There’s a useful concept called 6-sigma. If you prepare for deviations of up to 6 sigma, chances are you’ll about never be too late in your whole life. The question is whether you think 6 standard deviations is a time you’re willing to allocate, but for really important things like job interviews, perhaps one should.
In such statistical problems, a good way of reducing the proportion of times some bad event happens is cutting down the size of the standard deviations. For the problem at hand, this means that even if something disturbs your normal morning, it doesn’t have much of an effect.
In practice, regular routines with a low cost that keep your life organized are useful for this—for example, if you always have two bottles of showering gel at hand in the shower and check every day, that can help, or if you always place your car keys in some specific place X and make sure they’re there. Also, if you’re prepared for bad events, it’s possible to avoid cascade effects (such as “couldn’t get to the station in time, missed bus”), which also helps.
There’s a useful concept called 6-sigma. If you prepare for deviations of up to 6 sigma, chances are you’ll about never be too late in your whole life. The question is whether you think 6 standard deviations is a time you’re willing to allocate, but for really important things like job interviews, perhaps one should.
In such statistical problems, a good way of reducing the proportion of times some bad event happens is cutting down the size of the standard deviations. For the problem at hand, this means that even if something disturbs your normal morning, it doesn’t have much of an effect.
In practice, regular routines with a low cost that keep your life organized are useful for this—for example, if you always have two bottles of showering gel at hand in the shower and check every day, that can help, or if you always place your car keys in some specific place X and make sure they’re there. Also, if you’re prepared for bad events, it’s possible to avoid cascade effects (such as “couldn’t get to the station in time, missed bus”), which also helps.