Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 190

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing," by Daniel H. Pink.

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.

 

 

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.  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.

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.

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.

Call it the “uh-oh effect.” 

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. That injects a healthy dose of stress—Uh-oh, we’re running out of time!—that revives our motivation and reshapes our strategy.

What Adhav does is fundamentally different from delivering a Domino’s pizza. He sees one member of a family early in the morning, then another later in the day. He helps the former nourish the latter and the latter appreciate the former. Adhav is the connective tissue that keeps families together. That pizza delivery guy might be efficient, but his work is not transcendent. Adhav, though, is efficient because his work is transcendent. 

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.

I used to believe that timing was everything. Now I believe that everything is timing.