A story about time management

Here is a letter ask for help from Economist, see what would happened:

Dear Economist_Watch

By Tim Harford
Wednesday, January 24, 2007

I have the habit of setting my watch five minutes fast. This fools me into
avoiding being three minutes late for meetings, or the train - well, more
often than not - and instead being two minutes early. But if I am a rational
economic agent, how do I succeed in fooling myself so systematically?

Yours (in haste),

Mark, Oxford

Dear Mark,

That is a big "if". Economists frequently explain eccentric behaviour with a
model of two rational agents in one body, battling to outwit each other.

In your case, one agent (the one who is always late) is impatient: the risk
of missing a train in half an hour is unimportant compared with the instant
satisfaction to be derived from having one more sip of coffee.

Your more patient half disagrees. There seems to be some sort of stickiness
in your perception of time. Stickiness is a feature of retail prices,
because retailers will absorb a certain amount of inflation before spending
money on repainting signs and reprinting catalogues. However at some stage -
perhaps a five or 10 per cent increase in the price level - the fixed cost
of that reprinting must be paid.

Your impatient self clearly suffers from a similar fixed cost of carrying
out subtraction. If your watch was, say, 47 minutes fast, this fixed cost
would have to be borne every time you looked at it, because being 47 minutes
early for everything is even more costly than having to perform mental
arithmetic. Five minutes, like a 1 per cent increase in the price level, is
more tolerable.

To summarise: you have a split personality, a warped view of time and are
too lazy to do simple sums. Now put down this magazine: I suspect you are
running late for something.

From FTChinese : http://www.ftchinese.com/sc/story_english.jsp?id=001009141

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