IGMT #061 | A missing set of keys can steal two minutes and somehow disrupt the next thirty.
Well hello there, Reader!
There is a particular sound my car makes that I have grown to hate.
I get into the driver’s seat, close the door, put my foot on the brake, and press the button to start the car. Instead of hearing the engine, I get a beep and a message telling me there is no key detected.
The keys are still inside the house.
This happens more often than I would like to admit. I sit there for a second staring at the message as if the car might reconsider. Maybe if I press the button again, it will appreciate my confidence and start anyway. It never does.
So I open the door, get out of the car, and head back inside. The keys are usually sitting somewhere completely reasonable. They are not missing. There is no mystery to solve. I simply forgot to bring them with me.
The entire delay might cost me one or two minutes. Somehow, though, it feels much larger than that.
By the time I return to the car, I am no longer moving at the same pace. I am irritated with myself. I feel behind. I start thinking about traffic, the time, and everything that could now go wrong because I had to make one extra trip into the house.
Nothing meaningful about the morning has changed. But in my head, the morning is already off track.
…and it got me thinking.
We do not always respond to the amount of time we lose. We respond to the disruption of the plan we had already created.
Before I walk out the door, I have a version of the morning running in my head. I will get into the car, start it, pull out of the driveway, and arrive where I need to be at the time I intended. I may never consciously describe that sequence, but it is there.
The missing keys interrupt the sequence.
That is why two minutes can feel like twenty. The problem is not necessarily the delay. The problem is that reality stopped following the script.
Once that happens, I begin adding meaning to it. Forgetting the keys becomes evidence that I am disorganized. The extra walk into the house becomes the reason I will hit traffic. The possibility of arriving a few minutes later than planned becomes proof that the entire day is slipping away from me.
That is a lot of responsibility to place on a set of car keys.
We do this in other parts of our lives, too. A meeting begins late. A child cannot find a shoe. The internet needs to restart. Someone asks us a question just as we are trying to leave. None of these things takes much time on its own, but each one interrupts the version of the next few minutes we had already rehearsed.
The mind tends to calculate disruption emotionally rather than mathematically. We may have lost ninety seconds, but it feels as though we lost control.
That feeling can follow us long after the delay is over. We rush through the next task, speak more sharply than we intended, or carry unnecessary tension into a room. By the time we arrive, the original problem has been solved. The keys are in the car. The meeting has started. The internet is working again. Yet we are still responding to the interruption.
In performance settings, we often talk about adapting when something major goes wrong. We prepare for pressure, unexpected outcomes, and moments that demand an immediate response. But mental flexibility is usually tested by much smaller things.
It is tested when the warmup starts three minutes late, when someone sits in the seat we normally use, when the schedule changes without much warning, or when a familiar part of a routine is missing. The event itself may be minor, but the mind has to release one version of what was supposed to happen and accept the version that is actually happening.
That transition is not always easy.
Predictability helps many of us regulate our attention and energy. It gives the mind fewer decisions to make and allows us to move through familiar parts of the day without examining every step. For some neurodivergent people, that predictability can be especially important. A disruption may require more than a quick logistical adjustment because the mind must rebuild the sequence it was already prepared to follow.
The goal is not to stop making plans or pretend interruptions do not matter. Plans help us prepare, organize, and use our attention well. The trouble begins when the plan becomes the only version of the day we are willing to accept.
I have noticed that forgetting my keys does not determine how the rest of the morning feels. The story I attach to forgetting them does.
If I treat the beep as proof that I am late, scattered, and already failing at the day, I carry that version with me. I may drive faster than necessary, become frustrated by every red light, and arrive mentally exhausted from trying to recover time that was never truly lost.
The car does not know any of this. It is not judging my organizational skills or predicting a difficult morning. It is simply letting me know that the key is not there.
Then it waits.
There is something almost insulting about how calm it remains. I am mentally rewriting the entire day while the car sits silently in the driveway, confident that this problem will be resolved as soon as I walk back into the house.
And it is right.
I find the keys, return to the car, and press the button again. The engine starts as if nothing happened, because almost nothing did.
The car has moved on before I have.
Maybe that is the part worth noticing. Small disruptions will continue to happen. Keys will be forgotten, shoes will disappear, meetings will run late, and technology will choose the least convenient moment to remember it needs an update. The interruption may be unavoidable, but we do not have to keep extending it after the problem has ended.
I am probably going to forget my keys again. I would love to tell you that writing this newsletter has transformed me into a person who places them in the same spot every night and walks confidently out the door each morning.
It has not.
At best, I may become the person who hears the beep, shakes his head, and walks back into the house without declaring the entire morning a failure. That feels like progress, even if it still requires two trips to the car.
If you have your own version of the missing-keys beep, hit reply and tell me about it. What tiny disruption has an unreasonable ability to change the temperature of your day?
I will read your response as soon as I figure out where I put my keys.
