I got tired of guessing. Twice in one week I was wrong in opposite directions: I left 90 minutes to get through Shanghai Hongqiao (上海虹桥站) before a train and needed 11, and I left 30 minutes to open a bank account that took 72. So for six months I timed everyday errands in China with the stopwatch on my phone — 15 tasks, door-in to done, queue included. This page is that log, and it answers the question I could never answer before: how long things take in China, really.
The finding that changed how I plan a day
Twelve of the fifteen tasks finished in under 15 minutes. Only two crossed 30, and both were the same kind of task: something where a clerk had to check my identity document against a back-office system and wait for it to answer. Everything else — paying, boarding, ordering, collecting, boarding again — is bounded by how fast your own hands move, not by anyone else's.
That gives a usable rule. The errand is almost never the slow part; the wait for the errand is. A Chinese metro ride is not fast because the trains are fast, it is fast because there is no moment in it where you have to be served by a person. Compare that with a post office counter, where the same task has a form, a queue and a signature in it, and you have the whole table below in one sentence.
Fifteen tasks, timed
| Task | Where | Time | Where the minutes actually went |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security + ticket gate at a rail station | Shanghai Hongqiao | 11 min | Bag X-ray, ID gate, finding the right 检票口. 26 min on the Sunday before a holiday |
| Buying a rail ticket at the counter | Beijing South (北京南站) | 7 min | Three people ahead; the ID read is the slow part, not the printing |
| Registering a local SIM card | China Mobile (中国移动), Chengdu | 26 min | 18 of those minutes were the passport being verified by hand |
| Opening a bank account | China Merchants Bank (招商银行) | 72 min | Numbered ticket, one form, two system lookups, card printing |
| Food delivery, average of 34 orders | Meituan (美团) / Ele.me (饿了么) | 31 min | Restaurant cooking is about 60% of it; the rider is the fast half |
| Getting a table at hot pot, Friday 19:00 | Haidilao (海底捞) | 42 min | Free snacks and nail polish while you wait — the queue is the product |
| A DiDi arriving | Shanghai, 10:00 / 18:30 | 4 min / 14 min | Rain pushed the evening one to 22; the app warns you and it is not bluffing |
| Door-to-door metro trip, 8 km | Shanghai Line 2 | 27 min | 6 min walking inside the station, 2 min waiting, 19 min on the train |
| Hotel check-in with a foreign passport | Chengdu, mid-range hotel | 9 min | Passport scan and the 临时住宿登记 printout; 4 min for a Chinese ID card |
| Posting a parcel | China Post (中国邮政) | 18 min | Form, contents inspection, box taping. 6 min if you arrive with it already sealed |
| Collecting a parcel from a pickup point | Cainiao station (菜鸟驿站) | 3 min | Scan the code, they hand it over. Under 60 seconds if the shelf number is right |
| Entering a museum with a timed booking | Shaanxi History Museum (陕西历史博物馆) | 6 min | Security plus the booking QR; 35 min on a weekend without one |
| Shopping for three meals at a wet market | Chengdu 玉林 market | 22 min | Four stalls, four QR payments, one argument about scallions |
| Binding a foreign card in Alipay | Alipay (支付宝) app | 8 min | Card photo, SMS code, name check. Rejected twice on a card with no 3-D Secure |
| Convenience store checkout, self-service | FamilyMart (全家) | 90 sec | Scan, scan, pay. 4 min at a staffed till behind someone paying in coins |
Three things the table cannot show you
The queue is not linear. A three-person queue at a rail counter took me 7 minutes one Tuesday and 24 minutes one Friday, because the person at the front was rebooking a missed train for a family of four. You cannot average this out. What you can do is avoid the counter entirely: 12306 sells the same ticket, and the machine in the hall takes a passport in under two minutes.
Time of day beats day of week. My DiDi numbers split 4 minutes against 22 on the same route — the difference was 18:30 and rain, not a weekend. The same is true of security at Hongqiao: 11 minutes at 14:00, 26 minutes at 19:50. If you have any flexibility at all, move the errand earlier by three hours rather than later by one day.
The five minutes before the counter are where people lose the most time. Forms. At the post office, at the bank, at the carrier shop, the delay is almost always somebody filling in a paper form at the window while six people watch. Photograph a completed form once, and every subsequent visit halves.
Putting the numbers to work
My planning rule now: anything on the table under 5 minutes gets budgeted at 10, anything between 5 and 30 gets budgeted at 1.5×, and the two identity-check tasks get a whole morning and a book. That is it. It has been right often enough that I have stopped arriving at stations 90 minutes early, which over a year is a lot of coffee I get to drink sitting down.
The second thing I do differently is sequencing. Errands that need a person go first thing in the morning — the bank opens at 09:00 and the queue is four people at 09:05 and forty at 14:00. Errands that need only a phone go whenever. This sounds obvious written down, but it is the entire difference between a day in China that feels efficient and one that feels like it happened to you.
And the last one: if a task on this list can be done by a machine instead of a counter — ticket machine, self-checkout, locker, app — it will be roughly three times faster, every single time, without exception in six months of logging.
Fifteen timed errands, one pattern: if nobody has to serve you, it takes minutes; if somebody does, it takes as long as the queue in front of you. Plan for the queue, not the task.
Frequently asked questions
How long do everyday errands take in China?
Twelve of the fifteen tasks I timed finished in under 15 minutes; only two crossed 30, and both were the queue kind.
How should I budget time for a Chinese errand?
My planning rule: anything under 5 minutes gets budgeted at 10, anything between 5 and 30 at 1.5 times the measured time.
Is queue time predictable?
No, the queue is not linear: a three-person rail counter queue took me 7 minutes one Tuesday and 24 minutes one Friday.