When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(43)

Now use the other two or three minutes to lay out your plan for the following day. This will help close the door on today and energize you for tomorrow.

Bonus: If you’ve got an extra minute left, send someone—anyone—a thank-you e-mail. I mentioned in chapter 2 that gratitude is a powerful restorative. It’s an equally powerful form of elevation.


The semester or school year

At the end of a school term, many students feel a sense of relief. But with a little thought and planning, they can also experience a sense of elevation. That’s why some inspired teachers are using endings as meaning makers. For example, Anthony Gonzalez, an economics teacher at Nazareth Academy outside of Chicago, has his seniors write a letter to themselves—which he mails to them five years later. “In it, they include wisdom from high school, guesses on careers, pay, what adventures they hope to go on, stock prices, and so on. It’s a very cool opportunity for them to reflect.” And it’s a good way for Gonzalez to reconnect with them when they’re twenty-three and high school is a distant memory.

At North High School in Des Moines, Iowa, choir teacher Vanessa Brady enlists her husband, Justin, on the last day of school to bring in griddles, butter, syrup, and his homemade pancake batter for an end-of-the-year Pancake Day.

For the last class of a term, Alecia Jioeva, who teaches at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, takes her students to a small restaurant where they offer toasts to one another.

At the beginning of the school year, Beth Pandolpho, a language arts teacher at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School North in New Jersey, asks her students to write six-word memoirs that she hangs on a clothesline stretched around the perimeter of the classroom. At the end of the year, students write another six-word memoir. They read the earlier memoir aloud, remove it from the clothesline, and then read the new one. “To me,” Pandolpho says, “it feels a little bit like bringing our time together full circle.”


A vacation

How a vacation ends shapes the stories we later tell about the experience. As University of British Columbia psychologist Elizabeth Dunn explained to New York magazine, “[T]he very end of an experience seems to disproportionately affect our memory of it,” which means that “going out with a bang, going on the hot air balloon or whatever on the last day of the trip, could . . . be a good strategy for maximizing reminiscence.”8 As you plan your next vacation, you needn’t save all the best for last. But you’ll enjoy the vacation more, both in the moment and in retrospect, if you consciously create an elevating final experience.


A purchase

For all the words scratched and bellowed about the importance of customer service, we’ve generally given short shrift to the end of encounters with customers and clients. Yes, some restaurants present guests with free chocolates when servers bring the check. And, yes, at Nordstrom stores, sales associates famously walk out from behind the counter to personally hand customers the purchase they’ve just made. But imagine if more organizations treated endings with greater respect and creativity. For example, what if at the end of the meal in which the guests have spent above a certain amount, restaurants handed the table a card asking the group to select one of three charities that the restaurant will make a small donation to in their name? Or what if someone at a store who’s made a major purchase—a computer, an appliance, an expensive item of clothing—departs the establishment past a line of employees saying, “Thank you,” and giving that customer a round of applause?

Or what if an author, as an act of gratitude, offered readers something they didn’t expect?

Hmmm. Good idea. Let’s try that now.

As a thank-you for choosing this book and for making it to the end of this chapter and this section, I’d like to send you a signed bookplate—for free. Just e-mail your name and postal mailing address to [email protected]—and I’ll get it to you. No cost. Nothing more you need to do. Just a small token of thanks. The end.





6.


SYNCHING FAST AND SLOW

The Secrets of Group Timing

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

—WILLA CATHER, My ántonia





On a muggy February morning, as what passes for sunshine glints off giant billboards advertising 50 percent discounts on wedding clothes India’s largest city is coming to life. Here in Mumbai, the tang of smoke hangs in the air. Cars, trucks, and auto-rickshaws clog the roads, honking like embittered geese. Office workers in slacks and saris stream through alleys and wash onto commuter trains. And Ahilu Adhav, age forty, adjusts his white cap and jumps on his bicycle to begin his rounds.

Adhav pedals through Mumbai’s Vile Parle (pronounced VEE-luh PAR-lay) neighborhood, past street vendors selling everything from fresh cabbage to packaged socks, and steers toward the front of a small apartment building. He hops off the bike—the ability to quickly dismount moving vehicles is one of Adhav’s many skills—strides into the building, and rides the elevator to the third-floor apartment of the Turakhia family.

It’s 9:15 a.m. He presses the buzzer once, then twice. The door opens. After a quick apology for making him wait, Riyankaa Turakhia hands Adhav a maroon canvas bag about the size of a gallon of milk. Inside the bag is a cylindrical stack of four metal containers. Inside those containers, called tiffins, is her husband’s lunch—cauliflower, yellow dahl, rice, and roti. In three and a half hours, this home-cooked lunch will appear on her husband’s desk in downtown Mumbai, about thirty kilometers (nineteen miles) away. And in about seven hours, the canvas bag and its empty tiffins will reappear at this same door.