How to get better at being on time at work

There’s a lot of social pressure to show up to work events at the scheduled time. You don’t typically have to apologize for being early (though you may need to wait for something to start), but you do call attention to yourself in a negative way when you’re late. Of course, some aspects of your schedule are out of your control. If you’re in a meeting that runs late, it can throw off your timing. Unexpected high-priority tasks can also come up. Time management can also just be trickier for some of us. But there are things you can do to improve your ability to show up on time more often. If lateness is something that you’re concerned is affecting your work life, here are a few strategies that might help: Consider travel time One of the biggest reasons people run late is that they just don’t plan ahead. Even people who used to be on time a lot have struggled since the pandemic, because we have gotten used to opening up a video conference app and landing in a new meeting. The most unexpected thing that happens for those meetings is that the app needs to update before it will load. If you’re often late, it can help to make a note in your calendar that blocks off travel time. When you choose the amount of travel time, you need to be realistic about how long it will take to get from one place to another. In my job (as a professor and administrator), most of my meetings are on campus, but I still may need to walk from one building to another. That can take time. In addition, you have to stop making rosy predictions about the amount of travel time. If you have to drive or take public transportation to get to a meeting, then factor in the traffic and other delays that may disrupt your journey. Don’t just assume that you’ll hit every green light, and that every train will run on time. At first, you may find you need to do this planning explicitly for every meeting. If you do this for a while, eventually you’ll build a new habit to be mindful of the travel time required to get where you’re going before the start of an event. Reorient your schedule The pandemic messed with our schedules in other ways as well. Back in the pre-pandemic era, an hour-long meeting broke up after 50 minutes so that people could get to their next appointment. When Zoom took over our lives, meetings would suddenly go until the very last minute, because people could log out of one meeting and immediately jump into another. Many workplaces have gone back to more in-person engagement, but we haven’t changed our meeting behavior. Those in-person meetings are now creeping on past that 50-minute mark. As a result, people go bolting out of meetings and running to their next obligation. We need to return to the norm of protecting travel time in our meetings. Of course, if you know you’re going to a meeting that is going to take up a full hour (or if you need more than 10 minutes to get from one meeting to the next), then you need to stagger the start of your meetings so that your additional travel time is built into your schedule. I have reached a point in my career where other people set my schedule for me. In general, a block of 15 to 30 minutes is built in between meetings that require any travel. Use your environment Some amount of being late also involves behavior that goes beyond mere planning. Many colleagues who routinely miss the start of meetings got themselves sucked into email replies or projects that caused them to leave late—even when they had originally budgeted the time. If you have five minutes before you have to head out for a meeting, resist the urge to just do a quick check of your email or messages. Invariably, there will be something that requires more than a minute or two of your attention. Instead, leave your office and get to your next appointment. Worst case, you’ll arrive a few minutes early and you can check email from your phone there. You might even bump into a colleague and take a minute to catch up—which is almost guaranteed to be more enriching than answering an email. For those of you who get sucked into work projects and miss your travel window, it’s time to use an alarm to refocus your attention and get you on your way. If you do use an alarm, add an extra couple of minutes to that alarm to finish a sentence you’re writing, organize your materials, and save documents before you have to run off. Don’t set an alarm that requires you to immediately sprint out the door.