I was late to the office again that day. I was supposed to be there at 10 am but I reached a good one hour late. And I don’t even have the Bangalore traffic excuse. I live only 2km away from my office. My elaborate morning workout and breakfast routine had delayed me again. I don’t want to start the day anxious anymore.

Why reach office on time

I was determined to change the situation hereon. I had decided this multiple times earlier but this time I had a plan. Usually, I take pride in mastering the art of building any new habit. Why not build a habit of reaching office on time? I am pretty much punctual at all other timings except the morning office part. So, this is the action I took – I walked down to my colleague Prachi and made her my accountability partner for the Punctuality challenge.

Rules of the challenge

We both took up a challenge of reaching office by 10:15 am every morning. If we miss it, we pay a negative incentive of Rs.50 as fine for each miss. Here are the rules in detail. (Yes rules! I wrote them down to avoid ambiguity later.)

• We need to be at the office by 10.15 am maximum every day.
• We will ping each other on WhatsApp as soon as we reach the office, regarding exact entry time.
• If we inform on the previous day about a possible delay, then coming late is allowed. (not more than 3 days a month)
• If either of us fails to reach by 10.15 am, we need to pay 50Rs penalty.
• These penalties will be accumulated in a common penalty pool of money.
• At the end of each month, we will decide what to do (gift someone, donate, etc) with the accumulated penalty money.
• The money will be collected in one shot at the end of the month. Until then the account will be maintained regarding penalties in an excel.

Building the habit of being on time to office

#1 Planning ahead

As with any new habit, planning ahead is the key. The primary reason for being late somewhere is not knowing what to wear, what to eat or just waking up late. All of these could be addressed by planning ahead. The previous evening, I started planning what to wear for the next morning, what to make for breakfast and lunch and sleep on time.

#2 Identifying distractions

I don’t own a TV or watch streaming services. But there are always distractions in other forms. My distractions were surfing mobile, too much tidying up of home, talking over the phone to friends or family. I can’t claim to have fixed all these distractions but I certainly reduced it with awareness. This was one of the lessons from my minimalism game experience as well.

#3 Buffer for commute

I cycle or ride a scooter to the office. I was initially not planning enough time to get there. If it took me 10 min, I now plan 15 or 20 min to get there. Keeping a buffer for the commute is absolutely necessary. There are too many factors on the road that can affect your commute time. Always plan for the worst time.

#4 Seriousness of challenge

A negative incentive-based challenge has worked for me in the past. I used it earlier to regulate my blog writing, in fact. The penalty brings some seriousness to the challenge. Apart from this, having Prachi as an accountability partner was a great help too. We were able to discuss observations on our delays and our ways of improvement.

#5 Skipping a few things

To be on time every time needs sacrifice. You need to prioritize everything that you do before leaving the house. Sometimes you will have unpredictable things to do. What helps is to be ok with skipping a few low priority things. Postponing them to be taken care of later.

#6 Tracking the challenge

I work as a Project manager at an embedded company. Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint are my best friends at work. So, I was tracking the in time for both of us in an excel.

Results and lessons

I reached on time every day. This challenge has changed my life. I did not have to pay any penalty. Uh, all of these are lies. Here are the true results:

Date	Poornima In-time
6-Feb	10:05
7-Feb	10:20
10-Feb	10:15
11-Feb	10:15
12-Feb	10:23
13-Feb	10:20
14-Feb	10:15
17-Feb	10:40
18-Feb	10:22
19-Feb	10:12
20-Feb	10:50
21-Feb	holiday
24-Feb	leave
25-Feb	leave
26-Feb	11:15
27-Feb	9:56
28-Feb	10:15

• I missed the target time at least twice every week.
• One observation was that I was consistently late by 5min.
• My average entry time was 10:19 am (excluding one outlier of 11:15am entry time).
• I definitely worked with all 6 of the above approaches. They worked in combination. If I missed even a single one of those aspects, I got late.
• Even though my office does not mandate entry time, I wanted to maintain my timings. I could better my regularity with this. The importance of punctuality in any profession is common knowledge.
• The preparation on previous days helped me eat better and sleep better as well.
• I am now going to continue this challenge into the following month. Prachi and I want to keep doing it until we become consistent with our entry time at the office. I will, of course, continue my habit series with another habit next month. But not giving up this one.

I was on time at the office today. It is the last day of my February month challenge of reaching office on time. I had a productive day at the office. A smile on my face when I punched out at the end of the day. 🙂 Thanks for being with me on another habit experiment!