Leaving time

The second step is to move the target. You've been aiming at the place, which means aiming at nine o'clock in a building twenty minutes away. From now on you aim at the door, which means aiming at a time when you're standing outside your house with everything you need. Everything in this chapter is my own method, built on the research earlier in the book.

Work back from the start to the door. The meeting is at nine. Door to seat takes twenty-one minutes on an ordinary bad day. So the door is twenty to nine, and that's the time that matters. Nine o'clock is now somebody else's problem, because if you're through the door at twenty to, the rest looks after itself.

Set an alarm for the door, not the destination. Most people set reminders for the event. Set one for the door time, and one ten minutes before it, and call the second one "get ready". When the first goes, you start putting things in the bag. When the second goes, you leave. You don't finish the sentence. You don't send the email. You leave.

Get things ready before the ready alarm. Keys, bag, notebook and coat, in one place by the door, before you sit down to do anything else. The hunt for keys is the single commonest cause of the last-minute delay in my observation, and it can be removed entirely by putting them in the same bowl every time you come in. This is dull advice and it works.

Ban the last thing in the final ten minutes. Between the "get ready" alarm and the door, you do nothing that has a beginning, a middle and an end. No email, no phone call, no quick look at the news. Chapter 5 explained why. The last thing is estimated as a best case, and time under concentration feels shorter than it is. You can't beat those two effects by being careful. You can only beat them by not starting.

If you have spare time, spend it on the other side of the door. If you're ready at half past eight and the door is twenty to nine, leave at half past and have ten minutes there instead of here. Spare time here turns into the last thing. Spare time there turns into chapter 18.

Decide where and when, out loud or on paper. Sander Koole and Mascha van't Spijker gave people a task to finish within a set period and asked half of them to state where and when they'd do it. Those people finished more often, and the gap between what they'd predicted and what they did shrank, which the researchers traced to their being interrupted less. The plan they were predicting from was a plan that actually got carried out. A leaving plan works the same way. "I leave at twenty to nine from the front door with the bag that's already packed" is a plan. "I need to be at the meeting at nine" is a wish.

Treat the door time as fixed. This is the whole change, and it's the thing you already do for flights. The flight leaves at eleven whether or not you've finished the email. From now on the door leaves at twenty to nine on the same terms.

Some of this will feel rigid. It is a bit rigid, on purpose, for a few weeks. The habit has years of practice and the new arrangement has none. Once the door time is a reflex, most of the scaffolding can come down. You'll keep the bowl for the keys, though. Everyone keeps the bowl.