When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(23)
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. For others, it’s the difference between struggling with academics and mastering math and language courses—which can later affect their likelihood of going to college or finding a good job. In some cases, this small difference in timing could alleviate suffering and even save lives.
Starts matter. We can’t always control them. But this is one area where we can and therefore we must.
STARTING AGAIN
At some point in your life, you probably made a New Year’s resolution. On January 1 of some year, you resolved to drink less, exercise more, or call your mother every Sunday. Maybe you kept your resolution and rectified your health and family relations. Or maybe, by February, you were pasted on the couch watching Legend of Kung Fu Rabbit on Netflix while downing a third glass of wine and ducking Mom’s Skype requests. Regardless of your resolution’s fate, though, the date you chose to motivate yourself reveals another dimension of the power of beginnings.
The first day of the year is what social scientists call a “temporal landmark.”15 Just as human beings rely on landmarks to navigate space—“To get to my house, turn left at the Shell station”—we also use landmarks to navigate time. Certain dates function like that Shell station. They stand out from the ceaseless and forgettable march of other days, and their prominence helps us find our way.
In 2014 three scholars from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania published a breakthrough paper in the science of timing that broadened our understanding of how temporal landmarks operate and how we can use them to construct better beginnings.
Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis began by analyzing eight and a half years of Google searches. They discovered that searches for the word “diet” always soared on January 1—by about 80 percent more than on a typical day. No surprise, perhaps. However, searches also spiked at the start of every calendar cycle—the first day of every month and the first day of every week. Searches even climbed 10 percent on the first day after a federal holiday. Something about days that represented “firsts” switched on people’s motivation.
The researchers found a similar pattern at the gym. At a large northeastern university where students had to swipe a card to enter workout facilities, the researchers collected more than a year’s worth of data on daily gym attendance. As with the Google searches, gym visits increased “at the start of each new week, month, and year.” But those weren’t the only dates that got students out of the dorm and onto a treadmill. Undergraduates “exercised more both at the start of a new semester . . . and on the first day after a school break.” They also hit the gym more immediately after a birthday—with one glaring exception: “Students turning 21 tend to decrease their gym activity following their birthday.”16
For the Google searchers and college exercisers, some dates on the calendar were more significant than others. People were using them to “demarcate the passage of time,” to end one period and begin another with a clean slate. Dai, Milkman, and Riis called this phenomenon the “fresh start effect.”
To establish a fresh start, people used two types of temporal landmarks—social and personal. The social landmarks were those that everyone shared: Mondays, the beginning of a new month, national holidays. The personal ones were unique to the individual: birthdays, anniversaries, job changes. But whether social or personal, these time markers served two purposes.
First, they allowed people to open “new mental accounts” in the same way that a business closes the books at the end of one fiscal year and opens a fresh ledger for the new year. This new period offers a chance to start again by relegating our old selves to the past. It disconnects us from that past self’s mistakes and imperfections, and leaves us confident about our new, superior selves. Fortified by that confidence, we “behave better than we have in the past and strive with enhanced fervor to achieve our aspirations.”17 In January advertisers often use the phrase “New Year, New You.” When we apply temporal landmarks, that’s what’s going on in our heads.18 Old Me never flossed. But New Me, reborn on the first day back from summer vacation, will be a fiend about oral hygiene.