Running Late

When I can’t manage myself to manage time.

The metaphor:

I try to post on Thursday mornings – but I guess it’s only fitting this one’s going up at night, slipping in just a few hours before the deadline day ends. The whole post’s a metaphor for its point: I run late.

The story:

Last Sunday morning, I texted my sister about visiting our grandma after a lunch with friends. I offered to pick her up and bring her to the restaurant, after which we’d head to Gram’s.

Ten minutes after I’d planned to be on the road, she replied to accept. I was not on the road: I was running through the house, grabbing my sunglasses and water bottle, shoving my feet into my shoes. Once in the car, I had to walk back the offer. I’d left too late to pick her up and still be on time.

This was, in some ways, an improvement for me. Thanks to going straight there and some lucky street parking, I was actually five minutes early for lunch, and first to the table – a rare thrill. My sister and I did visit our grandma afterwards, three sets of crinkled green eyes above huge smiles. Still, I missed out on my intended plan because of running late.

Speaking of running…here’s my favorite running trail in prime fall foliage

I do this constantly. I’ve been late to work events and ticketed events. I’ve been late to appointments that had to be rescheduled, wasting the trip and delaying the care. I’ve had to run for every kind of public transportation: up streets, down subway steps, and through airports. Most importantly, I’ve left friends and loved ones waiting. I still flinch to remember the time I was an entire hour late to drinks at a DC bar 20 minutes from my rowhouse.

My friend was furious, which is fair. She thought I didn’t care – though I do care, deeply. I know there are people who wouldn’t care, and sometimes I wish I were one of them. What’s the point of caring enough that it hurts, if it’s not enough to fix it?

Are you good at time? Can you look at a scheduled flight departure and know when you need to commence all the components of your morning – waking up, taking a run, showering, eating, zipping your suitcase and leaving home?

Or are you like me? Do you have to pre-schedule blocks on your calendar for getting there, checking in, and boarding to make sure you don’t miss the plane?

I’m late enough, often enough, that the pattern is a punchline for my friends and coworkers. “We should go in half an hour,” a friend might say, then turn meaningfully to me. “That’s 15 Gwinutes.” Minutes adjusted for Gwen. I keep hoping I’ll break the cycle, or at least disrupt it enough to fly under the radar. I’d thought I was blending in at my new job, but in the past month alone, three different colleagues, including my boss, have remarked offhandedly that when they meet with me, they count on an extra 3-5 minutes before I join.

Getting somewhere on time requires skills I haven’t developed. This is still my fault, but it’s a different failure than if I’d acquired the skill and just didn’t enact it. If I have somewhere to be in several hours, I take a stab at planning to be there, but I feel suspense about when I’ll arrive right up until I do.

It’s a feeling I remember from swim lessons. I was a pre-teen in a YMCA class learning how to turn when you finish a lap without losing speed. The instructor did a demonstration: approaching the wall, submerging into a sommersault, and twisting from her back to her belly as she pushed off with her feet. “There’s no way to teach this,” she said, after surfacing. “You just have to do it to figure it out.”

For the rest of the lesson, I found out how flipturns can go wrong. The stinging pressure of water shooting up my nose if I didn’t blow out strong enough. The anticlimactic swish of my feet finding only open water if I turned too early, the wall still out of reach. The slam of my shinbones on the pool’s edge if I turned too late.

Eventually, practice pushed the process into muscle memory, yielding a confidence I retain even now, decades after I stopped swimming regularly. For weeks, though, as I launched myself upside down underwater, I was wondering, Am I doing it right? Is it working? Which is how it feels to be facing down a deadline for when I’m supposed to be somewhere: deep focus, hard breathing, creeping vertigo.

Have punctual people mastered the skills of timeliness the way I once mastered the flip turn? Do they feel that practiced ease, even a thrill of anticipation as they commence the process? Or do they just allow more buffer than I do, hurtling into each event of my life and flailing around, hoping it’ll all come together?

Often, I run late due to false expectations. If I’m not hungry when I’m planning, I forget that I’ll ever be hungry again. Suddenly it’s time to go and I realize I haven’t eaten yet that day. I expect that I’ll always be able to make the trip in record time; I forget about factors like traffic, weather, or parking that can make it take much longer. If part of my preparation doesn’t strike me as an activity, like dressing and showering, I forget to buffer time for them. Woe betide the friend I’m meant to meet on the day I slip into the driver’s seat, already cutting time close, and find the gas tank almost empty.

These are simple mistakes, like a faulty somersault: failing to tuck my chin for a quick spin or seal my fingers tightly enough to propel my turn. They’re my fault, but I make them accidentally. I make more complex mistakes, too: not just forgetting but actively hiding facts from myself, in favor of what I wish were true. Facts like that there isn’t time to finish what I’m doing, if I don’t notice or desperately wish otherwise.

I am a deep-focus person: it’s easy for me to slip into flow state. Suddenly, I’m too absorbed in reading to hear someone speaking, much less time silently passing. I’m tracking the arc of my own ideas while I run or write or type, thoughts orbiting my head like math symbols in A Beautiful Mind. Leaving the confines of the physical world for the psychedelic flow world is a central joy of my life, but time stays linear even when my thoughts don’t, and there I am again, late for whatever was supposed to happen next.

I’m also a tasklist addict, chasing the exhilaration that bursts from each item I check off. I’ve written that “on my best days at work, there’s so much momentum building that I feel like I’m actually in motion, wind blowing back my hair as my desk picks up speed.” It’s hard to stop checking off tasks and soaking up dopamine: I want to bend the laws of physics to fit in one more item, then another. The fact that I sometimes succeed at jamming too many activities into a small window of time only fuels the delusion that I can do it again. I’m in denial that typically, I need to choose: if I’m doing one thing, it’s instead of something else. Like being on time.

Together, these compound failures form a vicious cycle, where I keep not learning how long it takes to do things because I’m always rushing through them. That means I have bad data when I try to do better, which I do want, because being late is miserable. So I’ve learned to put preparations on my task list, for the joy of checking them off, and to buffer the time I need, since I so often guess wrong. I’ve even learned to monitor my thoughts for delusions. When I notice I’m thinking, I just want to finish…I tell myself firmly, Yes, it would be nice if there were time for that, but there isn’t. Often, this can break the spell of denial, the frantic working in service of false hopes. I’ll have to abandon them either way — the trick is to spur myself to stop before it’s too late to be on time.

The best strategy I’ve discovered? Working from home. Eliminating my commute has cut way back on the amount I’m late for work or to meet Steve afterwards. The only downside is, if I tell him I’m wrapping up, he can see if I do it or not. Now if only I could see it all myself, in real time.

The question: How do you make sure you’re on time – and how do you define that?

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