Sometimes you really can trade lead for gold. You may have noticed, for example, how much of a time-saver it is to stay a little late to finish a task today that you could finish tomorrow instead. Somehow that last little bit, which would only take a half-hour now, will eat up most of tomorrow morning if you leave it till then. It’s the same work, but somehow its size and complexion change drastically depending on when it gets done.

There should be some metaphysical law that stops you from getting such a good deal, but there isn’t. So you should go for it, and also become a hunter for such deals.

A lot of variables come together to make this sort of transmutation happen. If you’ve been working on something for an hour or two, your system is warmed up in all the right places. You have the relevant information loaded up in your mental RAM, the body is tuned into the relevant actions (flipping between spreadsheets, folding clothes, whatever) and the mind has dropped most irrelevant thoughts. What would take thirty more minutes in this state might take two hours from a cold start tomorrow.

In this scenario, and many others, delay is extremely costly. You’re not simply pushing the same amount of effort to the next day; it will grow four-fold in the meantime.

There are times when delay is your friend, though, for exactly the same reason. Momentum, excitement, and other conditions make it much easier to do certain things at certain times — but sometimes you want a thing to be harder to do.

One of Mr Money Mustache’s tips for saving money, for example, is to consciously delay any purchase you are suddenly considering. This is because the moment in which it occurs to you to buy something, you are probably intoxicated with excitement. You’ve gotten it into your head that one of those sleep-tracking rings would change your life, or that having a bottle of XO-grade cognac on hand would make you a hero to your guests. The mind easily justifies such a purchase when it’s been “warmed up in all the right places” by whatever anecdote or advertisement brought the idea to mind in the first place.

At moments like these, bias towards “yes” is probably maximal – it can only dissipate. Instead of telling yourself “No, I can’t have that,” making the desire more persistent, you simply delay the decision. Chances are, the next time you think of that potential purchase, the initial heat-bomb of excitement and covetousness has faded. Even though you still want the thing, you don’t want it enough to spend hundreds of dollars on it. This time, reason prevails, because it doesn’t have to overcome nearly as much exuberance.

You may have heard similar advice about delaying dessert or second helpings. The time when you most want more food is when you’re still eating something delicious, or right after. At that time, the system is warmed up in all the right ways again, this time for eating more food, which may not be what your wiser self wants to do.

If you wait fifteen minutes before making the call about dessert, the mind’s fever cools, the body begins to report its distinct opposition to further eating, and the prospect of filling a bowl with ice cream might go from hyper-attractive to something more blah.

Making use of this principle isn’t just a matter of “delayed gratification.” Delayed gratification, made famous by the Stanford marshmallow experiment, is about the benefits of impulse control – you can often get better rewards in life by not taking the reward that’s right in front of you.

You might use some impulse control to push to the end your Friday-afternoon task, or to delay your prospective cognac purchase, but the more important idea, the real alchemical miracle, is about understanding and exploiting the huge swings in ease and salience that different activities have at different times. Just by doing something at a different time, under different conditions, you can make good things feel much easier and more natural to do, or make not-so-good things harder.

There is some cultural awareness of this principle (“Don’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry”), but we talk much more about what to do than when. Often when I make some sort of personal breakthrough, it’s not because I’m doing a new thing, but because I’m changing when and under what conditions I’m doing an old thing.

I basically know already what’s worth doing – exercise, getting work done, sleeping enough, yada yada. But finding the best conditions for a given worthwhile thing – the best when – is usually what makes it finally work smoothly.

For example, I began exercising consistently only when I started doing it mid-day, rather than before or after work. At mid-day, I always have energy, the gym isn’t busy, traffic is light, evening plans never compete with my training, I don’t dread my workout, and it no longer feels cathartic to skip it. These are way better conditions. I actually want to lift heavy weights at noon; at 5pm I want to do the opposite of that. Doing it at 5pm is like adding a second kind of gravity to the barbell.

It’s like alchemy, this conditions-swapping game. You can often trade a bad situation, at a one-to-one ratio, for a good one. You really can pay twenty-five minutes of late afternoon work to spare yourself two hours of morning work. Lead-to-gold deals like that are out there.

If you tend to use your morning hours better than your evening hours, for example, by shifting your bedtime 30 minutes you’re essentially trading a low-quality half-hour of aimless screen time, which probably makes your sleep worse, for a high-quality half hour of morning reading on the porch. Good deal!

The best whens for a given person are an idiosyncratic matter. The deals you’re getting – and you’re getting a deal of some sort no matter what — depend on what your particular inner landscape is like in different situations, and inner landscapes vary tremendously between people, as you know if you’ve ever had a roommate.

Finding better whens takes some conscious experimentation. It’s unlikely that you’ve landed on them by dumb luck, because often we’re only doing a given thing at a given time because that’s when other people do it.

What to do is easier to figure out than when because we talk about what so much more. This makes me think that if something’s not working, it’s more likely the when, and not the what, that needs adjusting.

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Photos by Rob Wicks, Anita Jankovic, FlyD, David Cain