"I'll make it up on the way"

There's a belief that the dash is a genuine tool. If you leave five minutes late, you can walk faster, drive a bit harder, take the stairs, and arrive on time. The lost minutes can be recovered in motion.

Sometimes, by a minute or two. Consider what's actually in your control between the door and the place. On foot, a brisk walk against a normal one might save a minute in fifteen. Running would save more and get you there in no state to sit down. In a car, most of the journey time is lights, junctions and the cars in front. Your speed on the stretches in between is a small part of the total, and pushing it saves less than you feel it does, because what you feel is the effort and not the minutes. I'd put the whole recoverable amount at a few minutes on most trips, which is less than the last thing cost you.

The costs of recovering it are real. Driving faster because you're late is the ordinary reason people drive faster, and it's a reason that puts other people in the road at risk to save you the embarrassment of being late for a meeting. I'd ask you to treat the two as not comparable, and to make a flat rule that you never drive differently because you're late. Once you have that rule, the dash by car loses its only real lever, and you'll find you leave earlier because there's nothing left to try.

On foot, the dash costs you your arrival. You get there hot, out of breath and slightly cross, and the first minutes of whatever you've come to are spent recovering. There's a version of on time that's worse than five minutes late, and it's arriving exactly on the hour in a state where you can't do anything for a while.

And there's the phone call from the car or the pavement, in which you're both late and distracted, apologising to someone while trying to cross a road. It's a poor way to have a conversation and a poor way to cross a road.

I think the belief that time can be made up on the way is one of the things that lets the last thing happen. If you believe you can recover five minutes in motion, you'll spend them before you leave. If you know you can't, you won't. So this chapter is really about the door. Nothing much can be done after it. Everything can be done before it.