From the first Measuring Me exercise, I noticed that it takes me a lot longer to get to class/events than I initially thought. I also noticed that I enjoy walking to class with others if possible as a form of social interaction. As a result, I am sometimes early or late to class, meetings or social gatherings when I walk to them. One hypothesis I have is that I tend to walk slower or faster based on certain factors such as time of day or weather. I also think that there are other additional reasons why I may be late to class or meetings. For this measuring me, I decided to track every time I left the house to walk to a commitment and what I was doing before. I tracked Sunday afternoon to Wednesday morning.
I first noted whether I was leaving for class, a meeting or something social to understand if that impacted when I arrived. On Sunday afternoon, I first left to go on a walk with my friend. Because it wasn’t something with a strict deadline, I ended up running 15 minutes late. Luckily, she wasn’t waiting too long. On Monday, we didn’t have class but I had 1 group meeting. We met at COHO and I was on time. My hypothesis for this was I live right behind COHO so I estimated it would only take a few minutes to walk there and was right. Things started to fall apart on Tuesday. I was 8 minutes late to my 9am class in the quad, 5 minutes late to a lunch meeting and 4 minutes late to my second class. The reason I was late to my 9am class was that getting my coffee at COHO took longer than I thought. For my lunch meeting, the group I was walking with walked slow and for my last class, I was distracted by a friend. Wednesday morning I was 7 minutes early to 247B class. Maybe I felt bad about the day before or maybe I was so excited to get to class!
I think the main cause of me being late to commitments is underestimating how long the activity right before is going to take. I think I also need to be more conscious of what factors slow me down ie grabbing coffee/snacks, walking with others, being on the phone while walking and more. These can be seen in my models below.
