The personality trait linked to always being late – and the calendar tweak that finally fixes it

Ryan Collins • December 10, 2025 16:42

The sinking feeling of being “that” late person

There’s a particular flavour of dread that hits when you glance at the clock, swear it cannot be that time already, and realise you are once again leaving the house at the exact moment you were meant to arrive somewhere else. You fire off the apologetic text – “So sorry, running 10 mins late!” – knowing full well it will be closer to 20. Your heart rate spikes, your brain starts sprinting, and you promise yourself, with absolute sincerity, that next week you’ll be the kind of person who is early and serene.

You meant to leave on time. You always do. You even looked at your calendar in the morning and thought, “Plenty of time.” Yet somehow, between “just quickly emptying the dishwasher” and “I’ll answer this one email”, the minutes evaporated. It feels like everyone else is playing life on normal speed while your relationship with time is running on a slight delay.

Psychologists have a surprisingly consistent answer to why this happens, and it’s not simply bad manners or a lack of willpower. A specific personality trait quietly bends your sense of time out of shape – and a small, almost boring change to the way you use your calendar can straighten it again.

The trait that bends your sense of time

People who are reliably late often share a cluster of tendencies that psychologists file under low conscientiousness with a strong streak of optimism. That sounds clinical, but translated into everyday life it looks like this: you believe you can fit one more thing in, and you’re usually a bit too hopeful about how long “one more thing” will take.

Conscientiousness is the trait linked to planning, follow-through and realism about limits. People high in it naturally build buffers, finish tasks before the last minute and err on the side of caution. People lower on conscientiousness tend to rely more on improvisation and gut feel. Add a naturally optimistic outlook and you get what time researchers sometimes call “time optimism” – a reliable tendency to imagine the best-case scenario and plan as if nothing will interrupt it.

Time-optimistic people are often creative, sociable and curious. They say yes to things. They squeeze value out of their days. They are also the ones most likely to think the train will probably be on time, the traffic probably won’t be too bad, and getting ready probably won’t take more than ten minutes, even though history suggests otherwise. The intention is good; the estimate is wrong.

The crucial part is this: your lateness is not usually about caring less. It’s about a brain that consistently underestimates the invisible bits of time – transitions, faff, and mental loading – and overestimates how much it can cram into an hour.

The quiet mistake almost every late person makes

The mistake begins long before you are actually late. It starts when you first put something in your diary.

Most people who struggle with time do a version of the same thing: they schedule events, not departures. You type “Dentist – 3pm” and close the calendar. In your head, “3pm” becomes the meaningful point. Your brain stores it as the target, the anchor, the moment that matters.

What you don’t schedule, and therefore don’t consciously respect, are the little chunks wrapped around that appointment:

The 10 minutes hunting for your keys.
The 15 minutes of travel.
The three minutes you always spend turning off lights, grabbing a bottle of water and checking you locked the door.

You also probably do one other very human thing: you plan your day in solid, satisfying blocks. One more email. A quick call. Just wiping the kitchen worktop. The time between “now” and “that thing in my diary” looks big and vague, so your optimistic brain fills it until the very edges, trusting that everything will line up perfectly.

It rarely does. Life throws in micro-delays – the parcel at the door, the misplaced wallet, the bus that doesn’t appear – and with no built-in buffer, you slide from “cutting it fine” to “late” faster than your calendar can catch up.

Why alarms and good intentions don’t fix it

If you’re a repeated latecomer, you’ve probably tried to brute-force your way out of it with alarms. You set a reminder 15 minutes before a meeting, or an alert an hour before you need to be somewhere. For a week or two, it even helps.

Then your brain adapts. The alarm becomes background noise, just another nudge you can snooze. You tell yourself you’ll move “in two minutes” and then keep doing whatever you’re doing. The alert is about the event, and your time-optimistic brain still believes it can bend the minutes in between.

This is why willpower and one-off hacks tend to fizzle out. They don’t change the underlying frame: that you still think in terms of when something starts, not when you must physically leave to be on time.

To change your relationship with lateness in a way that survives real life, you need a tweak that alters the way your brain sees time by default, not just when you remember to be sensible.

The calendar tweak that finally works

The change that helps chronic latecomers most is so simple it can feel underwhelming: you stop scheduling events and start scheduling departures and prep as separate, real appointments.

You teach your calendar – and therefore your brain – to care about “Leave by” and “Ready by” times, not just the moment the meeting starts.

Step 1: Turn every event into three blocks

For anything that requires you to be somewhere at a set time, think in three parts:

Prep – getting dressed, printing documents, packing a bag, finding your keys.
Travel – however long it actually takes door-to-door, plus a small buffer.
Landing – the few minutes you need to arrive, find the room, get a drink, breathe.

Instead of “Dentist – 3pm”, your calendar might show:

“Ready to leave for dentist” – 2:20–2:30pm
“Travel to dentist” – 2:30–2:50pm
“Dentist appointment” – 3:00–3:30pm

Now the meaningful action isn’t buried inside a single line. The part where you usually slip – the leaving and the in-between – is visible, blocked out and given equal status to the thing itself.

Step 2: Rename your alarms

Most calendar apps let you rename reminders. Use that to make the action painfully explicit.

Instead of “Dentist in 30 minutes”, you want:

“Put shoes on and pack bag now”
“You should be walking out of the door”

Optimistic brains respond far better to specific, concrete instructions than to vague nudges. An alert that says “Meeting in 15” still leaves room for “I can just finish this”. “Open Zoom now” leaves much less wiggle room.

Step 3: Change your default event length

Time optimists often plan 60-minute meetings back-to-back, especially for video calls. On paper it looks efficient; in reality it leaves no room for bathroom breaks, notes or the previous call overrunning.

Change your diary defaults so that:

60-minute meetings become 45 minutes.
30-minute meetings become 25 minutes.

That “missing” 5–15 minutes becomes automatic landing time and buffer, not wishful thinking. You don’t have to remember to add it; it’s baked into how your day structures itself.

Step 4: Protect your departure blocks

The final step is the one late people tend to resist most: you treat your “leave by” and “travel” blocks as non‑negotiable. If someone tries to book over them, you move the other thing or say no. You don’t cannibalise the buffer you consciously created.

It can feel overdramatic to decline a call because it would nibble into your “travel to GP” slot. Yet this is precisely how consistently-on-time people operate without thinking about it. They defend the space around their commitments so reality has room to happen.

How this rewires your time optimism

What this calendar tweak really does is confront your optimism with evidence, gently but repeatedly.

When “travel to work” appears as a 35-minute chunk in your diary every weekday, your sense of how long it takes stops being “about 20 minutes, if the buses are kind” and becomes “half an hour, reliably, even on good days”. Your feelings about the journey may stay the same; your planning stops pretending.

Old vs new way of seeing an appointment

Approach	What you see	What your brain assumes
Old	“Dentist – 3pm”	I’m free until about 2:45pm
New	“Ready by 2:30, travel 2:30–2:50, dentist 3–3:30”	I’m busy from 2:20pm. I actually have less free time than I think

Over a few weeks, this repeated correction shrinks the gap between your felt sense of time and the actual minutes on the clock. You stop being shocked that things take as long as they do, because you see that length laid out in front of you every day.

Importantly, you don’t have to become a different kind of person – just a person whose optimism is held in check by a slightly more honest diary.

Borrowing a trick from project managers (without a spreadsheet)

If all this sounds faintly like project management, that’s because it is. Professionals who have to deliver things on time for a living rarely trust their gut alone. They plan backwards from a deadline, estimate prep and faff, add contingency and then protect that time.

You can steal the spirit of that method at home without ever touching a Gantt chart:

Start from the arrival time, not your current time.
Work backwards: landing → travel → prep.
Put each stage in your calendar as if it were its own appointment.
Let the visible blocks shame you out of squeezing in “just one more thing”.

The effect is quietly powerful. Instead of trying to remember to be different, you build a small system that makes being different the path of least resistance.

When lateness isn’t just personality

It’s worth saying clearly: for some people, persistent lateness is tangled up with ADHD, anxiety, depression or chronic pain. In those cases, time optimism is only one part of a more complicated picture, and a calendar tweak won’t magically solve everything.

What it can do is reduce avoidable lateness – the kind caused by misjudged prep, optimistic travel estimates and accidental double-booking. That, in turn, can lower the background stress and shame that make harder problems feel even heavier.

If you suspect there’s more going on than simple disorganisation, talking to a GP or mental health professional is still the better next step. A kinder calendar is a tool, not a diagnosis.

Small habit, big social difference

Once you start treating “leave by” as seriously as “starts at”, other parts of life shift. You stop turning up flustered and apologising before you’ve even taken your coat off. You begin to discover what it feels like to arrive with five minutes to spare and a normal heart rate.

You will still misjudge the odd day. Everyone does. Buses break down, children have meltdowns, trains vanish from the board. The aim is not spotless punctuality; it’s to make “I’m so sorry, running late” the exception instead of the default.

In the end, that small, unglamorous tweak – breaking events into prep, travel and landing, then guarding those slots – does something your pure good intentions never quite managed. It turns your optimism into a strength again, instead of the reason you’re always the last one rushing through the door.

FAQ: - Isn’t building all these extra blocks just going to make my day feel more cramped? It can look that way at first, because you’re finally seeing the time you were already spending on prep and travel. In practice, people often feel less rushed, because they stop pretending a 10-minute gap can hold 25 minutes of tasks. - What if my job doesn’t let me shorten meetings or refuse last‑minute calls? You may not control everything, but you can usually protect some departure blocks and add at least tiny landing buffers between calls. Even five minutes consistently protected is better than none. - Do I really need this if I’m only late by five minutes? Repeated small lateness still erodes trust and increases your own stress. The same method works at that scale, and many people find that once they can reliably be on time by a few minutes, bigger occasions (interviews, trains, flights) stop feeling like chaotic exceptions.