Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that you drive a car, not a time machine, so best to plan accordingly. Today's tip comes from a participant in one of my time tracking challenges. She told me that she had a tendency to underestimate how long various things would take, so her husband would remind her tongue in cheek, that she drives a car, not a
time machine. If something is thirty minutes away, you will not magically get there in fifteen, and if you leave ten minutes late, the distance is not going too magically become shorter. She's not the only one who sometimes forgets that we live in the real, non magical world, where the laws of physics are strictly enforced. Wanting something to take less time will not make it take less time.
In general, it is better to face this reality. Since I study time and look at a lot of people's time logs, I've come to see that time estimation is challenging for many people. This stems from a few things. Sometimes bad estimates come from looking at insufficient evidence. Maybe you once drove to your kid's daycare and onto the
office in twenty minutes, so you budget twenty minutes routinely. Once, you wrote a five hundred word newsletter article in half an hour, so you assume you can write a similar article during a thirty minute break between meetings today. But maybe there were extenuating circumstances for those situations, like there was literally no one else on the road because it was a major holiday that your family just didn't happen to have off, or maybe that newsletter was mostly a
reprinted memo from a colleague. The best case scenario tends not to be the normal scenario, so it may not be realistic to expect to write a newsletter when you've got thirty minutes between meetings, as you probably won't even get the full thirty minutes if the meeting run's late, or you need to go to the bathroom, or you find yourself answering a hot email. You can start, but your work isn't getting done by a time machine. We also underestimate with time because we forget about some of
the steps. Unlike time machines, cars need to be parked, Maybe the time between the actual key and the ignition moment in your driveway to the entrance to your office complex is twenty minutes, but you have to put on your shoes, walk to your car, get in, put on your seat belt, and start up a podcast. Of course, on the other end, you need to find a spot, grab your things, tap your badget security, and walk to
your desk. If you put your shoes on twenty minutes before your first meeting, you will in fact be late. But honestly, I think the biggest thing going on is some fantasizing. The truth is we don't want it to take forty minutes to get to work, or for that full on grocery store trip to take ninety minutes, so we don't budget the proper amount of time and just hope it will work out. Alas we drive cars, not
time machines. Wanting something to be different doesn't make it change. Instead, it's better to face reality and see what can be done to actually change what's going on while observing the laws of physics. Maybe you can split daycare drop off duties, maybe you can work from home twice a week, maybe you can order groceries online. But there is nothing gained by routinely underestimating how much time things will take other
than a lot of frustration and frenzy. Better to be more accurate and get done what we intend to do. In the meantime, This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
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