I have a basic travel rule – take earlier flights. 6am is better than 6pm, for example. 10am is the perfect sweet spot – you don’t have to get up at O-Dark-30 but you still miss the chaos that usually happens late in the day.

The thing is, airline schedule problems compound quickly. One late flight delays others – aircraft and flight crews aren’t where they need to be. Weather can delay hundreds of flights, ruining the entire schedule later in the day or even for days afterward. And time flows only one way – there’s no fixing a flight schedule once it goes bad.

So the basic strategy is to fly early in the day before things have time to go to shit. Yesterday I broke that rule and took a 545pm flight westward. And I paid for it. Long story short, some mechanical problem somewhere in Southwest’s system caused a one hour+ delay in my connecting flight. So I was supposed to land in San Diego at 910pm (after midnight on my body clock), but instead we landed at 1030pm. And of course it was pouring a cold rain and Uber rides were in an algorithm-induced premium state. By the time I made it home it was after 11pm, or after 2am for me personally.

Lesson learned (again) – don’t take the late afternoon flights. The twin gods Chaos and Entropy will conspire to send your trip into schedule hell.