Being late bugs me.

I don’t mind so much when other people are late (within reason) but I really hate being late myself, and I hate it when other people make me late.

In observing how this comes about recently, I’ve come to realise that a lot of why people are late is because they just don’t know how to be on time.

Fortunately, this is easily remedied. Being on time is in fact very simple. It may not be easy, but it’s simple.

If you wish to be on time, you need to aim to arrive early.

Why? Because if you’re arranging to arrive on time, then if anything goes wrong you will be late. And given the tendency to optimism in planning, things will go wrong more often than not.

This is particularly true if you have scheduled connections to make. If your trains run every half an hour, then being five minutes late for your train will make you half an hour late for the next stage of the journey. These things compound.

What this means is that if you want to not be late on a multi-stage journey you need to plan for redundancy. Tight connections mean you will be late.

The other way to not be late is of course simply to not aim to arrive anywhere in particular at any particular time. When you’re in control of your own schedule, this is entirely viable, but it’s much harder when coordinating with other people.