Don't do just one more thing

How to stop being late

I am not always on time everywhere. There have been some comical mishaps — like being late to my own speech on time management. But I do at least try to be where I’ve said I’d be at the time I said I’d be there. That has made me fascinated, on a sort of academic level, about why some people are chronically late to everything. Do we have completely different experiences of time?

I have studied time logs. I have asked questions. I have had some insights.

It turns out that, while I used to think that chronically late people were engaged in some sort of weird power play, what’s generally going on is that late people are wildly optimistic. They think it takes 20 minutes to get to work, because it did one time, five years ago, and that has now become the remembered standard, even though it’s taken closer to 30 or 35 minutes every other time since.

Another way this optimism plays out? Late people think they can fit in just one more thing before they leave. They can send one more email. They can empty the dishwasher. It’s just a little thing, and won’t take much time, and then they’ve taken this task off their plates for the future, so it’s all a win, right?

Well, no. The email takes 5 minutes, not 1 minute, to write, and then you see something hot in your inbox and have to look and boom…there goes 15 minutes. And likewise, while anyone who reads this newsletter knows emptying the dishwasher doesn’t take much time, it doesn’t take zero time either. So that means any buffer for being late is gone.

So if you find yourself falling into this trap, next time you’ve got 2 minutes before you need to be out the door, just go. Don’t think of this as wasted time. Think of it as sanity space.

Because the truth is that most things take longer than people think they will anyway. We fail to build in all the constituent steps. Perhaps you need to meet someone at a place 10 minutes from your house. So if it is 9:45 a.m. and you need to be there at 10 a.m., you think, brilliant! Time to empty the dishwasher. But it takes time to get your shoes on, and grab your keys, and get in the car, and start it, and back out of the driveway. It might also take time on the other end to park, and get to the place. Starting to leave 10 minutes before an appointed time for some place 10 minutes away guarantees that you will be late.

So don’t try to do just one more thing. Rather than fooling yourself into thinking that it’s more productive to squeeze in one more thing, enjoy the feeling of spaciousness that comes from not having to hurry. I believe we’re more productive in life when we feel like time is abundant, rather than scarce. And who knows, maybe someone else will empty the dishwasher. Wouldn’t that be nice?