A very important date

[kitchen_kink]

Dear readers,

Please, please, please kindly share your anecdotes, tips, medical interventions or other techniques that have helped you in your quests to be ON TIME.

You see, I am chronically late. Late to work by 5 or 10 minutes, daily. I blame it on some inherent flaw in public tranportation, which, while indeed slow and unpredictable, would be fine if I left ten minutes earlier. Late to classes that I take and that I teach. Late to dates that I really want to keep!

Being berated doesn't help. Setting my clock fast doesn't help. And getting in trouble at my jobs doesn't help.

Help!

Comments

[ladytabitha.livejournal.com]

Fuck if I know.

Going to sleep before midnight works for me, as then I'm more willing to get up at an ungodly hour.  Now, if I could only do that myself...

Try a buddy system: talk to someone who also gets up at an unreasonably early hour, and have him or her call you each morning.  Offer to set them on fire uh... bake them cookies or something in return.

Move in with a morning person.

[greendalek.livejournal.com]

Go to bed half an hour earlier than your usual time. If that means breaking off a nifty conversation, having to miss a TV show, or putting off skimming your LJ-friends' posts until tomorrow, then do so. Be ruthless about it.

Setting out clothes (including shoes) the night before and having the coffee brewer fully loaded up and ready to go also saves precious minutes.

[philjames.livejournal.com]

My best friend Denise is almost ALWAYS on time -- says she considers it a way of honoring the person or people she's seeing, a sort of self-initiated gift to them rather than something she should do according to the cold-climate ethic we've grown up with. Sounds mystical, but this way of looking at it has helped me be more on time too, since there is a part of me that automatically rebels against any shoulds. And it's fun to watch how something as simple as being on time starts to relax the hearts even of those who you'd think wouldn't care.

[alice-ayers.livejournal.com]

* i eat breakfast at work so i have that to look forward to and sometimes it makes me get there faster

more tips to follow when champagne isn't so much of an issue....

[ert.livejournal.com]

Snaps to greendalek and philjames. For work, the going to bed earlier works pretty well. And I suggest setting a target bedtime way earlier -- don't start new things after 10pm. Aim to do something like 30 minutes at the gym or journaling before you leave for work so you have a buffer, don't make "being at work" the first thing you have scheduled after waking up. Stop snoozing the alarm -- move it to the other side of the room and set it on 'annoy'. Be honest with yourself about how long it usually takes to get to work and how long it can take to get to work, and leave time for the latter.

And don't trust me with the alarm clock. :)

- Ert

[darxus.livejournal.com]

It sounds like your problems are a bit different from mine. I've had problems getting to work on time... as long as I've been employed. But I'm talking half an hour to an hour, habitually, not 5-10 minutes. My problem is getting out of bed in the morning. I lack motivation. I recently moved my alarm clock to my kitchen (basically the other side of the room closest to my bedroom). All is better. I was 10 minutes early to work today - something that used to never happen is somewhat normal now. And the process took some tweaking - I know exactly when I need to leave my apartment to reliably get to work on time, and I know exactly when I need to get up to reliably get out the door by the necessary time. If the time you set your alarm clock for doesn't work one morning, for whatever reason (public transportation isn't perfectly consistent, and you need to account for that), set your alarm clock that much earlier the next day.

Um...

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

I don't know that this helps, but the way I handle this (as I *hate* being late to things, and hate making other people wait for me) is to generally over-estimate how long things will take. For the most part, this has me places on time. Sometimes, early.

By telling myself and believing that things will take more time than they do, I get around the lateness problem. This works especially well to handle the fact that something *always* comes up when you are trying to get to something you care about especially much. Or the fact that I tend to get lost easily. :)

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Find a partner who will send you out of the house at a time that will get you there 10 minutes early. (Works for DJ...)

How I helped myself:

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

At this conference some military hotshot told me that, when it came to budget and schedule, his corporation managed 100% ... 100% of their projects were either over budget or behind schedule or both.
What I did (in a situation where consequences of error were very real) was to used a system I called "incremental lateness". Dig: "Oh my gawd, that paper's due this afternoon and I haven't even started yet!!" is not the same as, "OMG, that paper's due this afternoon and I still haven't spell checked the last chapter!" See what I mean? Perfectionism is the enemy of the good.

a) set up a series of targets (each of which will be missed, with increasingly minor consequences) rather than just a single target (which will be missed, with catastrophic results)
b) time the targets beginning well in advance of the final movement. Plane leaves 10AM Monday? set out your suitcase Friday morning (which might work out to be Saturday evening, in reality ... but far better than 11PM Sunday)
c) start on the major items first, and minor ones last, with an eye to duration. getting a sheaf of violet coloured writing paper might take 10 minutes, or it could turn into a 3 day scavenger hunt.
d) remember: you're going to be racing the clock in the end anyhow, so don't sweat the big stuff ... take care of the big things, and the little things will take care of themselves. or not. but who cares. that's what they're little! :-)

[longueur.livejournal.com]

Bring a book everywhere you go that you really want to read, and read when you're early. Round everything up to the nearest hour when figuring out time.

Late in the mornings

[jasonkelly.livejournal.com]

When I was working at MIT, I was constantly fifteen minutes late. Drove my boss nuts.

The problem, at least for me, is that the groggy still-half-asleep state is no place to be making a decision about whether or not I can afford to be late. The putting the alarm clock on the other side of the room thing might help, 'cause then at least you're standing up when you're deciding to snooze or not. I did shave some time off by doing everything I could to make the morning routine faster; leaving my clothes out the night before, getting the coffee ready to start and a travel mug ready, that sort of thing. The weird thing is that when I worked for Blue Shield in Cali, however, I was almost never late. The difference there was that I had to live with someone who would... be very clear about how my being late in the shower would inconvenience her. And I had amber_phoenix to leave with, which probably had a lot to do with me getting up on time.

The other thing that helped at MIT was moving my responsibilities into places where when I did the work mattered less. I don't know how much flexibility you have in the jobs that you work, but things got less stressful when we hired a temp who could pick up some of my morning slack.

[kahoki.livejournal.com]

From personal experience, people who are on time are perpetually agrevated when a person is late - I take more time to complete my work, which leaves my collegues waiting for 15 minutes sometimes. I set the alarm on my phone, which helped in meeting up for lunch when in differant areas of the building, and also setting it on vibrate/alarm and keeping it near my pillow worked to.

Do an analysis of what time it takes to prepare in the morning, your commute, and what sorts of delays you may incounter to develop a time line of what you ahve to have done by when. Having a clock in the bathtoom helps, as hot showers can tend to make you linger if your room is chilly at night.

Explain your situation and let the boss know you are working on it - we just went theough an hour transition, but traveling for work, I have a 3 hr adjustment, both at the job site and back in Boston which really skewed my sleep patterns.

One thing to try is to go to bed much earlier then usual and geting in about an hour or so earlier than usual - most people in my office that start at 7 am leave by 3:30 4 pm, which leaves them a few hours of daylight to enjoy, whereas my late morning schedule has me going home at 6:30-7 pm.

Find out what works best and procede accordingly, as the warmer weather should leave you less prone to hybernation.

depends...

[macthud]

Consistent 5-10 minutes late, for everything? That's *hard* to break.

Need to adjust your calendar keeping, your watch, everything -- and most importantly, and hardest, you need to adjust your internal attitudes about the value of your and your appointment's time.

Is what you're doing for the next 5-10 minutes worth more than what you're supposed to be doing shortly?

Yes, things run over-time, sometimes -- slack-time needs to be built into those appointments -- so you're scheduled to finish later than you `hope`, allowing for a bit of catch-up without being late to the next appointment.

I must to bed Real Soon Now, so I'm not late for morning work, myself, or I'd write more.... perhaps another night ;-)