I could also title this “Stop Kidding Yourself”. I’m sorry, but you can’t wake up, shower, dress, grab breakfast, grab your stuff, and leave the house in 20 minutes. You also can’t quit applications, shut down your computer, pack up, and leave the office in 2 minutes. You can’t drive across town, get seated, eat a nice lunch, and be back at your desk ready to work in exactly an hour. I’m sorry, but you just can’t.

If you’re chronically late, you need to first realize that you don’t truly understand how long it takes to do the routine things you do on a daily basis. On the other hand, once you acknowledge this you can start to learn how to manage your time. We’ll talk about planning and execution later, but I can’t reiterate this enough, you MUST change your thinking if you want to change your life.

Let me be more specific. Try approaching your daily life as if each segment of the day is a project and you are the project manager. Start with the end in mind. For example, let’s take starting work at 8am (not arriving to the office, but when you start being productive). In order to successfully complete this task, we need to know quite a bit of information. We need to know the following:

1. How long does it take you to start working from the time you enter the office? do you stop and talk to people, get coffee, check the mail, turn on your computer, check email, tweet, or read the news?
2. How long does it take you to get to your office? do you have to wait for a train or subway, do you ever get behind school busses while driving, do you regularly get stuck in traffic, do you park in a garage, do you have to walk a block or two, do you walk up stairs, or do you take the elevator?
3. How long does it take to leave the house? do you fix and eat breakfast at home, do you fix something to take with you, do you spend time in front of the mirror, do you have to pack your things, do you need to get the kids in the car?
4. How long does it take you to get ready? how many times do you hit snooze and how long does that last, how long do you spend in the bathroom from the time you set foot in til the time you walk out, do you spend time picking out clothes, do you change outfits 3 times, do you have to wake up your spouse or children, do you have to help them in any way?

Sure, this list of questions seems excessively long, but I’m willing to bet that you really don’t think to account for all these things when you plan to start work at 8am.  And if you do account for them, you probably misjudge the amount of time required.

Start a journal or just make notes on a sheet of paper, but make your own list and keep track of your start and stop times for all of these things.  Do this for a couple of weeks.  Then, once you have all the necessary data you can start adding them up: 9min + 18min + 5min + 7min + 11min + 21min = 71min.  I picked these numbers at random, but if each of your individual tasks equated to these figures, you would know that it takes 71 minutes from the time your alarm goes off to the time your sitting at your desk ready to work.

However, you need to make one more critical adjustment. . .

Stop planning for the average!  This is another very common error for people who are usually late.  The average time is just that, an average.  That means that there are quite a few times where you took a lot longer than the average.  Once again, don’t kid yourself by thinking that you can always hit the average.  You can’t.  Instead, start planning based on one of the more regular figures on the high end.  This will ensure that you’re successful more than just the 3 days each week you manage to hit your average.

Again, once you know what is involved in completing each task, and how long it actually takes to accomplish each small piece, you can then move on to planning.

Coming Up: Part 2 – Plan Ahead