Time Management - Marc Mancini

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Time Management
Anticipating Airline Delays
Airline travel just isn’t what it used to be. Flights are delayed
more often, especially since the renewed focus on airport
security. Not only does it take longer to check in for flights, but you
never know when a real or perceived emergency 3,000 miles away will
result in delays at your airport. It’s no longer possible to assume that
you’ll make that meeting scheduled two hours after your flight arrives
or that you’ll make that return flight scheduled two hours after the
meeting.
Since air travel so often takes longer now, many people are reconsidering
the necessity of face-to-face contact.Technology provides
opportunities to avoid air travel by offering teleconferencing possibilities
that are almost as efficient as being there in person.
But if you do need to travel, you should anticipate delays. It’s wise
to have an extra change of clothing in your carry-on luggage, as well as
work you could do to make any unscheduled stopovers or long waits
in terminals productive.
taken 20 minutes. You resent the over-efficient parking enforcement
officer—and you suppress that more honest, troubling
thought: for an extra 25 cents, you could have saved $50.
The parking meter syndrome touches many aspects of time
management. You know that you have a 10 a.m. appointment
across town and that it takes 30 minutes to get there. You leave
at 9:30—and a traffic jam makes you 20 minutes late. You estimate
that a project will take nine days to complete, so you start
on it nine days out from the deadline (or worse, six days out),
then find yourself working late into the evenings. As the due
date approaches, you rush the job or you ask for an extension.
The odd thing is that, in such situations and others, most
people tend to blame everyone and everything else for the
stress involved. It’s the fault of the police officer, or the traffic
jam, or those new, unexpected, and unreasonable demands that
the client made that throw off the schedule.
There’s only one way to defeat this self-deception: accept
responsibility, assume things always take longer than expected,
and act accordingly. You may even have to trick yourself into
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