Hey, what's going on, guys?
So, I got a few questions lately
about how to stop being late to things,
and I thought this would be a good topic
to cover because some of us do have problems
getting ourselves to things on time
even if we're not jerks
who don't respect the time of others,
we simply have other problems, little brain bugs
that cause us to be habitually late.
So, in today's video, I've got five specific tips
that can hopefully help you become
the most punctual person in your friend group.
And the first couple that we're going to tackle
what I think is the main problem
that makes people so late which is that we, as humans,
are very bad at making accurate time estimates.
And we are susceptible to something
called the planning fallacy which describes
how, basically, we are overoptimistic in our estimations.
And the first thing you can start doing
to fight against this planning fallacy
is to start envisioning the entire sequence
of steps it's going to take to get you
from whatever you're doing right now
to your next scheduled event.
And the reason that you should do this
is because it puts you on the right side
of what's called the segmentation effect.
And this effect basically describes
how people make shorter time estimations
for an entire task than their time estimations
for the sum total of all these subtasks
were they to break that task down.
And the reason this happens is because we tend
to fixate on the most important part,
or the part that's going to take the longest.
A perfect example is transit time.
If I need to get somewhere,
my brain tends to naturally fixate
on how long it's going to take to get there.
So, I might think, "Oh, I need to get
"to a coffee shop in the next town over.
"It's going to take 25 minutes to drive there.
And if I were to actually write down
all the steps involved in getting up from my desk
and getting myself into the building,
which I actually did, I can find out
that this is actually a 16-step process,
and there was about eight minutes
of extra steps involved.
So, instead of budgeting 25 minutes to get there,
I should budget 34.
And in reality, this is actually not enough time
because, like I said, the planning fallacy
has a pretty tight grip on our brains,
and we are overoptimistic in our time estimations,
and this is a natural brain bug.
In fact, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada
found this out by asking people
to make two different types of time estimations
for completing a task.
They asked people for best guess scenarios.
Basically like the everyday, run-of-the-mill, average case,
and they also asked people
for hopeful, ideal, best-case-scenario guesses.
And the results were virtually identical
for both cases which indicates that we only see
the ideal scenario when we try to plan
how long it's going to take to do something.
We don't think about the grandma that's going
to be driving five miles an hour in front of us.
We don't think about the ninjas
that are going to attack us on our way to school.
And these things happen, right?
We don't plan for the things that will go wrong,
but there's a natural distribution of outcomes
for any event, both good and bad.
And our brains just tend to fixate
on that perfect ideal, tiny, little end of the bell curve
where everything goes right,
and very rarely is that actually going
to be what happens.
Now, with a lot of practice and experience,
I found that it is possible to get over this tendency
to be overoptimistic, but an interim solution
is to use what's called a fudge ratio.
And this is a concept that was created
by the writer and blogger Steve Pavlina,
and it's basically the difference
between your time estimate for something
and the actual time it takes.
So, for example, if you thought it would take
30 minutes to go to the store,
and it actually takes you 45,
then your fudge ration is 1.5.
And what he recommends you do
is to keep this number in mind,
and apply as like a second step
in your brain, like a revision step,
to all your future time estimates for similar tasks.
Now, with the third tip we've got for you guys,
we're going to attack the problem
from a different angle.
Tips one and two were about estimating more accurately
and trying to envision all the steps.
And tip number three is to simply remove steps
by doing stuff in advance.
If you pack your bag the night before when you go to bed,
or you lay all your clothes in advance.
Or maybe you bulk cook your meals
so you can just wake up and microwave them,
then you've got less to do in the morning
or whenever you need to start doing stuff.
The less steps that you have to do through
in any process, the easier it's going
to be to estimate how long it'll take.
But, more importantly, the fewer instances
there are for things to do wrong, right?
A simpler process has fewer points of failure
than a complicated one.
All right, so now that we've moved through tips
for making your time estimates more accurate,
and for making your processes simpler,
my penultimate tip, or fourth tip for you guys,
is to schedule an end time to the task
that you're currently doing.
And the reasons that we want to do this
are number one, sometimes we just get caught up
in our work and we don't realize
we need to get going to our next thing.
And number two, sometimes we do know
we need to get going to the next thing,
but our brains are kind of like being rewarded
for whatever we're doing right now.
Maybe we're on Facebook, or maybe we're really
into the work that we're doing,
or playing a video game.
And the, you know the old part of your brain,
the limbic system that's kind of getting
all the dopamine hits is basically like a little kid
petitioning its mom saying like,
"Just one more minute.
"Just one more minute."
Right?
And your prefrontal cortex,
the more controll-y part of your brain
has to be the mom and say, "No, it's bedtime.
"Turn off the friggin' video games.
"Turn off Yu-Gi-Oh!
"It's time to go to bed."
And bed is probably class, but what I found
is that an external system is much better
at being a mom for the old part of your brain
than your PFC is.
So, use an alarm.
Maybe use a Pomodoro session
that ends five minutes before your next task
needs to begin.
Or maybe just have an alarm on your phone
that says it's time to start winding down.
That way your brain is going to be able
to kind of boot itself out of whatever
you're doing right now, and start doing
the next thing when it actually needs to do it.
And finally, my last tip is for any of you guys
that find yourselves forgetting events.
Either forgetting them entirely and completely missing them,
or forgetting them until like five minutes
before they're going to start,
which results in a panic attack, right?
Neither is a good situation,
and luckily both can be completely rectified
just by using a calendar efficiently.
Like the productivity guru, David Allen,
once said, "Your brain is for having ideas,
"not storing them."
This is true even if you have some weird genius brain
that can remember 99% of all the events
that you have to go to, and I can tell you
mine is not like that.
I can probably remember maybe 75%,
and usually those are only the fun ones,
but my calendar is always going
to remember 100% of everything that I put into it,
unless evil hackers somehow get into it,
and I've got pretty strong passwords.
So, get into the habit of putting events
into your calendar the moment
they come up on your schedule.
Get 'em out of your brain
and into a quick capture system, I like to call it,
so it's basically in a steel trap that you trust.
And I'd also recommend setting up
reminder notifications for your events.
Now, part of my morning routine
is to wake up and immediately check my calendar
so I know exactly what's going to happen that day,
but for certain events, I want to make darn sure
that I'm going to get to them on time.
So, I'll use Google Calendars reminder feature
to set maybe like an hour before
a notification to come to my phone.
All right, so those are the tips I've got for you
in this video, and if you're able
to implement them all into your life,
you are likely to become the most punctual person
in your group of friends, which will give you
the honor and privledge of being annoyed
at all the friends who are perpetually late
now that you aren't.
But hey, you can just send them this video, right?
So, hopefully you found this helpful.
If you get additional tips, I would love
to hear about them down in the comments.
And you can also check out the blog post
for this video which has got some extra details
and links to some cool scientific studies
about why our brains are broken and overoptimistic.
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And if you missed last week's video,
it was about how to wake up early.
So, if that's something you want to do and you missed it,
check it out right there.
Once again, if you want to check out
that companion article which has extra details
and resource links, you can click the button right there.
And if you'd like to connect with me,
well, you're probably going to need a rooftop
and a spotlight because all I'm sayin' is
have you ever seen Batman and me
in the same room at the same time, hmm?
Anyway, thank you so much for watching,
and I will see you in the next video.