When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(24)
The second purpose of these time markers is to shake us out of the tree so we can glimpse the forest. “Temporal landmarks interrupt attention to day-to-day minutiae, causing people to take a big picture view of their lives and thus focus on achieving their goals.”19 Think about those spatial landmarks again. You might drive for miles and barely notice your surroundings. But that glowing Shell station on the corner makes you pay attention. It’s the same with fresh start dates. Daniel Kahneman draws a distinction between thinking fast (making decisions anchored in instinct and distorted by cognitive biases) and thinking slow (making decisions rooted in reason and guided by careful deliberation). Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions.20
The implications of the fresh start effect, like the forces that propel it, are also personal and social. Individuals who get off to a stumbling start—at a new job, on an important project, or in trying to improve their health—can alter their course by using a temporal landmark to start again. People can, as the Wharton researchers write, “strategically [create] turning points in their personal histories.”21
Take Isabel Allende, the Chilean-American novelist. On January 8, 1981, she wrote a letter to her deathly ill grandfather. That letter formed the foundation of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she has started each subsequent novel on that same date, using January 8 as a temporal landmark to make a fresh start on a new project.22
In later research, Dai, Milkman, and Riis found that imbuing an otherwise ordinary day with personal meaning generates the power to activate new beginnings.23 For instance, when they framed March 20 as the first day of spring, the date offered a more effective fresh start than simply identifying it as the third Thursday in March. For Jewish participants in their study, reframing October 5 as the first day after Yom Kippur was more motivating than thinking of it as the 278th day of the year. Identifying one’s own personally meaningful days—a child’s birthday or the anniversary of your first date with your partner—can erase a false start and help us begin anew.
Organizations, too, can enlist this technique. Recent research has shown that the fresh start effect applies to teams.24 Suppose a company’s new quarter has a rough beginning. Rather than waiting until the next quarter, an obvious fresh start date, to smooth out the mess, leaders can find a meaningful moment occurring sooner—perhaps the anniversary of the launch of a key product—that would relegate previous screwups to the past and help the team get back on track. Or suppose some employees are not regularly contributing to their retirement accounts or failing to attend important training sessions. Sending them reminders on their birthdays rather than on some other day could prompt them to start acting. Consumers might also be more open to messages on days framed as fresh starts, Riis found.25 If you’re trying to encourage people to eat healthier, a campaign calling for Meatless Mondays will be far more effective than one advocating Vegan Thursdays.
New Year’s Day has long held a special power over our behavior. We turn the page on the calendar, glimpse all those beautiful empty squares, and open a new account book on our lives. But we typically do that unwittingly, blind to the psychological mechanisms we’re relying on. The fresh start effect allows us to use the same technique, but with awareness and intention, on multiple days. After all, New Year’s resolutions are hardly foolproof. Research shows that a month into a new year only 64 percent of resolutions continue to be pursued.26 Constructing our own temporal landmarks, especially those that are personally meaningful, gives us many more opportunities to recover from rough beginnings and start again.
STARTING TOGETHER
In June of 1986, I graduated from college—unemployed. In July of 1986, I moved to Washington, D.C., to begin my postcollegiate life. By August of 1986, I’d found employment and was working in my first job. The elapsed time between receiving my diploma in a university auditorium and settling into my desk in downtown D.C. was less than sixty days. (And I didn’t even spend all those days looking for work. Some of the time I was packing and moving. Some of it I was working at a bookstore to support myself during my brief job search.)
As much as I prefer to believe that my swift path from jobless graduate to youthful working stiff was due to my sterling credentials and winning personality, the more plausible reason is one that won’t surprise you by now: timing. I graduated at an auspicious time. In 1986, the United States was surging out of a deep recession. The national unemployment rate that year was 7 percent—not an amazing figure but a huge drop from 1982 and 1983, when the jobless rate reached nearly 10 percent. This meant that it was simpler for me to find a job than for those who’d entered the job market just a few years earlier. It’s not that complicated: You don’t need a degree in economics to grasp that finding work is easier when the unemployment rate is 7 percent than when it’s 10 percent. However, you have to be a pretty good economist to understand that the advantage I gained from the pure luck of beginning my work life in a relative boom lasted well beyond my first job.
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.*