How to be on time for a new job.

Why the first week counts for more than it should

Someone posted two weeks out from a job they could not afford to lose, saying they had been late everywhere their whole life: school, the army, every job before this one. Several hundred people replied. Almost none of the advice was about caring more.

The first week matters out of proportion because people form an impression fast and revise it slowly. Two weeks of walking in early buys you the benefit of the doubt for the year that follows, and it costs far less to establish than it does to correct.

Drive the commute once, for real

The most useful thing you can do before day one is a dry run. Get up when you plan to get up, get ready the way you actually get ready, take the route at the same hour on the same weekday, park where you will park, and walk all the way to where you will actually be working. Then look at the clock.

The number that comes back is nearly always bigger than the one in your head, and it is bigger in a predictable place: the parts nobody counts. Finding a space. The walk in from the lot. The four minutes spent looking for a badge you have not been issued yet.

Take that total and decide, now, how much padding goes on top of it. Padding chosen while you are calm ends up in the plan. Padding invented on the morning itself gets spent on the morning itself.

Then build the morning backward from it

Start at the time you have to be at your desk. Subtract the buffer you just decided on, then the walk in, the parking, the drive, and every step that has to happen before you can leave the house. What you land on is your wake-up time, and it will look early.

That is the answer to a subtraction rather than a target to beat, and the reason to run it in advance is so that you never have to run it again at 6:40 with wet hair and a car to find.

The last row is the one that decides how the first week goes, and it is the first one anybody deletes. Twenty-five minutes of being early is not spare time you failed to use. It absorbs the morning that goes wrong, and it is the difference between walking in settled and walking in apologizing.

Two weeks, in order

1. Do the dry run. Whole route, right hour, right day of the week, all the way to the door you will actually walk through.
2. Time the morning itself, once. Start the timer when the alarm goes off and stop it when you are in the car. Use that number afterward even though it feels too generous.
3. Write down the steps nobody counts. Parking, the walk in from the lot, the wait for the elevator, the walk to your desk, somewhere to put your coat, a computer that boots slowly. If it takes minutes, it gets a line and a number.
4. Pick the buffer now. Fifteen or twenty minutes of arriving early, decided in advance and written into the plan rather than negotiated at 7:00 AM.
5. Build the plan backward once. Arrival time at the bottom, every step above it carrying the time it has to start.
6. Rehearse it twice before day one. The plan you have already run is the one that survives a first morning.

None of this depends on becoming a morning person in two weeks. It moves the thinking to a calm week and leaves the first day with nothing to work out. On the morning itself you are not deciding anything. You are following what a calmer version of you already settled.

How early should I get to work on my first day?

Fifteen to twenty minutes before you are due, and treat that as the arrival time you plan around rather than a bonus. It gives you a badge desk, a parking space that is not the last one, and a morning where the first thing that goes wrong does not turn into the first thing anyone learns about you.

How do I stop being late before the job starts?

Measure instead of resolving. Time your real morning once and drive the real commute once, then build the schedule backward from your arrival time using those two numbers. Most people who have been late their whole lives are not slow. They are working from estimates that have never once been checked against a clock.

What if my commute is unpredictable?

Plan against a bad day rather than an average one, because the average day is not the one that gets you fired. Take the slowest run from your dry runs, use that as the drive time, and accept that you will often arrive with time to spare. Arriving early costs you a few minutes at a desk. Arriving late costs you a conversation with your manager.

Is there an app that makes sure I get to work on time?

Ready Time is built for exactly this. You set the time you have to be there, list the steps with how long each one really takes, and it works backward to a start time for every step and alerts you at each one. Once the plan exists you can repeat it every weekday without rebuilding it.

What if I am on time but only barely, every single day?

Then your arithmetic is right and your buffer is missing. Arriving at the exact minute means every ordinary problem, a slow shower or one bad light, lands as lateness. Add the buffer as its own step with its own duration, so it is part of the plan instead of the first thing sacrificed.

The general version of this is how to stop being late. The arithmetic itself, with a calculator, is on the leave time calculator.