When we do things can have a big impact on what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.
Just look at what tends to happen as we mark a new calendar year: while there isn’t anything peculiar about the moment between 11:59 pm on December 31 and 12:00 am on January 1 compared to other nights of the year, many people embrace this particular occasion for fresh starts and new or renewed commitments.
Timing, sequences, and episodes (which have beginnings, middles, and ends): all these influence our mindsets and introduce different cognitive biases like the serial-position effect, anchoring, the priming effect, hindsight bias, and the peak-end rule, among others.
Timing might not be everything, but it’s a big thing.
There may not be such a thing as perfect timing, but there is bad timing.
We can naively be susceptible to the effects of timing, or we can choose to learn more about it so we can make better decisions about what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.
