The behavior I measured for two days (Monday and Tuesday) was timeliness. Specifically, I want to be on time or early to my commitments, but I’m often a few minutes late. This tardiness ranges from classes, to meetings, to social activities. I’ve noticed that when something is really important, I can pull it together and make it there early, but I tend to be running behind on the day-to-day. In order to both respect the time of the people I meet each day, and make my daily commutes more enjoyable, I want to be on time more often.
Rather than try to measure my timeliness at a regular interval, I decided to record my actions in my notes app whenever I got ready, left for, and arrived at a commitment. Monday afternoon I had no plans, so there wasn’t much to record. I liked that I got to measure my behavior on different types of days; one day I was at home and running errands, and the next I had class and several meetings. Something I noticed was that I was good at planning to be early, but instead of getting ready when planned, I often hit snooze or scrolled on my phone for a few minutes, making me late by that much.
I was about a minute late to most of my meetings, and was perfectly on time to my Tuesday morning class. I think that virtual meetings gave me the illusion of needing no time to prepare, but finding the meeting link and opening zoom took longer than expected. I was rushed for the entire hour proceeding a Tuesday afternoon meeting in which I was presenting. My laundry took too long in the dryer because I was washing a pillow, so I hurriedly drove to the building where I could print worksheets, but I had to wait for the person before me to finish using the printer, so I just went to my meeting without the handouts and arrived one minute late. The single notable instance in which I was early didn’t seem much different from the others, except that I had no proceeding commitment, and I only stalled for 8 minutes before getting ready rather than my usual 15.
Another thing I noticed in my data was that I squeezed unplanned activities in before my commitments. When I was about to sit down for a 2-hour work block in my apartment, I decided to do my laundry instead. When was leaving for class, I considered whether I should order a coffee from Coupa on the way. I think these last-minute missions slowed me down, and made me less productive because I was scrambling between multiple tasks. My guess is that I was doing them to avoid more pressing, stressful work while still feeling productive.
