Lately I’ve been running three minutes early. I set my clocks ahead and took my phone off the network so now it runs on my time.

It started like this: I showed up half an hour late to my weekly journalism class, thinking I was on time. (It’s every college senior’s nightmare – a must-take course that starts at 9 a.m. and I thought it was at 9:30.)

Okay, it didn’t start like that. Lateness is a chronic illness I battle, a habit that runs in my family, an unkickable nuisance that plagues me no matter how many times I change my routine, like the proverbial last five pounds. (Indeed, where losing weight tops most New Year’s resolutions lists, timeliness tops mine.)

Call it island time, call it rude, call it slow; my friends call it Jen time; and know when I say five minutes it usually means more. It stems from a failure to sense time passing, a tendency to underestimate how long it takes to get somewhere and a need to squeeze each hour