Go Early, Not Fashionably Late

You're parked outside with ten minutes to spare, and you're not going in yet.

Your reason seems sound.

Being ten minutes early means an empty room. It means being the first there, standing about with nothing to hold and nobody to talk to, in full view of whoever is putting the chairs out. So you sit where you are and you let it fill up, and at twenty to you walk in on a room that's already buzzing, which feels safer, because you can come in at the back and nobody has to notice.

I'd like to put it to you that you've got this the wrong way round, and that the ten minutes in the car are the most expensive ten minutes of your morning.

A room is only frightening once it's full.

Think about what you're walking into at each end of it. At twenty five past there are five people in there, none of whom know each other well, all of them slightly at a loose end, and every one of them relieved to see somebody else arrive. Conversation happens because there's nobody else for it to happen with. You don't have to break into anything, because nothing has formed yet.

At twenty to, there are forty people in clusters of three and four, shoulders turned in, mid sentence. Every one of those clusters is a closed shape you'd have to open, in front of the people already in it, with some opening line you have to think of on the way over. That's a hard social task. It's hard for everybody, including the people who look like they're enjoying it.

So the ten minutes in the car turn an easy job into a hard one. And then, because we're all consistent about this, you spend the rest of the morning marking yourself on the hard job, as though it were the job you were given rather than the job you chose on the way in.

There's a second thing that going early gets you, and almost nobody uses it.

The host is there. Whoever is running the thing arrived first, because they always do, and at twenty five past they're on their own with a laptop that won't connect to the screen. They want the morning to go well. Their whole job is to know who's in the room and put people together. Early, you've got them to yourself, and you've got the conversation that produces the introductions. By twenty to they're fielding four people at once and you'll get thirty seconds at the end.

And there's a third thing, which is the bit nobody mentions. If you're already in the room, people come to you. Everybody arriving after you has to walk into a room with somebody in it, and the somebody is you. You don't have to approach anyone for the first twenty minutes, because the flow of the morning is doing it on your behalf. Arrive late and that current is running the other way, and you're the person swimming into it.

Whichever door you came in through, this is the same move.

If it's your body, going early is the difference between sorting yourself out in a quiet building and doing it in a busy one. You get to see where everything is, pick where you sit, take the chair near the door if you want the chair near the door, and do all of it with nobody watching and no queue. That's a big thing. It's most of what makes the next two hours bearable.

If it's the room, you meet people one at a time as they come in, which is a very different task from opening a group of four.

If it's being seen, you say your own name and what you do out loud to three people rather than to thirty, in a quiet room, before the volume comes up. You're not being introduced to the room. You're just talking, and you've had a run at it before it counts.

Now, the obvious objection, because it's a fair one. What if I'm the very first, and I'm standing there on my own?

Then you're standing on your own for perhaps four minutes, in a quiet room, next to somebody unfolding a table who will happily talk to you if you say hello and give them a quick hand. And it ends when the next person walks in, and comes towards you. Set that against twenty minutes on your own at the edge of a full room with a phone in your hand, which is the alternative you've been choosing, and which doesn't end until you leave.

I'm not offering you a trick that makes you braver.

Nothing here makes you braver.

What it does is change the task, so that the thing you have to be brave about is smaller.

That's allowed. You're permitted to arrange the morning so that it suits you. Nobody hands out marks for having done it the hard way, and there's no version of this where the room notices what time you arrived and thinks less of you for being early.

Last week I asked you to catch the sentence you say to yourself on the drive home. If you've been doing it, you'll have a couple of them written down by now, and they won't be kind. The reason I wanted them in your handwriting is that they're a verdict on a morning you'd already made harder than it needed to be, before you ever got out of the car.

Change what time you arrive, and the sentence has to change, because it'll be describing a different morning.

So: five or ten minutes before the start, not an hour, and go in. If you find yourself parked outside with time to spare, that's the moment. Not a decision to make later in the week. A door to open now, while the room is still nearly empty.

Next time, the other end of the morning, and how you know when you're allowed to leave.

And if you’re going to be parked outside with time to spare, you may as well use it. Twelve Minutes Before You Walk In is a free recording for that exact moment. It comes with the Sunday essays when you sign up.

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