Claim a Fresh Start Boost

No. 164 | By Christine Carron

It’s that time of year. The start of school is almost upon us. Can you feel it? The new school year energy? I can. I will even bravely acknowledge my extreme childhood nerdiness quotient by admitting that I loved starting school each year. Adored it. For me the joy of a getting back to school far outweighed the sadness of summer ending. (Yes, I was—and probably still am—that nerdy.)

My nerdiness factor aside, what is important is if you can feel the new year energy or not. If so, you have a powerful productivity booster coming your way. It all has to do with time and our associations with it.

Time Truths

Time is always doing its thing. Flowing. Passing. Not paying us any mind. We humans, on the other hand, are often up in Time’s business. Slicing it. Dicing it. Trying to slow it down. Speed it up. We are a bit obsessed. Yet, that preoccupation with time makes a lot of sense. 

The endless passage of time would be a little . . . vast, if we had no markers for it. The instincts of our forebears to parcel out time into less mind-boggling clumps helps us make meaning out of the ceaseless passage of time. A year. A month. A week. A day. An hour. And so on. 

Even those markers can start to feel monotonous, so we go further. We give certain moments special meaning. Start of the year. Start of the month. Start of the week. Holidays. Milestone birthdays. And, of course, start of a new school year. 

The Fresh Start Effect

Scientists who study time call these kinds of moments “temporal landmarks.” Temporal landmarks are relevant to you claiming a productivity boost thanks to a behavioral phenomenon researchers have dubbed the “fresh start effect.” 

In their paper, The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior, authors Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, and Jason Riis write: “Special occasions and calendar events (e.g., a birthday, a holiday, the beginning of a new week/month), which demarcate the passage of time and create numerous ‘fresh start’ opportunities at the beginning of new cycles throughout each year, are associated with subsequent increases in aspirational behavior. . . . Aspirational behaviors are activities that help people achieve their wishes and personal goals.”

Translation: Your motivation, focus, and determination get extra juice when you start a new effort on a day that is also a temporal landmark. 

Obviously, starting something on a temporal landmark doesn’t guarantee you will get that thing done. January is littered with New Year Resolution fails. But that doesn’t mean the  fresh start effect isn’t legit. It is. You just want to think about it as one of many tools in your growing creative productivity toolkit. 

Claim the Boost

So go ahead. Try it out. Pick one small thing you’ve been procrastinating on in relation to your creative work. And then continue to hold off doing it until the start of the school year. 

Enjoy the fun of waiting. The anticipation. And if the wait becomes too long—get the thing done already. (I certainly would have shown up the day before the first day of school if I could have.) All that means is that simply playing with the idea of the fresh start effect will have already had a positive impact on your productivity. 

In that case, continue experimenting with the fresh start effect: Pick another task and see if you can hold off on that one until the start of the new school year and then see if associating it with a temporal landmark helps you get it done, i.e., gives you an extra motivational boost to get that task over the finish line. 

If so, be sure to go out and play. You earned a recess! Wahoo! 

Happy day, happy creating, happy jamming. You’ve got this!