Additionally, research has consistently shown that people who underestimate task duration—especially for tasks that feel controllable—tend to assume they can personally speed up each step. As a result, they leave too little margin for real-world delays, increasing timing errors that often translate into late arrivals.
What you can do about it: To counter the planning fallacy, Rashelle Isip, a New York–based productivity consultant and author of The Order Expert’s Guide to Time Management, suggests simply doubling your initial time estimate for getting somewhere. “If you think something will take 10 minutes,” she advises, “make it 20 to give yourself a buffer.”
The free spirits: Low conscientiousness
Among the Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—conscientiousness shows the strongest and most consistent link to punctuality as individuals who score high in it have been shown to be more likely to arrive on time.
This is because conscientious people tend to be “responsible, goal-directed, and disciplined—reliable and attentive to details,” explains Geraldine Joaquim, a clinical psychotherapist based in West Sussex, England.
The trait is so important that one 2019 meta-analysis found it to be the single best noncognitive predictor of overall performance in life.