The blog

Are you a time-opti­mist to the point that you often dri­ve like a mani­ac the last bit just to make it in time for the meet­ing? ??Is it more com­mon for you to rush off rather than stop for a moment and make sure you’ve got every­thing you need before you step out the door?

Wouldn’t it be nicer if you had greater mar­gins so that you can relax a bit before you step into the meet­ing, so that you to a greater extent brought the things you need­ed for the day (and there­fore didn’t have to think of demand­ing emer­gency solu­tions), so that you made an even bet­ter impres­sion on your clients by always arriv­ing on time, and so that you reduced the risk of harm­ing your­self in a car crash???Be more accu­rate in your plan­ning by mak­ing your own dri­ving time list.

Try this

1. In a spread­sheet (in a spread­sheet appli­ca­tion on your com­put­er or on a plain sheet of paper), cre­ate the columns ​“From” (indi­cat­ing your office, home, or the place you usu­al­ly have as a start­ing point), ​“To” and final­ly ​“Dri­ving time”.
2. The next time you dri­ve some­where, write where you were going in the ​“To”-column and how long it took to get there, in min­utes, in the ​“Dri­ving time”- column.??Perhaps it was in con­nec­tion with the first meet­ing with a poten­tial client, per­haps it was to one of your company’s offices where you have reg­u­lar meet­ings to be on time for.
3. Grad­u­al­ly you will build a data­base cov­er­ing how long it actu­al­ly takes for you to get from door to door; not how long you hope it will take or how long some site on the Inter­net says it should take.
4. The next time you have a meet­ing at a loca­tion oth­er than your office, check your dri­ving time list for how long it took you to dri­ve there last time.
5. Enter the time you are dri­ving as time being ​“occu­pied” in your agen­da and if you work with a dig­i­tal cal­en­dar (such as Out­look for exam­ple), set a reminder for 15 min­utes before you need to go, so you make sure you are in the car at the right time.

Do you real­ly need to mea­sure the trav­el-time yourself?

Sure, you can find out the esti­mat­ed trav­el time through route-plan­ning ser­vices on the Inter­net, but by mea­sur­ing the actu­al time from door to door your­self, you will include those min­utes which are eas­i­ly for­got­ten, but which are spent get­ting to and from the car, stop­ping for gas, and try­ing to find a park­ing lot.??In fact, my dri­ving time list has cured my time opti­mism, at least with regards to how long it takes me to get from one place to anoth­er. So, I can only rec­om­mend you to get your own.

How do you do it?

How do you do to ensure that you arrive on time for meetings? 

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