Guides: routines, daily planning and remembering things
Commute planning: leave on time without doing time arithmetic every morning
Being late is usually not about being slow. It is about a calculation done badly at 8:15 in the morning: the meeting is at 9, the commute is "about half an hour", so there is plenty of time. Then the bus is late. Planning your commute properly means doing that calculation once, with honest numbers, and letting it drive your mornings.
Measure the real door-to-door time
Time your commute for a week, from closing your front door to sitting at your desk. Include the walk to the station, the wait and the stairs. Most people underestimate it by ten minutes. Use the typical time, not the best one you remember.
Add a fixed margin
Delays happen several times a month. A margin of ten to fifteen minutes turns them from stress into nothing. It is cheaper to arrive early and read for five minutes than to run through a station. The margin should be part of the plan, not something you hope to find.
Compute leave time from the first appointment
Your leave time is the first appointment minus commute minus margin. Your wake time is leave time minus your morning routine. On days when the first thing is a call from home, there is no commute at all and you can sleep a bit more. A planner that knows your commute can do this every day for you.
Prepare the night before
Keys, badge, bag, bike lights, the documents for the 10am meeting: set them out in the evening. The ten minutes you lose looking for things in the morning are exactly the ten minutes of margin you planned.
Use the commute on purpose
A train commute is time you can use: reading, listening to something you chose, or capturing the day's first tasks. If you drive or cycle, keep it for thinking and use dictation at the end of the ride to note what came to mind.
Different days, different commutes
If you work from home on some days, or go to a different place on others, tell your planner per appointment. A meeting across town needs a different leave time than the usual office.
A worked example
Your first meeting is at 9:30 across town. The commute is 40 minutes and you keep a 10 minute margin, so you leave at 8:40. Your morning routine takes an hour, so you wake at 7:40. If you need 7.5 hours of sleep, you are in bed by about 0:10, and dinner is ideally around 21:00. Tomorrow the first thing is a call from home at 10:00: no commute, and the whole chain shifts later.
Try it: what you write, what LifeOS does
- “my commute is 40 minutes” → Stored as a preference: for each appointment outside home the plan subtracts 40 minutes plus a margin to tell you when to leave.
- “tomorrow at 9am meeting at the office” → An appointment tomorrow at 9:00; the morning plan shows when to leave and when to wake up.
- “tomorrow at 10am call with Marta” → A call is treated as remote: no travel time is added.
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