When

When – Daniel H. Pink

Positive affect – language revealing that tweeters felt active, engaged, and hopeful-generally rose in the morning, plummeted in the afternoon, and climbed back up again in the early evening.

Fortunately, behavioral scientists have other methods to understand what we are thinking and feeling, and one is especially good for chartering hour-to-hour changes in how we feel. It’s called Day Reconstruction Method (DRM)… DRM research, for instance, has sown that during any given day people typically are least happy while commuting and most happy while canoodling.

Afternoon calls were more negative, irritable, and combative than morning calls

An important takeaway from our study for corporate executives is that communications with investors, and probably other critical managerial decisions and negotiations, should be conducted earlier in the day

Vigilance, inhibition, and the daily secret to high performance

Meet Linda. She’s 31, single, outspoken, and very bright. In college, Linda majored in philosophy . As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and participated in antinuclear demonstrations.

Before I tell you more about Linda, let me ask you a question about her. Which is more likely? A) Linda is a bank teller or B) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Faced with this question, most people answer (B). It makes intuitive sense, right? A justice-seeking, antinuke philosophy major? That sure sounds like someone who would be an active feminist. But (A) is – and must be the – the correct response. The answer isn’t a matter of fact. Linda isn’t real. Nor is it a matter of opinion. It’s entirely a matter of logic. Bank tellers who are also feminists-just like bank tellers who yodel or despise cilantro-are a subset of all bank tellers, and subsets can never be larger than the full set they’re a part of. In 1983, Daniel Kahnerman, he of Nobel Prize and DRM fame, and his late collaborator, Amos Tversky, introduced the Linda problem to illustrate what’s called the “conjunction fallacy,” one of many way our reasoning goes awry.

When researchers have posed the Linda problem at different times of day-for instance, at 9am and 8pm in one well-known experiment-timing often predicted whether participants arrived at the correct answer or slipped on a cognitive banana peel. People were much more likely to get it right earlier in the day than later. There was on intriguing and important exception to the findings (which I’ll discuss soon). But as with executives on earnings calls, performance was generally strong in the beginning of the day, then worsened as the hours ticked by.

The same pattern held for stereotypes. Researchers asked other participants to assess the guilt of a fictitious criminal defendant. All the “jurors” read the same set of facts. Bet for half of them, the defendant’s name was Robert Garner, and for the other half, it was Roberto Garcia. When people made their decisions in the morning, there was no difference in the guilty verdicts later in the day, they were much more likely to believe that Garcia was guilty and Garner was innocent. For this group of participants, mental keenness, as shown by rationally evaluating evidence, was greater early in the day. And mental squishiness, as evidenced by resorting to stereotypes, increased as the day wore on…

…First, our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change – often in a regular, forseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others.

Second, these daily fluctuations are more extreme than we realize. “The performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol,” according to Russell Foster, a neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford. Other research has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20% of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.

Third, how we do depends on what we’re doing. “Perhaps the main conclusion to be drawn from studies on the effects of time of day on performance,” says British psychologist Simon Folkard, “is that the best time to perform a particular task depends on the nature of that task.”

When Harvard’s Francesca Gino and two Danish researchers looked at for years the test results for 2 million day of school children and mash the scores the time of day the students took the test, they found an interesting, if disturbing, correlation. Student scored higher in the mornings then in the afternoons. Indeed, for every hour later in the day the test word ministered, scores fell little more.

Having math in the first two. To the school day instead of the last two periods increases the math GPA of students as well as their scores on California state wide tests

Chapter 1: Time hackers handbook

First, determine your chronotype using the three question method on page 28 whereby complaining that MCTQ questionnaire online (danpink.com/mctq)

How to figure out your daily when: for more granular sense of your daily wind, tractor behaviors systematically for a week. Set your phone alarm to beat every 90 minutes. Each time you hear the alarm, answer these three questions:

What are you doing?
On a scale one to ten, how mentally alert do you feel right now?
On a scale of one to 10 how physically energetic you feel right now?

When to exercise: exercise in the morning to lose weight. When we first wake up, having not eaten for at least eight hours, our blood sugar is low. Since we need blood sugar to fuel a run, morning exercise will use the fat store their tissues to supply the energy need we need. When we exercise after eating, we use the energy from the food we just consumed. In many cases, morning exercise may burn 20% more fat than later, post-food workouts.

Don’t drink coffee immediately after you wake up. The moment we awaken, our bodies begin producing cortisol, the stress hormone that kickstarts our groggy souls. But it turns out that caffeine interferes with the production of cortisol – just starting the day immediately with a cup of coffee barely boosts our wakefulness. Worse, early morning coffee increases our tolerance for caffeine, which means we must gulp evermore to obtain its benefits. The better approach is to drink the first half and hour 90 minutes after waking up, winter quarters all production has peaked in the caffeine can do its magic.

Schedule talk therapy appointments for the morning. Research in the emerging field of psychoneuroendocrinology says therapy sessions maybe most effective in the morning. The reason goes back to cortisol. Yes, it’s the stress hormone. But it also enhances learning. During therapy sessions in the morning, when cortisol levels are highest, patients are more focused and absorb advice more deeply.

The hospital due may not be a real name. But it is a real place. Everything I’ve describes what happens in Modern Medical Ctr., Street afternoon

consider colonoscopies. I’ve reached the age where prudence calls for submitting to this procedure to detect the presence or possibility of colon cancer. But now that I’ve read the research, I would never accept an appointment that wasn’t before noon.

When the Danish students had a 30 minute break to eat play and chat before test, their scores did not decline. In fact, they increased. As the researchers note, “a break causes an improvement that is larger than the hourly deterioration.” That is, scores go down afternoon. But scores go up by a higher amount after breaks. Taking a test in the afternoon without a break produces scores that are equivalent to spending less time in school each year and having parents with lower incomes and less education. But taking the same test after 20 to 30 minute break leads to scores that are equivalent to student spending three additional weeks in the classroom and having somewhat wealthier and better educated parents. And the benefits were the greatest for the lowest performing students.

Outside beats inside. Nature breaks may replenish us the most. Being close to trees, plants, rivers, and streams is a powerful mental restorative, one his potency most of us don’t appreciate. For example, people who take short walks outdoors return with better managing greater replacement than people who walked indoors. What’s more, while people predicted they be happier being outside, they underestimated how much happier. Taking a few minutes to being in nature is better than spending those minutes in the building. Looking out a window into nature is a better micro- Break been looking at a wall or your cubicle.

The most important meal of the day.

For example, the 2016 study looked at what than 800 workers ( mostly in information technology, education, and media) from 11 different organizations, some of them regularly took lunch breaks away from their desks and some of whom did not. The non-desk lunchers we’re better able to contend with workplace stress and showed less exhaustion and greater vigor not just during the remainder of the day but also for one year later.

Lunch breaks, the researcher say, offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being–particularly for employees and cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs. For groups that require high levels of cooperation– Say, firefighters– eating together also enhances team performance.

Not just any lunch will do, however. The most powerful lunch breaks have two key ingredients–autonomy and detachment. Autonomy – exercising some control over what you do, how you do it, when you do it, who you do with –is critical for high performance, especially in complex tasks. But it’s equally crucial when we take breaks in complex tasks.”The extent to which employees can determine how they utilize their lunch breaks maybe just as important as what employees do during your lunch,” Says one set of researchers.

Detachment – both psychological and physical dash is also critical. Same focused on work during lunch, or even using a phone for social media, can intensify fatigue, according to multiple studies, but shifting one’s focus away from the office has the opposite effect. Longer lunch breaks and lunch breaks away from the office can be prophylactic against afternoon peril. Some of these researchers suggests that”organizations could promote one standard coverage by giving options to spend lunch breaks in different ways that enable detachment, such as spending a break in a nonwork environment for offering a space for relaxing activities.”

Sleeping on the job

While naps between 30 and 90 minutes can produce some long-term benefits, they come with steep costs. The ideal naps– those that combine effectiveness with efficiency – are far shorter, usually between 10 and 20 minutes. For instance, an Australian study published in the Journal sleep found a five minute nap’s that little to reduce fatigue, increased vigor, or sharpen thinking. But 10 minute naps had Positive effects that lasted nearly 3 hours. Slightly longer naps are also effective. But once the nap lasted be on the 20 minute mark, our body and brain begin to pay a price. That price is known as “sleep inertia”– The confused, boggy feeling I typically had upon waking. Having to recover from sleep inertia–all the time splashing water on my face, shaking my upper body is like a soaked golden retriever, and searching the drawers for candy to get some sugar into my system– detracts from the naps benefits, as this chart makes clear.

With brief 10 to 20 minutes naps, the effect on cognitive functioning is positive from the moment of awakening. But with slightly longer snoozes, the napper begins in negative territory– that sleep inertia–and must dig herself out. With naps of more than an hour, cognitive functioning drops or even longer before it reaches a prenap state and eventually turns positive. In general, concludes one analysis of about 20 years of napping research, healthy adults “Should ideally nap for approximately 10 to 20 minutes.” Such brief naps “are ideal for workplace settings for performance immediately upon awakening is usually required.”

The experimenters divided participants in the three groups and gave them all at 30 minute midafternoon break before sitting another driving simulator. One group received a placebo pill. The second receipt two hundred mg of caffeine. The third received that same 200 mg of caffeine and then took a brief nap. When it came time to perform, the caffeine only group outperformed the placebo group. But the group that had caffeine and then had a nap easily bested them both. Since caffeine takes about 25 minutes to enter the blood stream, they’re getting a secondary b boost from the drug by the time their naps were ending. Other researchers have found the same results– that caffeine, usually in the form of coffee, followed by a nap of 10 to 20 minutes, is the ideal technique for staving off sleepiness in increasing performance.

Chapter 2: time hackers handbook

Set a timer on your phone for 25 minutes. If you napped for more than about a half hour, sleep inertia takes over and you need extra time to recover. If you’re not for less than five minutes, you don’t get much benefit. But nap between 10 and 20 minutes measurably boost alertness and mental function, and don’t leave you feeling even sleepier than you were before. Since it takes most people about seven minutes tonight off, the 25 minutes countdown clock is ideal. And of course, when you wake up, the caffeine is beginning to kick in.

The most accomplished filing this practice a lot in the morning, take off the afternoon, and practice a little more in the evening. In Ericsson study, one factor that distinguish the best from the rest is that they took complete breaks during the afternoon (many even nap as part of the routine), whereas nonexperts were less rigorous about pauses. We might think that superstars power straight to the day for hours on end. In fact, they practice was intense focus for 45 to 90 minutes bursts then take meaningful restorative breaks.

Chapter 3: Beginnings

Many school districts from Dobbs ferry, New York, to Houston, Texas, to Melbourne Australia, have heeded the evidence and shown impressive results. For example, one study examined three years of data on 9000 students from eight high schools in Minnesota, Colorado, and Wyoming that had changed her schedule is to begin school after 8:35 AM. Students earn higher grades in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies improve their performance on state and national standardized test. At one school, the number of car crashes for teen drivers fell by 70% after pushed at start time from 7:35 AM to 8:55 AM.

Other research and teaching hospitals found that patients in July and August had an 18% greater chance of surgery problems in a 41% greater chance of dying in surgery than patients did in April and May. Hey Nick there have you heard of something called the July effective teaching hospitals like The general public needs to know the city what you think that like general public knows of the Saints what is that you have life you should go to different hospital

Sustain your morale with small wins. Taking a new job isn’t exactly like recovering from an addiction, but program such as Alcoholics Anonymous due offer some guidance. They don’t order members to embrace sobriety forever but instead asked them to succeed “24 hours at a time,” something Karl Weick noted in his seminal work on ”small wins.” Harvard professor Teresa Amabile concurs. After examining 12,000 daily diary entries by several hundred workers, she found that the single largest motivator was making progress and meaningful work. Winston it need to be largely meaningful.

Well-being slumps in midlife. Social scientist asked the question “on a scale of 0 to 10, how happy are you?” the results, even controlling for income and demographics, we’re shaped in a shallow U. people in their 20s and 30s were reasonably happy, people in their 40s and 50s west so, and people from about 55 onward happier once again.

Mehta often begins Hanukkah with zest and inns with result but slacks in the middle. She sometimes neglect lighting candles on nights 3, 4, 5, and six – and thus ends the holiday with candles still in the box. And she’s not alone

Maferima Toure-Tillery ad Ayelet Fishbach are two social scientists who study how people pursue goals and adhere to personal standards. A few years ago, they were searching for a real-world domain in which to explore these two ideas when they realize that Hanukkah represented an ideal field study. They check the behavior of more than 200 Jewish participants who observe the holiday, measuring whether–and, crucially, when–they let the candles. After eight nights of collecting data, here’s what they found: on the first night, 76% of the participants lit the candles. On the second night, the percentage dropped to 55. On the ensuing nights, fewer than half the participants lit the candles– with the number climbing above 50% again only on Night eight.

Over the course of Hanukkah, the researchers conclude, “adherence to standards followed a U-shaped pattern.”

But perhaps the slump and easy explanation. Maybe less religious participants, unlike you’re more observant counterparts, we’re opting out in the middle and lowering the average. They tested for that possibility. They found the U-shaped pattern became more pronounced for the most religious participants. There were even more likely than others to light the candles on night 1 and eight. But in the middle of Hanukkah, “their behavior was almost indistinguishable from those of less religious participants.”

The researcher surmised that what was going on it was ”signaling.” We all want others to think well of us. For some people, the lighting of Hanukkah candles, often done in front of others, is a signal of religious virtue. However, the celebrants believe the signals that mattered most, the ones that projected their images most powerfully, were those at the beginning and end. the middle of didn’t matter as much. And they turned out to be right. When they conducted a subsequent experiments in which they asked people to assess the religiousness of three fictitious characters based on when those characters lit candles, ”Participants thought the persons who did not like the menorah on the first and last night were less religious than the people who skipped the ritual on the fifth night.”

In the middle, we relax our standards, perhaps because others relax their assessments of us. At midpoints, for reasons that are allusive but enlightening, we cut corners– As one last experiment shows. Toure-Tillery and Fishbach also engaged other participants and what they claimed was a test of how young adult perform on skills they hadn’t used much since childhood. They handed people five cards, each of which had a shape drawn on it, the shape is always the same, but it was rotated into a different position on each card. They gave people scissors and ask them to cut out the shapes as carefully as possible. Then the researchers presented the cut out shapes to lab workers not involved in the experiment and then ask them to rate, on a 1 to 10 scale, the cutting accuracy of the five shapes.

The result? Participant says her skills rose at the beginning and end but slumped in the middle.

When we reach a mid point, sometimes we slump, but other times we jump. A Mental siren alerts us that we’ve squandered half of our time. That injects a healthy dose of stress–oh, we’re running out of time!–That revives our motivation and reshapes our strategy.

Think of midpoints as psychological alarm clocks. They’re effective only when we set the alarm, when we can hear it’s annoying beep, beep, beep go off, and when we don’t hit the snooze button. But with midpoints, as with alarm clocks, the most motivating wake up call is one that comes when you’re running slightly behind.

Berger and Pope look at 10 years worth of NCAA matchups, nearly 46,000 games in all, and found the same, though somewhat smaller, effect. “ being slightly behind at halftime significantly increases a teams chance of winning,” they write. And when they examine the scoring patterns in greater detail, they found that the trailing teams scored a disproportionate number of their points immediately after the halftime break. They came out strong at the start of the second half.

The results? Three groups match their first half performance, but one did considerably better– the people who believed they were trailing by a little. Merely telling people they were slightly behind on the lead them to exert more effort.

First, be aware of midpoints. Don’t let them remain invisible. Second, use them to wake up rather than rollover– to utter an anxious uh-oh rather than a resigned oh-no. third, at the midpoint, imagine that you’re behind– but only by a little. That will spark your motivation and maybe help you win a national championship.

Picture one person your work will help. To our midpoint motivation murderers row of Hemingway and Seinfeld, let’s add Adam Grant, the Wharton professor and author of Originals and Give and Take. When he’s confronted with tough tasks, he musters motivation by asking himself how what he’s doing will benefit other people. The slump of how can I continue? Becomes the spark of how can I help? So if you’re feeling stuck in the middle of a project, Picture one person who will benefit from your efforts. Dedicating your worked to that person will deepen your dedication to your task.

For all the Strum und Drang phase one, your team probably hasn’t accomplished much yet. That was Gersick’s key insight. So use the midpoint – and the uh-oh effect it brings – to set direction and accelerate the pace. The University of Chicago’s Ayelet Fishbach, whose work on Hanukkah candles I described earlier, has found that when team commitment to achieving the goal was high, it’s best to emphasize the work that remains. But when team commitment is low, it’s wiser to emphasize progress that has already been made even if it’s not massive. Figure out your own team’s commitment and move accordingly. As you set the path, remember that teams generally become less open to new ideas and solutions after midpoint. However, there’re also the most open to coaching. So channel your inner Dean Smith, explain that you’re a little behind, and galvanize action.

Author and university of Houston Prof. Briene Brown offers a wonderful definition of “Midlife.” She says it’s the universe grabs your shoulders and tells you – I’m not fucking around, use the gifts you were given.”

Second, look at the list and circle your top five goals, those that are unquestionably your highest priority. That will give you two lists– One with your top five goals, the other with the next 20. Third, and immediately start planning how to achieve those top five goals. And the other 20, get rid of them. Avoid them at all costs. Don’t even look at them until you’ve achieve the top five, which might take a long time. Doing a few important things well is far more likely to propel you out of the slump than a dozen half assed and half finished projects are.

Chapter 5: Endings

Many of them begin the application but don’t finish it. Kiva enlisted the Common Cents Lab, hey behavioral research laboratory, to come up with A solution. Their suggestion: impose an ending.

But as news givers, we often do the reverse. Delivering that harsh performance review feels unsettling, so we prefer to ease into it, to demonstrate our kind intentions and caring nature by offering a few spoonfuls of sugar before administering the bitter medicine. Sure, we know that we like to hear the bad news first. But somehow we don’t understand the person sitting across the desk, wincing at our two-headed intro, feels the same. She’d rather get the grimness out of the way and end the encounter on a more redeeming note.

We blunder because we fail to understand the final principle of endings: given a choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. The science of timing has found repeatedly what seems to be an innate preference for happy endings.

Screenwriters understand the importance of endings that elevate, but they also know that the very best endings are not always happy in the traditional sense. Often, like a final chocolate, they’re bittersweet. Quote anyone can deliver a happy ending– Just give the characters everything they want,” says screenplay guru Robert McKee.”An artist gives us the emotion he’s promised… But with the rush of unexpected insight.” That often comes in the main character finally understands in an emotionally complex truth. John August, wrote the screenplay for Charlie and the chocolate factory and other films, argues that this more sophisticated form of elevation is the secret to the success of Pixar film such as Up, Cars, and the Toy Story trilogy. “every Pixar movie has its protagonists achieving the goal he wants only to realize it is not with the protagonists needs.” Typically, this leads the protagonist to let go of what he wants ( the house, the piston cup, Andy) to get what he needs (a true yet unlikely companion, real friends, A lifetime together with friends). Such emotional complexity turns out to be central to the most elevated endings.

The researchers found that at the core of meaningful Indians is one of most complex emotions humans experience: poignancy, a mix of happiness and sadness. For graduates and everyone else, the most powerful endings deliver poignancy because poignancy deliver significance. One reason we overlook poignancy is that it operates by an upside-down form of emotional physics. Adding a small component of sadness to an otherwise happy moment elevates that moment rather than diminishes it. “poignancy,” the researchers write, “seems to be a particular to the experience of endings.” The best endings don’t leave us happy. Instead, they produce something richer – a rush of unexpected insight, fleeting moment of transcendence, the possibility that by discarding what we wanted we’ve gotten what we need.

Is your current job both demanding and in your control? The most fulfilling jobs share a common trait: they prod us to work at our highest level but in a way that we, not someone else, control. Jobs that are demanding but don’t offer autonomy burn us out. Jobs that offer autonomy but little challenge bore us. ( and jobs that are neither demanding nor in our control are the worst of all.) if your job doesn’t provide both challenge and autonomy, and there’s nothing you can do to make things better, consider a move.

Does your boss allow you to do your best work? And his excellent book good boss, bad boss: how to be the best …and learn from the worst, Stanford graduate school of business professor Robert Sutton explains the qualities that make someone worth working for. If your boss has your back, takes responsibility instead of blaming others, encourages your efforts but also gets out of your way, and displays a sense of humor rather than a raging temper, you’re probably in a good place. If your boss is the opposite, watch out– and maybe get out.

The work day. When the workday ends, many of us went to Tara way – to pick up children, race home to prepare dinner, or just beeline to the nearest bar. The science of Indians to just that instead of fleeing we’re better off reserving the final five minutes of work for a few small deliberate actions that bring the day to a fulfilling close. Begin by taking two or three minutes to write down what you accomplished since the morning. Making progress is the single largest day-to-day motivator on the job. But without tracking our dones, we often don’t know whether we’re progressing. Ending the day by recording what you’ve achieved can encode the entire day more positively. ( testimonial: I’ve been doing this for four years and I swear by the practice. I’m good days, the exercise delivers feeling of completion; on bad days, and often shows me I got more done than I expected.) 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 – thank you email. I mentioned in Chapter to that gratitude is a powerful restorative. It’s an equally powerful form of elevation.

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

Syncing fast and slow

It’s 9:15 AM. He presses the buzzer wants, then twice. The door opens. After 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 this a cylindrical stack of four metal containers. Inside those containers, called tiffins, is her husband’s lunch– cauliflower, yellow Dal, rice and Roti. In three and half hours, this home-cooked lunch will end up on her husband’s desk in downtown Mumbai, about 30 km away. And in about seven hours, the canvas bag and it’s empty Tiffins will reappear at this same door.

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 60 minutes of his Monday, he will collect 15 such lunches, tying each back to the handlebars or the rear of his bike. Then, coordinating with the team of a dozen other dabbawalas who’ve collected their own bags elsewhere in the sprawling neighborhood about half 1 million people, he’ll sort the lunches, Voice 20 of them on his back, board the luggage compartment of the commuter train, and deliver the lunches to shops and offices in the business district of the city.

He’s not alone: about 5000 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 doing 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 AM, 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,” says Turakhia. In the five years she’s enlisted Adhav and his crew, for a fee of affordable to most middle-class urban families ( about $12 per month), they’ve misdelivered the lunch or delivered it late exactly 0 times.

What the dabbawalas manage to do every day verges on preposterous. Mom by operates with a 24 hour full tilt intensity, a move or be mowed down ethos that makes Manhattan seem like a fishing village. Mom buys not just one of the largest city 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 –is it a throbbing, anarchic intensity. ”A city in heat,” journalist Suketu Mehta calls it. 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 sync with one another, so finally attuned to the tempo of their task, that the pull off the feat–delivering 200,000 lunches everyday–without any technology beyond bicycles and trains. No smartphones. No scanners. No barcodes. No GPS. And no mistakes.

Thinking in tenses

For example, one reason some people don’t save for retirement is that they somehow consider the future version of themselves a different person than the current version. But showing people age advanced images of their own photographs can boost their propensity to save. Other research has found that simply thinking of the future in smaller time units– days, not years –make people feel closer to their future self…

The other study examining the effect of awe. Awe lives ”In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” as two scholars put it. It “is a little studied emotion… Central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art.” It has two key attributes: vastness ( the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation ( the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures).

Kathleen Voz, and Jennifer Aker found that the experience of awe– the sight of the Grand Canyon, the birth of a child, spectacular thunderstorm –changes our perception of time. When we experience awe, time slows down. It expands. We feel like we have more of it. In that sensation lifts our well-being. “Experiences of awe bring people into the present moment, and being in the present moment underlies awe’s capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, make life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.”

Matt W. Kane