How to Be Healthier, Happier and More Productive: It’s All in the Timing
You’ve probably made a few New Year’s resolutions, solemn promises to
yourself to behave better in 2018. You might have pondered how you’re
going to accomplish those goals, who could help you and why you need to
change.
But if you’re like most people—and social science
suggests that you and I are like most people—you’ve neglected a question
that could help you actually stick to those resolutions: “When?”
We all know that timing matters. But most of our decisions on
this front are intuitive and haphazard. Timing, we believe, is an art.
In
fact, timing is really a science. For several decades, researchers in
dozens of fields—from economics to anesthesiology to social
psychology—have been unearthing the hidden science of timing. In
randomized controlled experiments, field studies and the analysis of
massive data sets, they are exploring questions that span the human
experience. How do beginnings, midpoints and endings alter our actions
and memories? How do groups synchronize in time? How do even the verb
tenses we use affect our behavior? Time, they have discovered, shapes
our productivity, health and well-being in powerful but often invisible
ways.
Much of what we consider “natural” units of time—seconds,
hours, weeks—are really fences that our ancestors constructed to corral
time. But one unit remains beyond our control: We inhabit a planet that
turns on its axis at a steady speed in a regular pattern, exposing us to
consistent periods of light and dark. The day is perhaps the most
important way that we divide, configure and evaluate our time. By
understanding the science of the day—and by giving more attention to the
question of “when”—we can improve the effectiveness and success of our
resolutions.
So how can we harness time to be healthier, happier and more productive?
Resolution: Get a promotion, get a raise or otherwise do well at work.
Each year, many of us vow to get more done at work and perhaps even
make a few creative breakthroughs. Yet many of us don’t realize how much
the time of day matters to our performance.
Scientists began
measuring the effect of the time of day on human brain power more than a
century ago, when the 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. They’ve drawn three big conclusions.
First,
our cognitive abilities don’t remain static over the course of a day.
During the 16 or so hours we’re awake, they change—often in a regular,
foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster and more creative in some
parts of the day than others.
Second, these daily fluctuations
can be extreme. “The 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,” write Russell Foster, a
neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford, and Leon
Kreitzman in their book “Rhythms of Life.” Other research has shown
that time-of-day effects can explain 20% of the variance in human
performance on cognitive undertakings.
Third, how we do depends
on what we’re doing. We’re more effective at some tasks early in the day
and at other tasks later in the day.
From big-data analyses of 500 million tweets to studies led by Nobel
Prize-winning scientists, research has shown that we generally
experience the day in three acts: a peak, a trough and a rebound. Most
of us experience the pattern in that order. But the roughly one in five
of us who have evening “chronotypes”—people who are night owls—tend to
proceed in reverse order. (To determine whether you’re an owl, consider a
day when you don’t have to awaken to an alarm clock. What is the
midpoint between the time you go to sleep and the time you wake up? If
it’s 5:30 a.m. or later, you’re probably an owl.)
During the
peak, our ability to focus is at its best. 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, these sharp-minded analytic capacities crest in the late
morning or around noon. This is when we are most vigilant, when we can
keep distractions from penetrating our cerebral gates. That makes the
peak the best time to tackle work that requires heads-down attention and
analysis, such as writing a legal brief or auditing financial
statements.
Vigilance, though, has its limits. Alertness and
energy levels tend to plummet during the afternoons. And with that drop
comes a corresponding fall in our ability to remain focused and
constrain our inhibitions. This is the second stage: The trough, which
usually occurs in the early to midafternoon.
The effects of the trough can be significant. In a
2016 study,
Harvard University’s Francesca Gino and two Danish researchers examined
four years of standardized test results for two million students in
Denmark and matched scores to the time of day the students took the
test. They found that students randomly assigned to take the tests in
the afternoon scored considerably lower than those who took the test in
the morning—an effect equivalent to missing two weeks of school.
The trough is an especially dangerous time for health-care professionals and their patients. In a
study published in 2006
in Quality and Safety in Health Care, researchers at Duke Medical
Center reviewed about 90,000 surgeries at the hospital and found that
harmful anesthesia errors were three times more likely in procedures
that began at 3 p.m. than at 8 a.m.
The afternoon trough is the
Bermuda Triangle of our days—the place where effectiveness and good
intentions disappear. This is the time to do your mindless
administrative work, such as answering email, filing papers and filling
out expense reports.
The third stage is the rebound, which for
most of us occurs in the late afternoon and early evening. During this
stage, we tend to excel at a different type of work.
In 2011,
two American psychologists, Mareike Weith and Rose Zacks, posed what
are called “insight problems”—which require creative, rather than
algorithmic, thinking and have nonobvious, surprising solutions—to 428
people, about half of whom were vigilant morning thinkers. These
participants fared better on these problems not during their supposedly
more optimal mornings but much later in the day—a phenomenon the
researchers dubbed “the inspiration paradox.”
In the late
afternoons and early evenings, most people are somewhat less vigilant
than during the peak, but more alert and in a better mood than during
the trough. That combination has advantages. A boosted mood leads to
greater openness. A slight reduction in vigilance lets in a few
distractions—but those distractions can help us spot connections that we
might have missed when our filters were tighter. So we should move
brainstorming sessions and other creative pursuits to the rebound stage.
(Again, because night owls move through the day in the reverse order,
their rebound period is the morning.)
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