So as something for my own pleasure, I have been recently spending some nights on an “equation” which will roughly predict my punctuality to things… if only to prove my nerdiness.

I really do try to be on time for things, but unfortunately I don’t get my time management genes from my mom, whose are great, but get them from my dad, whose are terrible.

But anyway, while not complete or anywhere near perfect, so far it looks like:

Where:

• H = hours of sleep I’ve gotten. Speaks for itself
• I = Importance of event on a scale from 1-100
• T = Time of day, calculated with 24 hour time, so 1:00 PM = 13:00 = 13
• R = expected rate in miles per hour… yeah
• D = distance to event in miles… uh huh
• N = number of things I must do to prepare for the event, N ≠ 1. If N = 1, then you need to eliminate the (N - 1) in the numerator

The idea for this pretty much came up from me thinking “I rate how on time I be by how early in the morning it is, and/or how important it is,” but then I got to thinking that there must be more factors than this, and this is the result of every factor I could think of.

The numbers that this spits out are decimals, which is converted to a percentage, which represents how likely I will be on time. So far I’m getting some reasonable numbers, from where many factors are not in my favor (not a lot of sleep, early in the day, far away, etc.) range from about 20-30% where many things in my favor (lots of sleep, late in the day, how many things I need to do) range from 75-90%. The lower the percentage, the more minutes I’ll be late too. The numbers are balancing constants, which need to be there or else numbers become very strange. No I did not pull them from my butt.

The constants were found by taking each variable, thinking of an “ideal” number for each individually to make them equal to 1 on their own. For example, the whole variable for hours of sleep is H/9 so that if I got 9 hours of sleep, I would be on time for sure. [Probably not true but anyway]

… all except [I]mportance, which the whole thing I came up with was I/65. Obviously if I regard my being there as not so important, then it rates pretty low [40-50] but if I must must must must must be there then it will rate pretty high [95-100] because if I have to be there [rate it of high importance] then I’ll try a lot harder to get there on time.

There are of course exceptional cases, say like the event starts late starts at night or its really far away. Generally for these, I plan ahead and sometimes leave too much time, allowing me to be early. Same goes for cases like if I’m already out and not at home, or I have a lot of things to do to prep for the event.

Mathematically, this makes no sense. Properly accounting for units would come out to be hours [I think] when it’s supposed to be just a unitless number. This also doesn’t account for extraordinary cases either, like cross country trips or events that start incredibly late at night, since either of these cases would throw the percentage out the window. Also traffic is not accounted for, in which the time of day variable needs a lot of changing… something to do

The main problem I have though is that a change of 1 in any of the variables is incredibly influential, to a point where it would be ridiculous, most notably the time of day and rate variables. Changing them by what doesn’t seem to be a lot makes a huge difference in outcome.

Now that I’ve written all this, I’ve just noticed that 8190 is divisible by 3, but at this point I’m too tired to change it.

Haha just as a point of curiosity, if you could try, tell me what you put in [literally just think of a situation, put in numbers for appropriate variables], and see what comes out as a response. Like h=7,i=72,t=14,r=85,d=25,n=1 0.646

If this is successful, I want to put this into infographic form… I will need help for that…