The leave-the-house plan
Name one event. The tool works out the moment you actually have to be at the door, and tells you whether being late here is expensive or not.
The short version
- Chronic lateness is usually a stable, small amount (six or seven minutes to nearly everything) and it is rarely about caring less. That is not the same as it not mattering, and the person waiting is paying for it either way.
- Enter one upcoming event, your worst-case travel time, and a small buffer. The tool counts backwards from the start and hands you a single alarm time labelled shoes on now, plus a reminder to do nothing in the last fifteen minutes.
- It also flags whether this is a setting where lateness is genuinely expensive (a synchronised start) or one where it costs nobody anything. Those are different problems.
Leaving time is meant to be a boundary, not a target. I am leaving at six should mean at six you stand up and go, not that six is when you start getting ready. This tool turns the boundary into one number you can set an alarm to, built from the worst trip rather than the fastest one.
Before you begin
Pick one real event with a fixed start time, a train, a film, a table booked for eight, a meeting of nine people. Six short questions. Nothing you type is saved.
Questions
Question 1 of 6
Your plan
Copy it somewhere it will survive
Select the text below and copy it into wherever your reminders live. This page keeps nothing.
The one thing that undoes all of this
The last task expands. Fifteen minutes before leaving is enough for one small thing, and the small thing has three parts you could not see from the outside, it finishes at the moment you were meant to be at the door. So the plan ends with a hard rule: do nothing in the last fifteen minutes. Be ready early and be bored. Boredom is the price, and it is lower than it feels.
Worth knowing. People underestimate how long their own tasks will take, and keep doing it even when they know they have done it before, Buehler, Griffin and Ross documented this as the planning fallacy (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994). It is one of the sturdier findings in this area, and it is the reason this tool plans from your worst trip rather than your fastest one.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.