#249| What's Causing Your Chronic Lateness (And How To Fix It): Overwhelm, Productivity, Time Management & People Pleasing

Do you constantly find yourself running just a few minutes late — and starting your day already feeling stressed and frazzled?

For many overwhelmed working women, chronic lateness isn’t about laziness or poor planning. It’s often driven by hidden thinking patterns like optimism bias, people pleasing, and overpacking every minute of the day. In this episode, Michelle unpacks why running late creates unnecessary mental stress, how it impacts your nervous system and focus, and the simple mindset shifts that can help you feel calmer, more present, and more in control of your time.

In this episode, you will:

•  Understand the three hidden thinking patterns that keep you stuck in chronic lateness 
•  Learn practical ways to create calmer transitions between meetings, appointments, and daily tasks 
•  Discover how small shifts can reduce overwhelm and improve your focus throughout the day 

Press play to learn how breaking the habit of running late can help you feel calmer, more focused, and less overwhelmed every single day.

Wondering why you're overwhelmed? Take my "why am I overwhelmed" quiz to find out the source of your overwhelm, and what to do about it. 

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Work With Me - Interested in working with me 1-on-1, taking a class, or joining one of my coaching groups? Message me here to get the scoop.   

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Life can be overwhelming, but on this podcast, you'll discover practical strategies to overcome overwhelm, imposter syndrome, and negative self-talk, manage time effectively, set boundaries, and stay productive in high-stress jobs—all while learning how to say no and prioritize self-care on the Overwhelmed Worki...

Transcript

Why Running Late Feels Awful

Michelle Gauthier 0:00

Running late is one of those things that will always cause a little stress and a little overwhelm and impact our mindset.

Michelle Gauthier 0:10

You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less. I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach. On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences. And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.

Michelle Gauthier 0:37

Hello, friend. Thanks for joining. Today we're going to be talking about running late. When I was working on my goals for 2026, I had this category of microhabits, little things that I wanted to tweak or change about my behavior that I thought would make my year better. And I chose four of them and I put one in each quarter for the year. So in the first quarter, I really wanted to focus on not being late. I usually arrive to where I want to be a minute or two after I would really prefer to be there. And so I had just let this become a habit and it was causing me to arrive at places feeling not present and kind of overwhelmed and flustered. And so I thought, I'm gonna look into this. I learned a lot when I was working on this little micro habit. And I realized too that the same thing was happening for a lot of my clients where they were just consistently running late, whether that be 30 seconds late, a minute late, 10 minutes late. I really think that running late is one of those things that will always cause a little stress and a little overwhelm. I don't think there's anybody who can be late to something that they wanted to be on time for and just be like, oh well, it's no big deal. I'm not talking about a party where you run, you know, fashionably late. I'm talking about an appointment or in my case, a class at the gym, where you're a few minutes late. I just think it always impacts our mindset. And I think little things like this can add up over time. Today you'll discover the real reasons why women like us run late, what running late actually does to your brain and your focus, not just in that moment, but for the rest of the day. And then three practical shifts you can make to try to break the pattern for good. And I will share with you how I have done at breaking this pattern.

Three Thinking Patterns Behind Lateness

Michelle Gauthier 2:18

Let's first start off by talking about some of the reasons why you might be running late. And I think some of these may surprise you too. Here are the thinking patterns that I see most often, both in myself and in clients. The first thinking pattern is called optimism bias. I think this is one of the few times in life when thinking optimistically could cause an issue. My handsome man friend lives about, see, I even want to say 30 minutes right now. I think he realistically lives 40 minutes away from me and he lives in a high rise and there is street parking. So in my brain, naturally I calculate that as, okay, it's like, you know, 26, 27 miles away. It'll take me 30 minutes to get there. So I'm leaving my house at 8:30, I'll be to your house at nine. When realistically there's always traffic in this one certain area, it's for sure gonna take me like 40 minutes. Then I have to find street parking, then I go in the building, then I wait for the elevator, then I go up the elevator to the 20th floor, then I walk down to where he actually lives. I mean, it's definitely a good 45 minutes at minimum, but my brain thinks that it takes 30 minutes. And there probably is a world where I could do all that in 30 minutes if I went there at like 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning and there was no traffic and I could park right in front of his building. This is a great place to use a realistic expectation or what we sometimes call strategic pessimism. We don't want to think like, what if there's a huge problem on the highway and it's completely closed down for an hour because that's really unrealistic. But in this example I'm talking about, there's always like a 10-minute slowdown in the middle of the drive. So really try to have the expectation based on reality and give yourself that extra time, that extra 15 minutes in this example that I'm talking about to get there. The other pattern that I see is more along the people-pleasing end of things. A lot of lateness isn't actually about the transition to the next thing, it's about the inability to end the current thing. If you're thinking about people who you work with, there are people who just chronically go over their meeting time, or maybe a friend will call you and you really don't have time to talk to them, but you pick up the call and you take it anyway, or somebody else is saying, Oh, I just need your help real quick, or can you help me real quick with this? So instead of staying focused on what you're doing and what you need to do next, you stay on that person's schedule because you don't want to upset them. And then you make yourself late essentially from people pleasing. The third pattern that I see is not valuing or paying attention to your own transition time. So when you schedule your day, do you build in time to get from one thing to the next thing? If you think about the way that the world works today, if you're working in a corporate type job, especially, you could have back-to-back meetings. I mean, I used to look at my calendar and think, oh wow, I have eight to nine, nine to ten, ten to eleven. There's no time in there to go to the bathroom, pull up your notes for the call you're about to have, get a drink of water, god forbid eat lunch or anything like that. And I feel like we get in this habit of trying to pack in as much as we can with zero buffer. And that is because having a buffer feels like indulgent or something, like it's lazy or inefficient. But that transition time is real time. And if you imagine if you had five minutes at the end of one meeting before you started the next, and you could really get up, get some water, refocus, what a difference that would make when you got to that second meeting. This is why my coaching sessions they start on the hour, but they're 50 minutes long. So both of us on the call have 10 minutes before we transition over to our next thing. It makes a huge difference.

What Lateness Does To Your Brain

Michelle Gauthier 5:44

Okay, so let's talk about what running late actually does to your brain. For me, one of the places that I actually run late is when I go to the gym. If I'm going to a class at the gym at 8:30, my most likely time to arrive is 8:30 or 8:31. And what happens when I'm on my way there and I can see that I'm gonna get there at 8:30 or 8.31, my nervous system is activated. It's not in a calm focused state. It's like, oh shoot, okay, well, if I don't hit this red light, maybe I'll get there on time. Okay, well, the light's red. Let me check in for class on the app so I don't have to do that when I get there. And then I park my car and hurry up and get in there and put my stuff down and get on the floor. And by the time I get there, I'm not really present. I'm physically present, but mentally I'm still feeling flustered. Think of it like a computer with a whole bunch of tabs open. You can technically use the computer, but it's slow and it's glitchy and it's not running the way it's supposed to, versus the other option of getting there at 827, 828, and actually being on the floor and ready to work out. When it starts, I just feel completely calm and ready to do what I'm gonna do. So why does this matter? So what if you feel flustered the first five minutes of a workout? It all works out, right? And I do think that's true. It's not like this is the end of the world, but I think any place where we can adjust these micro habits, you are creating, first of all, a new habit for yourself and a more calm state of being instead of being up and down. Okay, I'm running late, I'm stressed, okay. I made it. All right, let me get focused. I'm focused, I'm in the moment. Now I got the next thing. I'm running late, I'm stressed, I'm in going up and down. I'm doing a little up and down motion with my hand right now that you can't see. But it's just that up and down, let's say you do that six or eight times in a day, it's just unnecessary anxiety and overwhelm and loss of focus.

Three Practical Shifts To Stop

Michelle Gauthier 7:33

So here are a couple of shifts that I suggest if you want to stop this habit. Shift number one is to get curious about why you're late in the first place. What actually are you doing? If I look at the reason why I'm late to an 8:30 class, I've been up for hours. It's not like, oh, I'm just rolling out of bed and getting there. It's because I was trying to do the maximum number of things before I left so that they were already done. Let me just put these dishes in the dishwasher. Let me just send this one last email. Oh, let me read up on this person that I'm interviewing for the podcast. And it felt like I had to maximize every single minute of every day. And by doing so, it was just making me consistently late. So between noticing that and noticing that, my brain always underestimates how much time things actually take. It was super helpful to me to understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. I promise, I know this sounds super simple, but if you just stop and ask yourself, like, what am I doing? Why am I being late? It could be really enlightening for you. If you are more stuck on calls or situations where other people are causing you to be late, like the people-pleasing end of things, one of the things you can do is just let people know at the beginning of a meeting or at the beginning of a lunch or a phone call, I have a hard stop at 145. So let's make sure we cover the most important things first. Setting expectation for other people will make it easier for you to say, okay, I've got to go in five minutes. Is there anything else we should talk about? Even though it will feel uncomfortable, like I always talk about with people pleasing, when you learn that skill, it will feel uncomfortable. The last suggestion I have is to really focus on how you're using the transition time between meetings. And if your answer is, I have no transition times between meetings, that is a great place to start. Let's say you have a nine o'clock meeting. Are you sliding into your chair at 8:59 or nine o'clock and quickly trying to get on that call or grab your stuff and go to a meeting? Could you get there five minutes earlier and sit down at your desk and look at your schedule for the day? Just think about the way that you are transitioning between home and work and the meetings when you are at work and put some intention into that transition.

Progress, Self Compassion, And Next Steps

Michelle Gauthier 9:48

Okay, so let's pull this all together. Running late is often a thinking problem, driven by optimism bias, meaning I think I can get there more quickly than I actually can. People pleasing. So I don't want to leave somebody else when they need me and not valuing or paying attention to your own transition time. And the cost of that is, of course, being late, but it's the mental loop that follows you all day. Frazzled arrival and that feeling of the 47 tabs running in the background while you're trying to focus on something. And what I recommend that you do for that is get curious about why you are late and help yourself understand your patterns, practice ending things on time, and then really think about and be mindful about your transition time. Where do you have the opportunity to better your transition time between the back-to-backness of life? And now I will tell you that the grade that I would give myself for the new micro habit of not running late and not getting someplace a minute after it starts, I would give myself a C. So I know now what is causing it. I have the ability to be on time now, and I'm still in the transition phase where it is hard for me to do that all the time. So the way that I'm handling that is I'm not being super critical of myself. I'm just trying to continue to improve. So I had this as a Q1 goal. As you know, we're now solidly into Q2, and I'm still working on this. I'm sharing that with you to say now I have some evidence to know how good it feels when I am not running late. And also when you have an old pattern, sometimes it can be hard to break, and you just have to keep working on it. Okay, if I don't get this podcast to my podcast producer soon, I'm going to be late with my podcast delivery. So that is all for today. I hope you have a great week. As always, if this episode was helpful, I'd love if you shared it with a friend or leave a rating and review. It means the world to me and it helps other women find the show. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com. See you next week.