When you book a flight, you know you need to get to the airport by a certain time.
If you need to get there four hours ahead of boarding time to feel comfortable, anything less than that buffer feels late. Even if you arrive two hours before boarding, you may feel like you should’ve been there two hours earlier.
Along the way, you might worry about missing your flight, ruminate about all of the reasons for your timing, and feel frantic and anxious the whole trip to the airport. In this state of mind, it’s hard for you to enjoy the commute.
A similar experience takes place for all sorts of time estimates. At least flights are straightforward, because you know the exact time the flight is scheduled to leave. Even when the flight is delayed, it’ll still be the same day. For more complicated goals and plans, even the best estimates are no more than a guess.
Sometimes, the date is an age milestone, like, “Before I turn 30.” Other times, it’s “As soon as possible,” “After this next milestone,” or even, “Yesterday.” There are people who seem to pull a number from their imagination, without any grounding in reality; behind schedule is routine for them. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess how stressful that is.
When you’re making this estimate, you can approach it in a few ways:
Which are you more energized by—being early or being late? Adjust your planning accordingly. If being early makes you feel proud of yourself, create timelines where you can easily be early. If being late makes you feel drained, adjust your timelines so that you’re not late.
Private and public project timelines are two different things.
Keep a hard deadline and a loose scope. Make it output oriented, not outcome. Be flexible with what you deliver, as long as you deliver by a specific date.
Or, keep a tight scope, and a loose deadline. Make it outcome oriented, and be okay not knowing when—or even how—that will happen. Keep an open mind and very open eyes. While I personally haven’t found this approach very useful, I’ve seen some friends find it energizing. (Results TBD.)
If you’re going to make optimistic forecasts, then prepare yourself for a proportional amount of disappointment. You may not be able to escape disappointment, but you will be able to soften it by changing its meaning. (For example, consider how many of the people you admire, or your peers, felt disappointment along the way to their goal?)
Make a historical timeline of how long things took (e.g., how much outreach you needed to do, how much time you needed to do that, etc.) and factors that will affect the timeline. Approach it like how you’d approach guessing how much time it takes to get to the airport. That sets you up to make a best guess based on the past. The more recent your data, the more precise your timeline will be. If you’re in a “new country,” metaphorically or literally, you’ll need to rely on an external source like Google Maps for data, so it’s best to set a buffer.
If you hate being late, and find it draining, the best way not to be late is to do it every day, carve out windows of time to make progress when you feel like it, and keep expectations low for the future. There should be no consequences for your lateness. This method is difficult to count on, so you’ll need to make adjustments if you need other people to buy in. But, it’s great for projects which you’re working on yourself, and not relying on for income yet. This approach looks spontaneous, and other people might not take it seriously, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to.