When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(44)
Adhav is a dabbawala. (Dabba is the Hindi word for those metal tiffin boxes, wala is an amalgam of “doer” and “merchant.”) During the first sixty-eight minutes of his Monday, he will collect fifteen such lunches, tying each bag to the handlebars or the rear of his bike. Then, coordinating with a team of a dozen other dabbawalas who’ve collected their own bags elsewhere in this sprawling neighborhood of about half a million people, he will sort the lunches, hoist twenty of them on his back, board the luggage compartment of a commuter train, and deliver the lunches to shops and offices in the business districts of the city.
He’s not alone: About 5,000 dabbawalas work in Mumbai. Each day they deliver more than 200,000 lunches. They do this six times a week nearly every week of the year—with an accuracy that rivals FedEx and UPS.
“In today’s world, we’re very health conscious,” Turakhia tells me at Adhav’s first stop. “We crave homemade food. And these guys do an excellent job of delivering the dabba to the right place at exactly the right time.” Her husband, who works for a brokerage firm, leaves for the office at 7 a.m., too early for anyone to prepare a proper lunch. But the dabbawalas offer the family time and peace of mind. “They’re very, very coordinated and synchronized,” Turakhia says. In the five years she’s enlisted Adhav and his crew, for a fee affordable to most middle-class urban families (about $12 per month), they’ve misdelivered the lunch or delivered it late exactly zero times.
Dabbawala Ahilu Adhav fastens a lunch to the back of his bicycle.
What the dabbawalas manage to do every day verges on preposterous. Mumbai operates with a twenty-four-hour full-tilt intensity, a move-or-be-mowed-down ethos that makes Manhattan seem like a fishing village. Mumbai is not just one of the largest cities in the world; it is also one of the most densely populated. The sheer shoulder-to-shoulder humanity of the city itself—12 million citizens crammed into an area one-fifth the size of Rhode Island—gives it a throbbing, anarchic intensity. “A city in heat,” journalist Suketu Mehta calls it.1 Yet the walas somehow haul home-cooked meals in canvas bags through the chaos of Mumbai with military precision and punctuality.
More impressive, the dabbawalas are so deeply in synch with one another, so finely attuned to the tempo of their task, that they pull off the feat—200,000 lunch deliveries every day—without any technology beyond bicycles and trains.
No smartphones. No scanners. No bar codes. No GPS.
And no mistakes.
Human beings rarely go it alone. Much of what we do—at work, at school, and at home—we do in concert with other people. Our ability to survive, even to live, depends on our capacity to coordinate with others in and across time. Yes, individual timing—managing our beginnings, midpoints, and endings—is crucial. But group timing is just as important, and what lies at its heart is crucial for us to know.
Consider a patient wheeled into an emergency room with a serious heart attack. Whether that patient lives or dies depends on how well coordinated the medical professionals are—whether they can deftly synchronize their activities while the clock, and perhaps the patient’s life, ticks away.
Or take less dire circumstances that require group timing. Software engineers who work on different continents in different time zones to ship a product by a certain date. Event planners who coordinate multiple crews of technicians, hospitality workers, and presenters so that a three-day conference can unfold on time and free of calamities. Political candidates who organize campaign volunteers to canvass neighborhoods, register voters, and distribute yard signs before Election Day. Schoolteachers who marshal sixty students on and off a bus and through a museum during a field trip. Sports teams. Marching bands. Shipping companies. Factories. Restaurants. All require individuals to work in tempo, to synchronize their actions with others, to move to a common beat and toward a common goal.
The breakthrough that most enabled us to do these things came in the late 1500s, when Galileo Galilei was a nineteen-year-old medical student at the University of Pisa. Inspired by a swinging chandelier, Galileo conducted a few makeshift experiments on pendulums. He discovered that what most affected a pendulum’s motion was the length of its string—and that for any given length of string a pendulum always took the same amount of time to make one full swing. That periodicity, he concluded, made pendulums ideal timekeepers. Galileo’s insight led to the invention of pendulum clocks a few decades later. And pendulum clocks, in turn, produced something that we don’t realize is a relatively new concept: “the time.”
Imagine life without even a rough consensus on what time it is. You’d find a way to manage. But it would be cumbersome and inefficient in ways we can scarcely fathom today. How would you know when to make a delivery, expect a bus, or take your kid to the dentist? Pendulum clocks, which were far more accurate than their predecessors, remade civilization by allowing people to synchronize their actions. Public clocks appeared in town squares and began establishing a single standard of time. Two o’clock for me became two o’clock for you. And this notion of public time—“the time”—greased the wheels of commerce and lubricated social interaction. Before long, local time standardization became regional, and regional standardization became national, giving rise to predictable schedules and the 5:16 p.m. train to Poughkeepsie.2
This ability to synchronize our actions with others, liberated by the cascade Galileo set off a few centuries ago, has been critical to human progress. Yet a consensus about what the clock says is only the first ingredient. Groups that depend on synchronization for success—choirs, rowing teams, and those Mumbai dabbawalas—abide by three principles of group timing. An external standard sets the pace. A sense of belonging helps individuals cohere. And synchronization both requires and heightens well-being.