• Feb 26, 2025 • Read in ~8 mins
— By Dr. Sandip Roy.Tidsoptimist (pronounced tid-sop-tuh-mist) is a word for someone who is a “time optimist.”
The Swedes/Norwegians coined that term to mean a person who believes they have more time than they actually do. That time-optimism is why these people are always late.
- Are you one of those people who are perpetually late to everything?
- Do you often say, “Sorry, I’m late,” hoping that others will move on without taking offense?
Frankly, it’s never an issue if it’s rare. People also understand if you were held up by an emergency.
But they get annoyed when you’re a repeat offender — it sends out a message:
“My time matters more than yours.”
You might not see yourself this way. You might not mean to be rude. But your actions shape how others view you.
5 Highly Practical Tips To Stop Being Always Late
You may have received advice, and you even tried, to set your clock ahead by 10 or 15 minutes. That didn’t help.
You may have set three extra alarms, but it never seemed to break the pattern. (ADHD people understand this well; they have time blindness).
Here’s a 5-step guide to help you break your habit of being chronically late:
Step 1. Track Your Routine
Start tracking your routine.
Tonight, before you go to bed, note down how many times you have been late today. And by how many minutes.
- Leaving for work — late by 30 minutes
- Returning from lunch — late by 15 minutes
- Meeting person X — late by 10 minutes
- Showing up at a party — late by 60 minutes
- Going to bed — late by 120 minutes
These times don’t have to be exact. Just write some approximate times.
The more crucial part is to jot down as many of your ‘sins’ of being late as you can. Still, don’t get too worked up over it. It’s okay to catch 2–3 events on your first day.
Do this for the next 7 days. It shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes each night, and you’ll get better at this with daily practice.
Do not try to fix anything at this stage. Just let them stay on paper. You’ll start the next step only after 7 days of journal entries. That’s the way it works.
Step 2. Sort Your ‘Sins’
Sort your lateness events in an ordered way.
At the end of 7 days, sort your activities in order of lateness, from the worst to the least offense.
Remember, you’ll only arrange your late activities by time, not by how much harassment they caused you before or after. So, if you were late by 120 minutes, that activity comes first, and 15-minute lateness comes last, even if the 15-minute delay cost you your job.
How to do it? Make 6 slabs. Mark sections or pages for each slab. Here’s the framework:
- 120 or more minutes — submitting a project to your team
- 90 to 120 minutes — getting to a meeting with a client
- 60 to 90 minutes — returning a call to your colleague or friend
- 30 to 60 minutes — going to bed (frankly, most of us suffer from this)
- 15 to 30 minutes — reaching your kid’s party or sports event
- 15 or fewer minutes — showing up at a networking event
Making this work depends on arranging your activities according to how late you were. It starts turning the wheels in your brain as you see the chunks of lateness with your eyes.
Do not try to micromanage this part. Let go of trying to be accurate to the minute.
The most crucial part of this step is, again, not to do anything about it.
How long do you spend on this step? Give it 2 or 3 days.
On to the next step.
Step 3. Pick Out The Tiniest Devil
Fix the smallest event of lateness.
Two ground rules here:
- Don’t tell anyone else about it. Because declaring it before doing it takes away your motivation.
- Set up reminders throughout each day to your goal. Fix a lot of post-it notes at various places.
Action time: Pick up the activity that you were the least late to, and fix it.
Once you have fixed it, and are no more late to that activity, give yourself a little reward.
Keep repeating it to set it in stone.
How to go about fixing it? We are dealing with that in the next step, where we’ll lay out the plan to fix it.
Step 4. Begin A New Ritual
Replace your old habit with new rituals.
Habits don’t work from the start; rituals do.
Habits are automatic behaviors. Rituals, however, are just the opposite — they require your intention, attention, and engagement.
Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit, says,
“Rituals, by contrast, are almost always patterns developed by an external source, and adopted for reasons that might have nothing to do with decision-making.”
Rituals are step-by-step instructions you can easily repeat to get to your desired outcome. If you’ve taken up your habit of going to bed on time, here’s an example of how to go about it:
If you’re late at it for around an hour each night, then set up a ritual one and a half hours earlier before your designated bedtime. Start with shutting down and switching off your electronic gadgets. Ten minutes later, start dimming the total light in the house, by turning off a few of the lights. If you’re not already in bed by then, five minutes later, make the whole house dark and force yourself to find your way to bed in the dark.
If you’ve trouble going for a morning bout of exercise on time, so much so that you give it up for days together, here’s another example of tackling it:
You wake up in the morning with your phone reminding you repeatedly to put on your running shoes instead of slippers. Once you do put on your joggers, tell yourself you can’t take those shoes off until you’ve gone out and walked or jogged around for 20 minutes.
When you do a ritual for enough days, it turns into a new habit.
Step 5. Make It Utterly Easy
Make your behavior change easy.
The best way to start a behavior change is to keep it simple and easy. And the right way to do it is to start with a small goal and keep your expectations low. When you begin with a smaller aim, it usually keeps things manageable.
It works like this. If you have the ultimate goal of reducing a half-hour delay in doing something, start by setting yourself up to shrink your error by all of 5 minutes for the first few days.
Now, if five minutes seems large, make it 2 minutes. Just arriving two minutes earlier from your previous day will get you to arrive 10 minutes earlier in just five days.
And that’s all there’s to it — two minutes earlier to a task or meet every day in an incremental process.
An inspiring thought about this is by James Clear in his book Atomic Habits:
If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.
And in Habit Stacking, author S. J. Scott writes:
The core idea behind the mini-habits concept is that you can build a major habit by thinking small enough to get started. Most people don’t need motivation to do one pushup, so it’s easy to get started. And once you get going, you’ll find it’s easy to keep at it.
Changing a habit is never an all-or-nothing process. Remember not to straitjacket yourself with a “this time or no other time” dictum. You are not changing a habit; you’re actually replacing it with several serially arranged small rituals.
How To Make The New Habit of Being-On-Time Stick
The last question: How do you make your new habit of punctuality stick?
The answer: Start a habit chain.
The basic idea of habit tracking is to put a mark (say X) on each day you do something you have wanted to do and carry forward without breaking the habit chain.
To achieve this, install a habit tracker on your smartphone. There are many; check your app store. You could also easily do this with a simple paper calendar.
Why Are You Always Late, As Per Psychology?
The reason some people are habitually late is that they have a psychological issue called the planning fallacy. They cannot correctly predict how long it will take them to complete a task.
The concept of planning fallacy was first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. They said that planners focus on the most optimistic scenario for the task, rather than using their experience to judge how much time similar tasks require.
Remember that word in the beginning — tidsoptimist — meaning someone who’s a “time optimist”? That word nails the concept.
A real-world example is the James Webb Space Telescope. It went over budget by $9 billion, and was sent into orbit 14 years later than its originally planned launch date.
Some other reasons for constantly being late could be low self-control, a high anxiety, or perfectionism.
Final Words
Finally, handle yourself with some self-compassion instead of self-criticism.
This is less about a despicable habit that haunts you, and more about a person you want to become as a result of changing that habit.
√ Also Read: Psychology of Goal-Setting: How To Make Your Goals Sticky
√ Please share it with someone if you found this helpful.
