: WHAT HANUKKAH CANDLES AND MIDLIFE MALAISE CAN TEACH US ABOUT MOTIVATION
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Maferima Touré-Tillery and Ayelet Fishbach are two social scientists who study how people pursue goals and adhere to personal standards. A few years ago, they were searching for a real-world domain in which to explore these two ideas when they realized that Hanukkah represented an ideal field study. They tracked the behavior of more than two hundred Jewish participants who observed the holiday, measuring whether—and, crucially, when—they lit the candles. After eight nights of collecting data, here’s what they found: On the first night, 76 percent of the participants lit the candles. On the second night, the percentage dropped to 55. On the ensuing nights, fewer than half the participants lit the candles—with the number climbing above 50 percent again only on night eight. Over the course of Hanukkah, the researchers conclude, “adherence to standards followed a U-shaped pattern.”10
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Just as the bell curve represents one natural order, the U-curve represents another. We can’t eliminate it. But as with any force of nature—thunderstorms, gravity, the human drive to consume calories—we can mitigate some of its harms. The first step is simply awareness. If the midlife droop is inevitable, just knowing that eases some of the pain, as does knowing that the state is not permanent. If we’re aware that our standards are likely to sink at the midpoint, that knowledge can help us temper the consequences. Even if we can’t hold off biology and nature, we can prepare for their ramifications.
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Midpoints, as we’re seeing, can have a dual effect. In some cases, they dissipate our motivation; in other cases, they activate it. Sometimes they elicit an “oh, no” and we retreat; other times, they trigger an “uh-oh” and we advance. Under certain conditions, they bring the slump; under others, they deliver the spark. Think of midpoints as a psychological alarm clock. They’re effective only when we set the alarm, when we can hear its annoying bleep, bleep, bleep go off, and when we don’t hit the snooze button. But with midpoints, as with alarm clocks, the most motivating wake-up call is one that comes when you’re running slightly behind.
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Jonah Berger of the University of Pennsylvania and Devin Pope of the University of Chicago analyzed more than 18,000 National Basketball Association games over fifteen years, paying special attention to the games’ scores at halftime. It’s not surprising that teams ahead at halftime won more games than teams that were behind. For example, a six-point halftime lead gives a team about an 80 percent probability of winning the game. However, Berger and Pope detected an exception to the rule: Teams that were behind by just one point were more likely to win. Indeed, being down by one at halftime was more advantageous than being up by one. Home teams with a one-point deficit at halftime won more than 58 percent of the time. Indeed, trailing by one point at halftime, weirdly, was equivalent to being ahead by two points.20 Berger and Pope then looked at ten years’ worth of NCAA match-ups, nearly 46,000 games in all, and found the same, though somewhat smaller, effect. “Being slightly behind [at halftime] significantly increases a team’s chance of winning,” they write. And when they examined the scoring patterns in greater detail, they found that the trailing teams scored a disproportionate number of their points immediately after the halftime break. They came out strong at the start of the second half.
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The best hope for turning a slump into a spark involves three steps. First, be aware of midpoints. Don’t let them remain invisible. Second, use them to wake up rather than roll over—to utter an anxious “uh-oh” rather than a resigned “oh, no.” Third, at the midpoint, imagine that you’re behind—but only by a little. That will spark your motivation and maybe help you win a national championship.
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1. Set interim goals. To maintain motivation, and perhaps reignite it, break large projects into smaller steps. In one study that looked at losing weight, running a race, and accumulating enough frequent-flier miles for a free ticket, researchers found that people’s motivation was strong at the beginning and end of the pursuit—but at the halfway mark became “stuck in the middle.”1
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2. Publicly commit to those interim goals.
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3. Stop your sentence midway through. Ernest Hemingway published fifteen books during his lifetime, and one of his favorite productivity techniques was one I’ve used myself (even to write this book). He often ended a writing session not at the end of a section or paragraph but smack in the middle of a sentence. That sense of incompletion lit a midpoint spark that helped him begin the following day with immediate momentum. One reason the Hemingway technique works is something called the Zeigarnik effect, our tendency to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones.2
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4. Don’t break the chain (the Seinfeld technique). Jerry Seinfeld makes a habit of writing every day. Not just the days when he feels inspired—every single damn day. To maintain focus, he prints a calendar with all 365 days of the year. He marks off each day he writes with a big red X. “After a few days, you’ll have a chain,” he told software developer Brad Isaac. “Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”3
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5. Picture one person your work will help. To our midpoint-motivation murderer’s row of Hemingway and Seinfeld, let’s add Adam Grant, the Wharton professor and author of Originals and Give and Take. When he’s confronted with tough tasks, he musters motivation by asking himself how what he’s doing will benefit other people.4
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ORGANIZE YOUR NEXT PROJECT WITH THE FORM-STORM-PERFORM METHOD In the 1960s and 1970s, organizational psychologist Bruce Tuckman developed an influential theory of how groups move through time. Tuckman believed that all teams proceeded through four stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing. We can combine pieces of Tuckman’s model with Gersick’s research on team phases to create a three-phase structure for your next project.
5. ENDINGS: MARATHONS, CHOCOLATES, AND THE POWER OF POIGNANCY
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For example, to run a marathon, participants must register with race organizers and include their age. Alter and Hershfield found that 9-enders are overrepresented among first-time marathoners by a whopping 48 percent. Across the entire life span, the age at which people were most likely to run their first marathon was twenty-nine. Twenty-nine-year-olds were about twice as likely to run a marathon as twenty-eight-year-olds or thirty-year-olds. Meanwhile, first-time marathon participation declines in the early forties but spikes dramatically at age forty-nine. Someone who’s forty-nine is about three times more likely to run a marathon than someone who’s just a year older.
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What the end of the decade does seem to trigger, for good and for ill, is a reenergized pursuit of significance. As Alter and Hershfield explain: Because the approach of a new decade represents a salient boundary between life stages and functions as a marker of progress through the life span, and because life transitions tend to prompt changes in evaluations of the self, people are more apt to evaluate their lives as a chronological decade ends than they are at other times. 9-enders are particularly preoccupied with aging and meaningfulness, which is linked to a rise in behaviors that suggest a search for or crisis of meaning.3
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The motivating power of endings is one reason that deadlines are often, though not always, effective. For example, Kiva is a nonprofit organization that finances small low-interest or interest-free loans to micro-entrepreneurs. Prospective borrowers must complete a lengthy online application to be considered for a loan. Many of them begin the application but don’t finish it. Kiva enlisted the Common Cents Lab, a behavioral research laboratory, to come up with a solution. Their suggestion: Impose an ending. Give people a specific deadline a few weeks away for completing the application. On one level, this idea seems idiotic. A deadline surely means that some people won’t finish the application in time and therefore will be disqualified for the loan. But Kiva found that when it sent applicants a reminder message with a deadline, compared with a reminder message without a deadline, 24 percent more borrowers completed the application.8 Likewise, in other studies, people given a hard deadline—a date and time—are more likely to sign up to be organ donors than those for whom the choice is open-ended.9 People with a gift certificate valid for two weeks are three times more likely to redeem it than people with the same gift certificate valid for two months.10 Negotiators with a deadline are far more likely to reach an agreement than those without a deadline—and that agreement comes disproportionately at the very end of the allotted time.11
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“The suggestion that adding mildly pleasant years to a very positive life does not enhance, but decreases, perceptions of the quality of life is counterintuitive,” write social scientists Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi. “We label this the James Dean Effect because a life that is short but intensely exciting, such as the storied life led by the actor James Dean, is seen as most positive.”15 The James Dean effect is another example of how endings alter our perception.
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You might have heard of the “peak-end rule.” Formulated in the early 1990s by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues including Don Redelmeier and Barbara Fredrickson, who studied patient experiences during colonoscopies and other unpleasant experiences, the rule says that when we remember an event we assign the greatest weight to its most intense moment (the peak) and how it culminates (the end).16 So a shorter colonoscopy in which the final moments are painful is remembered as being worse than a longer colonoscopy that happens to end less unpleasantly even if the latter procedure delivers substantially more total pain.17 We downplay how long an episode lasts—Kahneman calls it “duration neglect”—and magnify what happens at the end.18
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Carstensen called her theory “socioemotional selectivity.” She argued that our perspective on time shapes the orientation of our lives and therefore the goals we pursue. When time is expansive and open-ended, as it is in acts one and two of our lives, we orient to the future and pursue “knowledge-related goals.” We form social networks that are wide and loose, hoping to gather information and forge relationships that can help us in the future. But as the horizon nears, when the future is shorter than the past, our perspective changes.
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Moreover, what spurs editing isn’t aging per se, Carstensen found, but endings of any sort. For example, when she compared college seniors with new college students, students in their final year displayed the same kind of social-network pruning as their seventy-something grandparents. When people are about to switch jobs or move to a new city, they edit their immediate social networks because their time in that setting is ending. Even political transitions have this effect. In a study of people in Hong Kong four months before the territory’s handover from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, both young people and older folks narrowed their circles of friends.
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The people informed that the fifth chocolate was the last—that the supposed taste test was now ending—reported liking that chocolate much more than the people who knew it was simply next. In fact, people informed that a chocolate was last liked it significantly more than any other chocolate they’d sampled. They chose chocolate number five as their favorite chocolate 64 percent of the time (compared with the “next” group, which chose that chocolate as their favorite 22 percent of the time). “Participants who knew they were eating the final chocolate of a taste test enjoyed it more, preferred it to other chocolates, and rated the overall experience as more enjoyable than other participants who thought they were just eating one more chocolate in a series.”31
6. SYNCHING FAST AND SLOW: THE SECRETS OF GROUP TIMING
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Yet a consensus about what the clock says is only the first ingredient. Groups that depend on synchronization for success—choirs, rowing teams, and those Mumbai dabbawalas—abide by three principles of group timing. An external standard sets the pace. A sense of belonging helps individuals cohere. And synchronization both requires and heightens well-being. Put another way, groups must synchronize on three levels—to the boss, to the tribe, and to the heart.
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In 1995, two social psychologists, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, put forth what they called “the belongingness hypothesis.” They proposed that “a need to belong is a fundamental human motivation . . . and that much of what human beings do is done in the service of belongingness.” Other thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Abraham Maslow, had made similar claims, but Baumeister and Leary set about finding empirical proof. The evidence they assembled was overwhelming (their twenty-six-page paper cites more than three hundred sources). Belongingness, they found, profoundly shapes our thoughts and emotions. Its absence leads to ill effects, its presence to health and satisfaction.8
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Working in harmony with others, science shows, makes it more likely we’ll do good. For instance, research by Bahar Tunçgenç and Emma Cohen of the University of Oxford has found that children who played a rhythmic, synchronized clap-and-tap game were more likely than children who played nonsynchronous games to later help their peers.31 In similar experiments, children who first played synchronous games were far more likely than others to say that if they were to come back for more activities they would be interested in playing with a child who wasn’t in their original group.32 Even swinging in time with another child on a swing set increased subsequent cooperation and collaborative skills.33 Operating in synch expands our openness to outsiders and makes us more likely to engage in “pro-social” behavior. In other words, coordinating makes us better people—and being better people makes us better coordinators.
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He synchs first to the boss—that 10:51 a.m. train from the Vile Parle station. He synchs next to the tribe—his fellow white-hatted walas who speak the same language and know the cryptic code. But he ultimately synchs to something more sublime—the heart—by doing difficult, physically demanding work that nourishes people and bonds families.
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SEVEN WAYS TO FIND YOUR OWN “SYNCHER’S HIGH” Coordinating and synchronizing with other people is a powerful way to lift your physical and psychological well-being. If your life doesn’t involve such activities now, here are some ways to find your own syncher’s high: 1. Sing in a chorus. Even if you’ve never been part of a musical group, singing with others will instantly deliver a boost. For choral meetups around the world, go to https://www.meetup.com/topics/choir/. 2. Run together. Running with others offers a trifecta of benefits: exercising, socializing, and synching—all in one. 3. Row crew. Few activities require such perfect synchrony as team rowing. It’s also the complete workout: According to some physiologists, a 2,000-meter race burns as many calories as playing back-to-back full-court basketball games. 4. Dance. Ballroom and other types of social dancing are all about synchronizing with another person and coordinating movements with music. 5. Join a yoga class. As if you needed to hear one more reason that yoga is good for you, doing it communally may give you a synching high. 6. Flash mob. For something more adventurous than social dancing and more boisterous than yoga, consider a flash mob—a lighthearted way for strangers to perform for other strangers. They’re usually free. And—surprise—most flash mobs are advertised in advance. 7. Cook in tandem. Cooking, eating, and cleaning up by yourself can be a drag. But doing it together requires synchronization and can deliver uplift (not to mention a decent meal). Find tandem-cooking tips at https://www.acouplecooks.com/menu-for-a-cooking-date-tips-for-cooking-together/.
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Once a group is operating in synch, members’ jobs aren’t done. Group coordination doesn’t abide by the set-it-and-forget-it logic of the Crock-Pot. It requires frequent stirring and a watchful eye. That means to maintain a well-timed group you should regularly—once a week or at least once a month—ask these three questions: 1. Do we have a clear boss—whether a person or some external standard—who engenders respect, whose role is unambiguous, and to whom everyone can direct their initial focus? 2. Are we fostering a sense of belonging that enriches individual identity, deepens affiliation, and allows everyone to synchronize to the tribe? 3. Are we activating the uplift—feeling good and doing good—that is necessary for a group to succeed?
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2. Mind Meld. This exercise promotes a more conceptual type of synchronization. Find a partner. You count to three together, then each one of you says a word—any word you want—at the same time. Suppose you say “banana” and your partner says “bicycle.” Now you both count to three and utter a word that somehow connects the two previous words. In this case, you both might say “seat.” Mind meld! But if the two of you offer different words, which is far more likely—suppose one says “store” and the other “wheel”—then the process repeats, counting to three and saying a word that connects “store” and “wheel.” Did you both come up with the same word? (I’m thinking “cart”—how about you?) If not, continue until you both say the same word. It’s harder than it sounds, but it really builds your mental coordination muscles.
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TECHNIQUES FOR PROMOTING BELONGING IN YOUR GROUP 1. Reply quickly to e-mail. When I asked Congressional Chorus artistic director David Simmons what strategies he used to promote belonging, his answer surprised me. “You reply to their e-mails,” he said. The research backs up Simmons’s instincts. E-mail response time is the single best predictor of whether employees are satisfied with their boss, according to research by Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist who is now a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. The longer it takes for a boss to respond to their e-mails, the less satisfied people are with their leader.1 2. Tell stories about struggle. One way that groups cohere is through storytelling. But the stories your group tells should not only be tales of triumph. Stories of failure and vulnerability also foster a sense of belongingness. For instance, Gregory Walton of Stanford University has found that for individuals who might feel apart from a group—for instance, women in a predominantly male environment or students of color in a largely white university—these types of stories can be powerful.2 Simply reading an account of another student whose freshman year didn’t go perfectly but who eventually found her place boosted subsequent feelings of belongingness. 3. Nurture self-organized group rituals. Cohesive and coordinated groups all have rituals, which help fuse identity and deepen belongingness. But not all rituals have equal power. The most valuable emerge from the people in the group, instead of being orchestrated or imposed by those at the top. For rowers, maybe it’s a song they all sing during warm-ups. For choir members, maybe’s it’s a coffee shop where everyone gathers before each rehearsal. As Stanford’s Robb Willer has discovered, “Workplace social functions are less effective if initiated by the manager. What’s better are worker-established engagements set at times and places that are convenient for the team.”3 Organic rituals, not artificial ones, generate cohesion.
7. THINKING IN TENSES: A FEW FINAL WORDS
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The same principle applies to the future. Two prominent social scientists—Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia—have argued that while “all animals are on a voyage through time,” humans have an edge. Antelope and salamanders can predict the consequences of events they’ve experienced before. But only humans can “pre-experience” the future by simulating it in our minds, what Gilbert and Wilson call “prospection.”12
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Awe lives “in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” as two scholars put it. It “is a little studied emotion . . . central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art.”19 It has two key attributes: vastness (the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures).
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The product of writing—this book—contains more answers than questions. But the process of writing is the opposite. Writing is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe. I used to believe in ignoring the waves of the day. Now I believe in surfing them. I used to believe that lunch breaks, naps, and taking walks were niceties. Now I believe they’re necessities. I used to believe that the best way to overcome a bad start at work, at school, or at home was to shake it off and move on. Now I believe the better approach is to start again or start together. I used to believe that midpoints didn’t matter—mostly because I was oblivious to their very existence. Now I believe that midpoints illustrate something fundamental about how people behave and how the world works. I used to believe in the value of happy endings. Now I believe that the power of endings rests not in their unmitigated sunniness but in their poignancy and meaning. I used to believe that synchronizing with others was merely a mechanical process. Now I believe that it requires a sense of belonging, rewards a sense of purpose, and reveals a part of our nature. I used to believe that timing was everything. Now I believe that everything is timing.
NOTES
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42. Sergio Garbarino et al., “Professional Shift-Work Drivers Who Adopt Prophylactic Naps Can Reduce the Risk of Car Accidents During Night Work,” Sleep 27, no. 7 (2004): 1295–1302. 43. Felipe Beijamini et al., “After Being Challenged by a Video Game Problem, Sleep Increases the Chance to Solve It,” PloS ONE 9, no. 1 (2014): e84342. 44. Bryce A. Mander et al., “Wake Deterioration and Sleep Restoration of Human Learning,” Current Biology 21, no. 5 (2011): R183–84; Felipe Beijamini et al., “After Being Challenged by a Video Game Problem, Sleep Increases the Chance to Solve It,” PloS ONE 9, no. 1 (2014): e84342. 45. Nicole Lovato and Leon Lack, “The Effects of Napping on Cognitive Functioning,” Progress in Brain Research 185 (2010): 155–66; Sara Studte, Emma Bridger, and Axel Mecklinger, “Nap Sleep Preserves Associative but Not Item Memory Performance,” Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 120 (2015): 84–93. 46. Catherine E. Milner and Kimberly A. Cote, “Benefits of Napping in Healthy Adults: Impact of Nap Length, Time of Day, Age, and Experience with Napping,” Journal of Sleep Research 18, no. 2 (2009): 272–81; Scott S. Campbell et al., “Effects of a Month-Long Napping Regimen in Older Individuals,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 59, no. 2 (2011): 224–32; Junxin Li et al., “Afternoon Napping and Cognition in Chinese Older Adults: Findings from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study Baseline Assessment,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 65, no. 2 (2016): 373–80. 47. Catherine E. Milner and Kimberly A. Cote, “Benefits of Napping in Healthy Adults: Impact of Nap Length, Time of Day, Age, and Experience with Napping,” Journal of Sleep Research 18, no. 2 (2009): 272–81. 48. This is especially true when coupled with bright light. See Kosuke Kaida, Yuji Takeda, and Kazuyo Tsuzuki, “The Relationship Between Flow, Sleepiness and Cognitive Performance: The Effects of Short Afternoon Nap and Bright Light Exposure,” Industrial Health 50, no. 3 (2012): 189–96.
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6. Kyla Wahlstrom et al., “Examining the Impact of Later High School Start Times on the Health and Academic Performance of High School Students: A Multi-Site Study,” Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (2014). See also Robert Daniel Vorona et al., “Dissimilar Teen Crash Rates in Two Neighboring Southeastern Virginia Cities with Different High School Start Times,” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 7, no. 2 (2011): 145–51.
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12. Finley Edwards, “Early to Rise? The Effect of Daily Start Times on Academic Performance,” Economics of Education Review 31, no. 6 (2012): 970–83. 13. Brian A. Jacob and Jonah E. Rockoff, “Organizing Schools to Improve Student Achievement: Start Times, Grade Configurations, and Teacher Assignments,” Education Digest 77, no. 8 (2012): 28–34.
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27. Lisa B. Kahn, “The Long-Term Labor Market Consequences of Graduating from College in a Bad Economy,” Labour Economics 17, no. 2 (2010): 303–16.
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31. Paul Oyer, “The Making of an Investment Banker: Stock Market Shocks, Career Choice, and Lifetime Income,” Journal of Finance 63, no. 6 (2008): 2601–28.
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1. Gary Klein, “Performing a Project Premortem,” Harvard Business Review 85, no. 9 (2007): 18–19. 2. Marc Meredith and Yuval Salant, “On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects,” Political Behavior 35, no. 1 (2013): 175–97; Darren P. Grant, “The Ballot Order Effect Is Huge: Evidence from Texas,” May 9, 2016. Available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2777761. 3. Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 17 (2011): 6889–92. 4. Antonia Mantonakis et al., “Order in Choice: Effects of Serial Position on Preferences,” Psychological Science 20, no. 11 (2009): 1309–12. 5. Uri Simonsohn and Francesca Gino, “Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment from 10 Years of MBA Admissions Interviews,” Psychological Science 24, no. 2 (2013): 219–24. 6. Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso. “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 17 (2011): 6889–92. 7. Lionel Page and Katie Page, “Last Shall Be First: a Field Study of Biases in Sequential Performance Evaluation on the Idol Series,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 73, no. 2 (2010): 186–98; Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both (New York: Crown Business, 2015), 229. 8. Wändi Bruine de Bruin, “Save the Last Dance for Me: Unwanted Serial Position Effects in Jury Evaluations,” Acta Psychologica 118, no. 3 (2005): 245–60. 9. Steve Inskeep and Shankar Vedantan, “Deciphering Hidden Biases During Interviews,” National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, March 6, 2013, interview with Uri Simonsohn, citing Uri Simonsohn and Francesca Gino, “Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment from 10 Years of MBA Admissions Interviews,” Psychological Science 24, no. 2 (2013): 219–24. 10. Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, read by Kevin T. Norris (Flushing, NY: Gildan Media LLC, 2013). Audiobook. 11. Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011). 12. Harrison Wellford, “Preparing to Be President on Day One,” Public Administration Review 68, no. 4 (2008): 618–23. 13. Corinne Bendersky and Neha Parikh Shah, “The Downfall of Extraverts and the Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process of Status Allocation in Task Groups,” Academy of Management Journal 56, no. 2 (2013): 387–406. 14. Brian J. Fogg, “A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design” in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (New York: ACM, 2009). For an explanation of motivational waves, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqUSjHjIEFg. 15. Karl E. Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psychologist 39, no. 1 (1984): 40–49. 16. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy,
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20. Jonah Berger and Devin Pope, “Can Losing Lead to Winning?” Management Science 57, no. 5 (2011): 817–27.
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3. Adam L. Alter and Hal E. Hershfield, “People Search for Meaning When They Approach a New Decade in Chronological Age,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 48 (2014): 17066–70.
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8. Kristen Berman, “The Deadline Made Me Do It,” Scientific American, November 9, 2016, available at https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/the-deadline-made-me-do-it/. 9. John C. Birkimer et al., “Effects of Refutational Messages, Thought Provocation, and Decision Deadlines on Signing to Donate Organs,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 24, no. 19 (1994): 1735–61. 10. Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, “Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences,” Journal of Marketing Research 47, no. 5 (2010): 933–44. 11. Uri Gneezy, Ernan Haruvy, and Alvin E. Roth, “Bargaining Under a Deadline: Evidence from the Reverse Ultimatum Game,” Games and Economic Behavior 45, no. 2 (2003): 347–68; Don A. Moore, “The Unexpected Benefits of Final Deadlines in Negotiation,” Journal of Experimental
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24. Laura L. Carstensen, Derek M. Isaacowitz, and Susan T. Charles, “Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity,” American Psychologist 54, no. 3 (1999): 165–81.
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31. Ed O’Brien and Phoebe C. Ellsworth, “Saving the Last for Best: A Positivity Bias for End Experiences,” Psychological Science 23, no. 2 (2012): 163–65.
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8. Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497–529.
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31. Bahar Tunçgenç and Emma Cohen, “Interpersonal Movement Synchrony Facilitates Pro-Social Behavior in Children’s Peer-Play,” Developmental Science (forthcoming). 32. Bahar Tunçgenç and Emma Cohen, “Movement Synchrony Forges Social Bonds Across Group Divides,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016): 782.
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1. Duncan Watts, “Using Digital Data to Shed Light on Team Satisfaction and Other Questions About Large Organizations,” Organizational Spectroscope, April 1, 2016, available at https://medium.com/@duncanjwatts/the-organizational-spectroscope-7f9f239a897c. 2. Gregory M. Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen, “A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students,” Science 331, no. 6023 (2011): 1447–51; Gregory M. Walton et al., “Two Brief Interventions to Mitigate a ‘Chilly Climate’ Transform Women’s Experience, Relationships, and Achievement in Engineering,” Journal of Educational Psychology 107, no. 2 (2015): 468–85. 3. Lily B. Clausen, “Robb Willer: What Makes People Do Good?” Insights by Stanford Business, November 16, 2015, available at https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/robb-willer-what-makes-people-do-good.