How to Be Healthier, Happier and More Productive: It’s All in the Timing
This post has been viewed 3,103 times.
When is the best time to exercise or do creative work? Research on the science of timing has answers
You’re probably getting ready to make a few New Year’s resolutions, solemn promises to yourself to behave better in 2018. You might have pondered how you’re going to accomplish those goals, who could help you and why you need to change.
But if you’re like most people—and social science suggests that you and I are like most people—you’ve neglected a question that could help you actually stick to those resolutions: “When?”
We all know that timing matters. But most of our decisions on this front are intuitive and haphazard. Timing, we believe, is an art.
In fact, timing is really a science. For several decades, researchers in dozens of fields—from economics to anesthesiology to social psychology—have been unearthing the hidden science of timing. In randomized controlled experiments, field studies and the analysis of massive data sets, they are exploring questions that span the human experience. How do beginnings, midpoints and endings alter our actions and memories? How do groups synchronize in time? How do even the verb tenses we use affect our behavior? Time, they have discovered, shapes our productivity, health and well-being in powerful but often invisible ways.
Tags:
