TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| This column will change your life: Perfect timing Is there a 'best time' to buy shoes or ask for a pay rise?The best time to view the Mona Lisa, according to a new book on the best times to do things, is around nine o'clock on a Sunday morning: most tourists, it seems, don't realise that the Louvre is open then, while plenty of those who do will still be recovering from the wine-fuelled excesses of Saturday night. The best time to buy shoes, contrastingly, is late afternoon, when your feet are at their biggest. The best night to eat at a restaurant is a Tuesday: no crowds, but better than a Monday, since many restaurants don't get weekend deliveries, making Monday's food less fresh.Such is the mundane but strangely compelling life-advice collected within the covers of Buy Ketchup In May And Fly At Noon, by Mark Di Vincenzo, a book that takes literally the cliche that timing is everything. Di Vincenzo betrays, it's true, a certain America-centric bias – the titular wisdom on ketchup, for example, is something to do with condiment pricing in advance of the barbecue season, whatever that is – but the seductive implications of his outlook are universal. If there's a perfect time to ask for a pay rise or a date (5pm and 12pm respectively, Di Vincenzo argues, semi-scientifically), or a perfect moment in life to buy a house, have children or switch jobs, then there's hope for us all, if only we can time things right. There's also a ready-made excuse if we fail: it wasn't inferior intelligence, talent or effort – it's just that the timing was wrong.Of course, there's no such secret art of timing that will make everything run smoothly. But one general principle that does emerge from Di Vincenzo's book is this: it pays, in life, to learn when and how to deliberately fall out of sync with the rest of the world. Sometimes, this is a simple question of avoiding the crowds: obviously, that's the rationale for holidaying off season, and it's why Di Vincenzo recommends calling customer-service lines the moment they open, when call volume is lowest. (On the other hand, you should visit the post office half an hour after opening, to allow the loitering early-birds to be served and depart.) But there's more to the matter than merely avoiding peak times: with a little cunning, you can de-synchronise yourself from the crowd so as to make their herd behaviour work to your advantage.The humorist Lore Sjöberg recently labelled this stance the Cult of the Somewhat Delayed: an approach to life, and especially consumption, that involves putting yourself just a little behind the curve. Buy slightly older technology – an approach recommended by LastYearsModel.org – and you'll effectively be allowing others to weed out the teething problems with new gadgets, while avoiding those that turn out to be transient fads. Eschew 24-hour TV and web news in favour of newspapers or magazines, and you'll benefit from an improved "noise-to-signal ratio": things that turn out not to matter will be more likely to have been filtered out in advance. I've always thought the same principle could be applied to charity fundraising: aid groups are always complaining that the fickle media spotlight all too quickly abandons one crisis for the next, so what about a website allowing me automatically to funnel donations to last year's crisis? Timing may not be everything, but it's comforting to think that it might be cannier, easier and more effective to be slightly behind the times.oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.ukHealth & wellbeingPsychologyOliver Burkemanguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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