When or lose
Fresh from the “hmm … that never occurred to me” front is a powerful opening introduction in a new thought-provoking book about time and timing.
Capt. William Thomas Turner is one of those figures whose role associated with a prominent historical event completely overshadows his name. In his new book When, author Daniel Pink posits the idea that Captain Turner’s fateful decisions back in 1915 resulted in catastrophe possibly because of the timing surrounding them.
Turner was at the helm of the Lusitania on May 7 as it approached the Irish coast in a dense fog at a cautious 15 knots. He had received news that German U-boats were in the area, and so when the fog lifted around 1 p.m. he gave orders to increase speed to 18 knots.
That wasn’t “full speed ahead,” which would have been 21 knots—fast enough to outrun a sub. Inexplicably, about 45 minutes later he also ordered a time-consuming bearing check that required the ship to travel in a straight line rather than a zig-zag maneuver.
Plowing ahead slow and unswerving, the Lusitania was essentially a sitting duck. At just after 2 o’clock, a German torpedo tore into the ocean liner’s starboard hull. The rest is nautical tragedy.
Turner’s decisions spawned countless conspiracy theories.
Pink’s provocative notion: Maybe all the myth and lore surrounding the Lusitania is just that. “Maybe,” he argues, “Captain Turner just made some bad decisions. And maybe those decisions were bad because he made them in the afternoon.”
To produce the book, Pink and his team pored over more than 700 studies ranging from economics and anesthesiology to chronobiology and social psychology to get a tighter grasp on the “hidden science of timing.”
Data collection in the digital age is powerful; consumer behavior is analyzable in ways never before imagined, since most of us live out large chunks of our lives using smartphones and the Internet.
And across this vast bulkhead of scientific research, delving deep into the patterns and cycles that pervade so many aspects of biological life and psychological nature, Pink unearthed some remarkable insights.
To begin with, the natural oscillation of everyone’s day involves a predictable peak-trough-rebound pattern, as entrenched biologically as the tides.
Whether the studies involved Twitter tweets and the tone of their content, earnings calls from public companies and the negativity they produced, or mock jurors looking over the same sets of trial facts with disparate verdicts, the up-down-up curve of a three-stage day held true in shaping how we think, feel and act.
The Bermuda triangle of our day, Pink points out, is the trough—that dip in our daily cycle that tends to emerge about seven hours after waking.
That’s when Captain Turner erred lethally. It’s also when hospital statistics go haywire.
Whether it’s fatal complications with anesthesia, or over-prescription of antibiotics, or hospital employees not washing their hands diligently, afternoons produce far more medical mistakes and calamities than mornings.
Pink found that there is an antidote to troughs and their declines in vigilance, however, and it’s hardly anything new under the sun. Restorative breaks—even naps—can return mental capacity and decision-making back to the level of peaks and recoveries.
Science tells us breaks aren’t signs of sloth, he says, but signs of strength.
Some of the scientific research is staggering in its scale. In a 2015 study of handwashing at some three dozen U.S. medical centers, researchers scoured over data from radio frequency ID chips on sanitizer dispensers that communicated with chips on employee badges.
The volume was massive: Studying the behavior of more than 4,000 caregivers (most of which were nurses) resulted in almost 14 million opportunities for hand hygiene.
Afternoons reduced the likelihood of handwashing by as much as 38 percent—a serious problem given the increased risk of infections, and their cost in dollars and lives.
Obviously, hospitals can’t shut down in the afternoons. But understanding more of the science around timing allows for better management of issues related to the neglect fostered by troughs.
Some medical centers have instituted “vigilance breaks” in the afternoons to let surgical teams refocus on tasks at hand in formal, methodical ways. Similar to a “timeout” in sports, they stop, reset collectively, and restart.
Vigilance breaks have proven successful, with improved outcomes and reduced mistakes.
In education, studies have consistently shown higher test scores in the mornings, even controlled for all manner of student differences.
But the learning solution isn’t merely moving test times. Students fall into the same broad chronotypes as adults—larks, owls and what Pink calls third birds—but at different times depending on their age.
Adolescents, for example, tend to be notorious night owls, whose peak times are later in the day or early evening. Problem-solving studies involving logic and analytics clearly indicate that those spike during a person’s peak.
Yet high schools constantly force students to apply that kind of thinking during their troughs.
With a growing body of science around timing, it isn’t a matter of whether conventional thinking about daily routines and their social inertia will be seriously challenged—it’s a matter of when.