At half past twelve on Saturday, May 1, 1915, a luxury liner slipped away from Pier 54 on the Hudson River in Manhattan, New York, and set sail for Liverpool, England. Undoubtedly, some of the 1,959 passengers and crew aboard the massive British ship would have felt a bit queasy, though less from the waves than from the times.
Britain was at war with Germany, as the First World War had erupted the previous summer. Germany had recently declared the waters surrounding the British Isles, which this ship had to traverse, as a war zone. In the weeks leading up to the scheduled departure, the German embassy in the United States even placed several advertisements in American newspapers warning potential passengers that those who entered those waters "in vessels of Great Britain or her allies, do so at their own risk."
However, only a few people canceled their trip. After all, this transatlantic liner had made over two hundred crossings without incident. It was one of the largest and fastest passenger ships in the world, equipped with wireless telegraphy and well-supplied with lifeboats (thanks in part to the lessons learned from the Titanic, which had sunk three years earlier). And perhaps most importantly: at the helm of the ship was Captain William Thomas Turner, one of the most seasoned sailors in the industry; a gruff fifty-eight-year-old man with a track record full of commendations and "the psyche of a battleship."
The ship sailed the Atlantic Ocean for five days without incident. But on May 6, when the imposing vessel made headway towards the coast of Ireland, Turner received word that German submarines, or U-Boats, were lurking in the area. He immediately left the captain's deck and positioned himself on the bridge to scan the horizon and be prepared to make quick decisions.
On the morning of Friday, May 7, when the liner was just a hundred miles from the coast, a thick fog settled in, so Turner reduced the speed of the ship from twenty-one knots to fifteen. However, by noon, the fog had lifted, and Turner could see the coast. The sky was clear, and the sea was calm.
But at one o'clock in the afternoon, unbeknownst to the captain or the crew, the commander of a U-Boat, Walther Schwieger, spotted the ship. And over the next hour, Turner made two inexplicable decisions. The first was to slightly increase the speed of the ship, to eighteen knots, but not reach its maximum speed of twenty-one knots, despite having good visibility, calm waters, and knowing there could be submarines lurking. During the voyage, he had assured passengers that he would take the ship fast because, at its maximum speed, this transatlantic liner could easily outpace any submarine. The second decision was that, around 1:45 p.m., and in order to calculate its position, Turner carried out what is called a "four-point bearing," a maneuver that required forty-five minutes, instead of executing a simpler bearing maneuver that would have required only five minutes. And because of the four-point bearing, Turner had to steer the ship in a straight line, instead of following a zigzag course, which was the best way to evade U-Boats and their torpedoes.
At 2:10 p.m., a German torpedo struck the ship on the starboard side, opening a huge hole. A geyser of seawater gushed out, raining down on the shattered equipment and remnants of the ship on the deck. Minutes later, one boiler room flooded, then another. The damage caused a second explosion. Turner was thrown overboard and into the sea. Passengers screamed and scrambled for lifeboats. Then, just eighteen minutes after the impact, the ship listed to its side and began to sink.
Seeing the wreckage caused, Schwieger, the submarine commander, sailed away. He had sunk the Lusitania.
Nearly twelve hundred people perished in the attack, including one hundred twenty-three of the one hundred forty-one Americans aboard. The incident intensified the First World War, rewrote naval combat rules, and later contributed to dragging the United States into the war. But what exactly happened that May afternoon a century ago remains somewhat of a mystery. Two investigations immediately following the attack yielded unsatisfactory results. British authorities shut down the first to avoid revealing military secrets. The second, led by John Charles Bigham, a British jurist known as Lord Mersey, who had also investigated the Titanic disaster, exonerated Captain Turner and the shipping company of any negligence. However, a few days after concluding the hearings, he resigned from the case and refused payment for his services, saying, "The case of the Lusitania was a dirty and damned job." Throughout the past century, journalists have painstakingly read newspaper clippings and passengers' diaries, and divers have traced the wreckage of the ship in search of clues about what really happened. Writers and filmmakers have continued to produce books and documentaries with great speculative flair.
Had Britain deliberately placed the Lusitania in harm's way, or even conspired to sink the ship to drag the United States into the war? Was the ship, which carried some small munitions, actually being used to transport a larger, more potent shipment of arms for the British war effort? Was the highest naval authority, a quadragenarian named Winston Churchill, somehow involved? Was Captain Turner, who survived the attack, merely a puppet of other more powerful and influential individuals, "a fool inviting disaster," as one surviving passenger put it? Or had he suffered a minor stroke that impaired his judgment, as others claimed? Do the inquiries and investigations, whose documents have not yet been declassified, still harbor a series of giant cover-ups?
Nobody knows for sure. More than a hundred years of investigative journalism, historical analysis, and pure speculation have not yielded a definitive answer. But perhaps there is a simpler explanation that no one has considered. It may be that, from the new perspective of twenty-first-century behavioral sciences and biology, the explanation for one of the most significant disasters in maritime history is less sinister. It may be that Captain Turner simply made bad decisions. And those decisions may have been bad because he made them in the afternoon.
This is a book about timing. We know that timing is everything. The problem is that we don't know too much about timing itself. Life presents us with an endless stream of decisions about "when": when to change careers, deliver bad news, schedule a class, end a marriage, go for a run, or take a project or person seriously. But most of these decisions spring from a smoky quagmire of intuitions and conjectures. Knowing when to choose the moment is an art, we think.
I will show that timing is actually a science; there is a growing body of multifaceted and multidisciplinary research that offers new insights into the human condition and useful guidance on how to work smarter and live better. If you go to any bookstore or library, you will see a shelf (or twelve) filled with books on how to do various things, from making friends and influencing people to speaking Tagalog in a month. The production of such books is so enormous that they need a category of their own: "How to...". I believe this book belongs to an entirely new genre: "When to..."
In the past two years, two intrepid researchers and I have read and analyzed over seven hundred studies—from the fields of economics and anesthesiology; anthropology and endocrinology; chronobiology and social psychology—to unravel the hidden science of timing. Throughout the next three hundred pages, I will use that research to address questions that span the human experience but often remain hidden from our view. Why are beginnings—whether we rush out of the gate or make a false start—so crucial? And how can we start over if we stumble out of the blocks? Why does hitting the midpoint—of a project, a game, or even life—sometimes leave us feeling deflated and other times rev us up? Why do endings give us the energy to push harder and reach the finish line, but also make us feel the need to slow down and seek meaning? How do we synchronize our timing with that of others, whether designing software or singing in a choir? Why are some school schedules a hindrance to learning, but a certain type of breaks lead to better exam results for students? Why does thinking about the past make us behave in one way, but thinking about the future guides us in a different direction? And finally, how can we build organizations, schools, and lives that take into account the invisible power of timing; that recognize, to paraphrase Miles Davis, that timing isn't the most important thing, it's everything? This book talks a lot about science. You will read about numerous studies, all cited in footnotes so you can delve deeper (or fact-check my work). But this is also a practical book. At the end of each chapter is what I call the "Time Hacker's Handbook": a collection of tools, exercises, and tricks to help you put the ideas into practice.
So, where do we start?
The place to start is time itself. If we study the history of time—from ancient Egypt's earliest sundials to sixteenth-century Europe's first mechanical clocks and the advent of time zones in the nineteenth century—we will quickly realize that much of what we assume as "natural" units of time are actually fences that our ancestors built to corral time. Seconds, hours, and weeks are human inventions. Only by marking them—wrote historian Daniel Boorstin—"could humanity free itself from the cyclical monotony of nature."
But there is a unit of time that continues to elude our control, the epitome of the cyclical monotony to which Boorstin referred. We live on a planet that spins on its axis at a constant speed following a regular pattern, exposing us to regular periods of light and darkness. Each rotation of the Earth we call a day. The day is perhaps the most important way we have of dividing, shaping, and evaluating our time. So the first part of this book begins our exploration of time there. What have scientists learned about the rhythm of a day? How can we use that knowledge to improve our performance, our health, and feel more fulfilled? And why, as Captain Turner demonstrated, should we never make important decisions in the afternoon?