When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(37)

What’s more, nearing the end of a decade seems to quicken a runner’s pace. People who had run multiple marathons posted better times at age twenty-nine and thirty-nine than during the two years before or after those ages.2



The energizing effect of the end of a decade doesn’t make logical sense to marathon-running scientist Morozovsky. “Keeping track of our age? The Earth doesn’t care. But people do, because we have short lives. We keep track to see how we’re doing,” he told me. “I wanted to accomplish this physical challenge before I hit sixty. I just did.” For Yi, the Australian artist, the sight of that chronological mile marker roused her motivation. “As I was approaching the big three-oh, I had to really achieve something in my twenty-ninth year,” she said. “I didn’t want that last year just to slip by.”

However, flipping life’s odometer to a nine doesn’t always trigger healthy behavior. Alter and Hershfield also discovered that “the suicide rate was higher among 9-enders than among people whose ages ended in any other digit.” So, apparently, was the propensity of men to cheat on their wives. On the extramarital-affair website Ashley Madison, nearly one in eight men were twenty-nine, thirty-nine, forty-nine, or fifty-nine, about 18 percent higher than chance would predict.

What the end of the decade does seem to trigger, for good and for ill, is a reenergized pursuit of significance. As Alter and Hershfield explain:

Because the approach of a new decade represents a salient boundary between life stages and functions as a marker of progress through the life span, and because life transitions tend to prompt changes in evaluations of the self, people are more apt to evaluate their lives as a chronological decade ends than they are at other times. 9-enders are particularly preoccupied with aging and meaningfulness, which is linked to a rise in behaviors that suggest a search for or crisis of meaning.3



Reaching the end also stirs us to act with greater urgency in other arenas. Take the National Football League. Each game lasts sixty minutes, two thirty-minute halves. In the ten years spanning the 2007–8 and 2016–17 seasons, according to STATS LLC, teams scored a total of 119,040 points. About 50.7 percent of those points came in the first half and about 49.3 percent in the second half—not much of a difference, especially considering that teams with leads late in the game often try not to score but run out the clock instead. But look a few statistical layers deeper, to the minute-by-minute scoring patterns, and the energizing effect of endings is apparent. During these seasons, teams scored a total of about 3,200 points in the final minute of the games, which was higher than almost all other one-minute game segments. But it was nothing compared to the nearly 7,900 points teams scored in the final minute of the first half. During the minute the half is ending, when the team that possesses the ball has every incentive to put points on the board, teams score well more than double what they score during any other minute of the game.4

Clark Hull, even though he was born forty years before the NFL’s founding, would not have been surprised. Hull was a prominent American psychologist of the early twentieth century, one of the leading figures in behaviorism, which held that human beings behave not much differently from rats in a maze. In the early 1930s, Hull proposed what he called the “goal gradient hypothesis.”5 He built a long runway that he divided into equal sections. He placed food at every “finish line.” Then he sent rats down the runway and timed how fast they ran in each section. He found that “animals in traversing a maze will move at a progressively more rapid pace as the goal is approached.”6 In other words, the closer the rats got to the vittles, the faster they ran. Hull’s goal gradient hypothesis has held up far longer than most other behaviorist insights. At the beginning of a pursuit, we’re generally more motivated by how far we’ve progressed; at the end, we’re generally more energized by trying to close the small gap that remains.7

The motivating power of endings is one reason that deadlines are often, though not always, effective. For example, Kiva is a nonprofit organization that finances small low-interest or interest-free loans to micro-entrepreneurs. Prospective borrowers must complete a lengthy online application to be considered for a loan. Many of them begin the application but don’t finish it. Kiva enlisted the Common Cents Lab, a behavioral research laboratory, to come up with a solution. Their suggestion: Impose an ending. Give people a specific deadline a few weeks away for completing the application. On one level, this idea seems idiotic. A deadline surely means that some people won’t finish the application in time and therefore will be disqualified for the loan. But Kiva found that when it sent applicants a reminder message with a deadline, compared with a reminder message without a deadline, 24 percent more borrowers completed the application.8 Likewise, in other studies, people given a hard deadline—a date and time—are more likely to sign up to be organ donors than those for whom the choice is open-ended.9 People with a gift certificate valid for two weeks are three times more likely to redeem it than people with the same gift certificate valid for two months.10 Negotiators with a deadline are far more likely to reach an agreement than those without a deadline—and that agreement comes disproportionately at the very end of the allotted time.11

Think of this phenomenon as a first cousin of the fresh start effect—the fast finish effect. When we near the end, we kick a little harder.

To be sure, the effect is not uniform or entirely positive. For instance, as we close in on a finish line, having multiple ways to cross it can slow our progress.12 Deadlines, especially for creative tasks, can sometimes reduce intrinsic motivation and flatten creativity.13 And while imposing a finite end to negotiations—for labor-management contracts or even peace agreements—can often speed a resolution, that doesn’t always lead to the best or most enduring results.14