You Are Already Optimising Your Day. The Question Is What For.

"Milners are never late."

It is a phrase my children know well — and one my thirteen-year-old son finds particularly frustrating.

In our family, arriving on time usually means arriving ten minutes early. The value came from my late dad. From a young age, he taught me that if you say you will be somewhere at a particular time, you arrive at that time. As a teenager, I thought two minutes late was perfectly acceptable.

He did not.

Recently my son made his case to me again on the way to a movie: the twenty minutes we spend waiting is time he could have used for something else. I started with the argument I always reach for first — that arriving early is about respecting other people, particularly professionals whose entire day can be disrupted by one person running late.

But that is not the only reason why being punctual matter to me.

So I tried again, and what came out was this:

"I want to arrive happy, not snappy."

It sounds a little cheesy. It is also completely true.

I don't want to arrive anywhere flustered and apologising. If there is a traffic jam, I want to be able to sit in it calmly rather than watching the clock, gripping the steering wheel and feeling my anxiety climb with every passing minute. If we get to the movie early, we can buy a snack, walk around, take our time finding our seats.

The twenty minutes he wants back are the twenty minutes that make me pleasant to sit next to.

What are you optimising for?

That conversation made me realise this is not really about punctuality at all.

Most of us optimise our days for efficiency without ever consciously choosing to. How much can I fit in? How quickly can I get there? Can I squeeze in one more meeting, one more call, one more task? How close can I cut it without actually being late?

We measure a good day by how much we completed. We rarely ask what internal state we had to create in order to complete it.

I optimise for something else.

I wake up early enough to get to the gym without rushing, and to do the extra twenty minutes of back rehabilitation I currently need — because mentally racing towards the next obligation while supposedly caring for my body rather defeats the point of doing it at all.

And I don't book coaching sessions back-to-back.

Partly that is for my clients. I never want to cut someone off mid-sentence, at the precise moment they have found the courage to say the difficult thing, because we have reached the top of the hour.

But it is also for the person who comes after them. Coaching conversations leave a residue. Someone may have just told me something painful. If I walk straight out of that room and into the next one, I carry it with me — not the content, but the weight of it. The next client deserves someone who has had ten minutes to breathe, make a few notes, drink some water and put the previous conversation down.

That gap is not admin. It is part of the work.

What it costs me

I want to be honest about the trade-off, because I don't think this idea is worth much without it.

Protecting that space costs me money. I see fewer clients in a day than I could. Over a year, that is a meaningful number of sessions I have chosen not to sell. The margin I leave in my diary is unbilled time, and the fifteen minutes I leave early, several times a day, add up to hours a week that are unproductive by any conventional measure.

What I get back cannot be counted the same way.

In a coaching session, the moment that changes everything is almost never the one the client came in to discuss. It arrives as a throwaway line — a small aside they drop on the way to something else, which they do not think is significant at all. Catching it requires me to be genuinely listening rather than half-tracking the clock, and to have the room to stop and stay there once I hear it. Would I catch it if I were rushed and playing catch-up? Sometimes. Not as often, and not as keenly.

So the cost is measurable and the return is not. I pay it deliberately anyway — not because I have some unusual luxury of space, but because I built that space, I keep choosing it, and I know exactly what I am like on the other version of the day. So does everyone around me.

There are certainly seasons and circumstances in which the options are genuinely limited, and I am not suggesting anyone can simply decide to be unhurried. But most of us have more choice than we admit. We just spend it on fitting in more.

Create the space first

You may believe you work well under pressure. Perhaps you do. But is the pressure actually necessary, or have you become accustomed to manufacturing it?

You may believe you are saving time. But what are those saved minutes worth if you arrive impatient, anxious and depleted?

You may well be getting more done. From what state?

Panic, frustration and anxiety narrow our thinking, shorten our patience and change how we speak to the people in front of us. Space does the opposite. It creates clearer decisions and a more grounded version of who we are.

The traffic jam will still happen. The queue will still be slow. A meeting will still run over. But the conditions for panic are usually created long before the traffic. They are created when we leave no margin, and assume everything will go exactly according to plan.

So what would create more spaciousness in your day?

Perhaps it means leaving fifteen minutes earlier than you usually would. Perhaps it means refusing to fill every gap between meetings. Or perhaps, when you do find yourself with an unexpected ten minutes, it means resisting the urge to be useful with them — look around, take a breath, enjoy the rare experience of not having to rush.

Arriving early also creates pockets of time for the things I otherwise never seem to find room for — the book I am halfway through, the podcast I want to listen to properly rather than at 1.5 speed between calls. It is a way of forcing space that would never survive a diary invitation.

And on the days I don't want to be 'extra productive' with those minutes at all, I don't have to be. Either way, the choice is mine. That is the whole point: the space comes first, and only then do I get to decide what it is for.

Back in the car

My son, for the record, was not persuaded.

He listened, said "okay Mom" in the particular tone reserved for thirteen-year-olds humouring their mothers, and put his headphones back in. I fully expect to have the same conversation again next month.

I said it anyway — because the state I create does not stay inside me. He experiences it. My clients experience it. Anxiety is contagious, but so is calm, and I would rather be the source of the second one.

The question is not only how much you can fit into your day.

It is who you want to be while you are living it, and what you want the people around you to experience because you were there.

Here's to arriving happy,

Warm wishes,

Lori