It’s not the same thing every time. For me, it’s primarily ‘distractable’. I see that I have 5 minutes before the time I have to leave, and I think ‘let me just sit down and send one last email’ and then somebody calls me, and someone else IMs me, and the email takes longer than I thought, and now, instead of being 5 minutes before the time I needed to leave to get there 5 minutes early, it’s 10 minutes after the time I need to leave to get there 5 minutes early, meaning I’m 5 minutes late. Parking, however, is never as smooth as I’d hoped, and I invariably underestimate how far I’m going to have to walk from the nearest spot, and end up being 10 minutes late, even when I try to plan for it.
The only way for me to be on time for anything is to be at least half an hour early for it, and even then, I’m only 20 minutes early for it. In the situation the OP describes, where the other person had more pressing commitments than mine, I would go way out of my way to be super extra early or to make alternate arrangements (like calling when I get there so they can head over), but for casual sorts of ‘drinks after work’ things, it’s just terribly difficult for me to do those things without a huge effort.
I absolutely hate waiting for tardy people, those that make a habit of it are told once politely, if they do it again they get the look and are not invited again. If they ask about it, I tell them straight out why. Seems to work.
One of the managers where I work used to show up for meetings between 10-15 minutes late and expect us to “fill him in” on what we covered before he got there, wasting another 15 minutes of our time. When our quarterly employee surveys came around I made it clear what I thought of him and his tardiness. He’s much better about it now, I guess they really do read those things!
I’m fortunate - my group of friends all run 5-10 minutes late for things, so we’re all understandable of tardiness. If I must be on time for something, I can be, but I like that friend outings are a nice, non-stressful “Get here around X”. Though so far no one’s been like Anaamika’s family and been an hour and a half late - wow.
That’s how everybody who is habitually punctual does it. They allow for screw-ups. I have an ex-friend who would excuse being an hour late by saying “The phone rang just as I was leaving.” To me, is bullshit. Let it ring. Or answer it like I do when something else has priority – “I’m sorry. I’ll have to call you back. I’m late for an appointment.” Why should someone else jump to the head of the line?
I used to work with someone who was 5 minutes late every day. Exactly 5 minutes. Why couldn’t *she *be on time?
Everyone is late once in a while. It is people who are habitually late who I am talking about. If it is important enough, they will be on time. If they are not on time, it is because it was not important enough. Once I figure out that I am not important enough, it is no longer worth it to me to arrange meetings.
Habitually punctual/early person checking in here.
(using you as an example here, not picking on you specifically; bolding added) See, this is where (to my punctual mind) you have allowed these other things to become more important to you than the appointment. You have 5 minutes, you get 5 minutes, not 15. You ignore the IM, you save a draft of the e-mail when your 5 minutes is up, you let the answering machine pick up, you take a cue from Contrapuntal:
The way I think is, “Five minutes before I’ve scheduled myself to leave. If I’m ready enough to lollygag around writing an e-mail, I’m ready enough to hop in the car and not have to be rushed.”
See, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work! You’re still early and you haven’t inconvenienced anyone.
Sincere question: Why is it “terribly difficult” and “a huge effort” in one case but not the other? Either you choose to pay attention and be on time or you don’t. In this case, it looks to me like you’ve decided that “drinks after work” (and/or, by extension, the friends you’re meeting for said drinks, presumably at a specific time) isn’t important enough to be on time for. Not saying whether that’s good or bad, just a choice that you have made.
Mr. S once lived an hour away from his job, the drive being on mostly backcountry roads that were often the last to be plowed on snowy mornings. He was often the only person to arrive at work on time or early after a winter storm; the ones who lived IN THAT CITY blamed their lateness on the roads, traffic, etc. Did they allow extra time because of the weather, like Mr. S did? All together now: No!
It’s not rocket science. I have seriously reconsidered (and in one case ended) friendships in which the other party was consistently late or stood me up with no notice, no matter how apologetic they might be afterward EVERY DAMN TIME.
I had a great insight into a habitually late person a couple of months ago. I was meeting my sister to shop for dresses; as we chatted on the cell phone as she was about to leave, I knew where she was and where she had to go. I told her it would take her about 20 minutes to get to my location from where she was. She disagreed, thought it would take much less. It took her EXACTLY 20 minutes. She’s habitually late, I’m habitually punctual. I think part of the problem with habitually late people is an inaccurate sense of how long things take.
I think being chronically late is something that can be amended to a great deal, if the habitually late person is interested in fixing it instead of making excuses for it. The rest of the world doesn’t have some magical gene that makes us punctual; we just have different habits, behaviours, and attitudes.
I am the absent-minded professor. If you wanted to break it down to physiology, it is likely a combination of poor coordination and a signifigant case of ADD. For someone who is very smart, the sheer volume of stuff I forget, misplace, drop, or trip over would astonish you. In October, I broke my foot while. . . walking. I just stepped wrong and fell off the side of my shoe. I hurt myself bad enough to need medical treatment doing something completely normal (like walking) 2-3 times per year…
I’ve been berated most of my life for it. I’m inconsiderate. I’m just not careful. It’s deliberate and I’m choosing to be this way. People say this because they can not grasp my hands and feet don’t always go where I’m aiming them.
My mom used to tell me that if I just paid more attention, that it would be different. And yeah, I could live my life as if everything I held was a museum artifact. It would take me 4 hours to do the dishes. I choose, instead, to buy cheap plates and have a dustbin ready.
I tried once to conquor the forgetfullness by reminders, notes, and concentration. It’s an exhausting, awful way to live. Imagine needing to have a post-it to remind you to do the most basic things, every day. Brush your teeth. Put on deoderant. Pick up your purse. Make sure you have car keys. My walls would be covered with them by breakfast.
I can’t make myself be different. I want so badly to do so. You have no idea. But after many years, I have come to the conclusion that this isn’t a choice, and I can’t change it. The only thing I can do if work around it. So I keep toothpaste in my desk & deoderant in my glove box. I have a locator beeper attached to my keys, and multiple spare sets. I set two alarms. I allow extra time. I work in a creative feild, where eccentric is tolerated. I make a lot of lists. (I am good under pressure, because my whole life is a deadline I’m just barely making.)
I am also inexplicably unlucky. For example I am rear-ended while stopped at a light about once a year (only once was there serious injury). I bought a car that is traffic-cone orange, but it hasn’t helped. I have never been in any other sort of accident.
featherlou, I also wonder if my sense of how long things take is screwed up. Maybe that’s why it seems like I need to allot such a large amount of extra time. Maybe that’s also why my guestimating about said extra time is sometimes waaaay off (to where I’ll be really, REALLY early, or late despite my best efforts). Don’t know how to reset my sense of time, though
I think habitually late people are hooked on the drama of running around like a nut at the last minute then rushing in with a big story about why they’re late. It’s either attention seeking or they get some sort of weird adrenaline rush out of it.
No offense, but see what I mean? Why not just walk out the door relaxed and get there five minutes early? I used to be this way until I got sick of giving myself a heart attack trying to get somewhere. And I got tired of people getting mad at me for being late and rightly so.
If you are always late, that’s what your known for. You can do ten times the work of someone else once you get there but you’ll always be known for being late. A person who gets somewhere early is seen in a positive light even before they do anything.
Obsidian, seriously I was you. ADD, whole bit. I tripped and fractured my elbow just walking through an empty parking lot. My husband drove there the next day to see if there was something in the lot I fell over and the lot was as flat as a pancake. Just me, falling over nothing.
You can get the ADD to work to your advantage. I started setting time limits for everything. Makeup done by 5:00, dressed by 5:30. I put my coat and stuff by the chair before I started to get ready. Otherwise I’d get caught up in something stupid.
I really worked at it and it’s made such a difference in my life. I’m no longer out of breath and apologizing all the time.
I’m not her, but I will answer this sincerely, for me.
In both cases, it takes a large amount of effort. It just does. If you are not a forgetfull and easily distracted person, it is virtually impossible for you to grasp how much work it can take to “Just pay attention”. I can’t keep track of time without staring at the clock, or setting automated things to beep at me. See my post above about my best theories as to why. At this point, it doesn’t even really matter why. My options are make the concerted effort (involving cell phone alarms and note or email reminders), or to not.
I don’t mind doing this at all for a time-sensitive event. But if I had to do it every time I did anything or went anywhere (such as, in her example, meeting friends for drinks), I just wouldn’t go. The stress of making the deadline would remove the joy from the casual outing. Thankfully, my friends are much more casual with meeting times.
I think that’s what she’s saying. If you ask me to meet you after work for drinks at 6PM (and you’re not a good friend who knows me), I will say “No, thanks, because I don’t know when I’ll be there.” This is your cue to say “Oh, wander in anytime” or “Maybe next time.”
Time sense is an ‘executive function’. It’s governed by a specific area in the brain. A lot of people have deficits in that area of the brain. It’s a fairly easy spot to fall on or get hit on when you’re young.
Very often, this persisting with action is the issue with people who are late; they continue to do something thiking there will still be time to leave and arrive promptly. Hating someone for this is just mean. It’s not purposeful and it’s not really repairable although I gather ADD meds can help.
In a large number of people, lateness isn’t inconsiderate or selfish or anything other than a biologically induced incapacity.
Life would be so much easier if people would learn to understand others rather than always finding reasons to condemn them, shun them, or cast them off.
To the OP, rather than sit and stew about your imaginings (honestly, nobody in the restaurant cares a fig about you and why you’re there alone so it’s a waste of time to fret about it), do something constructive with your time. Take out a few postcards and jot notes to friends. If this friend is predictably late, then set your appointments for 15 or 20 or a number of minutes earlier and then show up later.
For Mr. Stuff, this is definitely a major part of the problem. He has an inaccurate sense of the passage of time and therefore an inaccurate sense of how long things will take.
So he’ll look at his watch, and it’s 10:30. In a while, he’ll think, “Well, I looked at my watch a little while ago, and it was 10:30, so it must be a little after that.” In reality, it’s 11:15. He truly just does not understand where the time goes. In a famous (in our family) example, we had a somewhat heated discussion about how long it would take to get to a certain restaurant. He thought it was about half an hour. I said 45 minutes. My brother drove and timed it. It was 44 minutes and 26 seconds.
He is, left to his own devices, nearly always late. I’m not. This does not mean that I’m a better person than he is, as tempting as it is to think so. He has never, for example, bitten someone’s head off because they weren’t in the car so we could leave for church on time. It’s possible that I might have done so, and it probably wasn’t my best moment.
We’ve learned to accomodate one another. I don’t hyperventilate if he’s puttering around when we’re going somewhere, if time isn’t actually that important. I also have learned to remind him of the time in ways that don’t bother him. On Sunday mornings, I ask him, “What time is it?” every so often. He figured out very quickly that I didn’t need to know the time, I needed him to know the time. He doesn’t mind. It seems much nicer to him than having me say, “Hurry up! We’re going to be late!” every few minutes. In return, he tries very hard to be timely when he knows that it matters to me, and he does quite well on those occasions.
We could drive each other crazy with the time thing, but it works better for us to cooperate. Like Quiddity said, we’ve tried to understand each other. We don’t always achieve it, but we do try.
Because you can substitute any length of time for five minutes. If I’ve got half an hour left before I have to go somewhere, I’ll get absorbed in something else and distracted and not realize it until I’m late. Or an hour. Or whatever.
Regarding the effort thing somebody else mentioned, Obsidian’s got it pretty close to right. I find it very stressful to be late, but I find it more stressful to make sure I’m somewhere on time. If I had to stress that for every casual drinks meeting with friends, I simply would not ever have casual drinks meetings with friends. If you’d rather not wait for me because I’m late, I would be sad, but I’d understand that–it’s totally your choice; fortunately, I have a few very, very kind friends who tolerate my lateness, and we focus on activities that don’t require that I be there at a specific time - concerts with early doors open time for me to aim for, for example, or movies that we pick once we get to the theatre.
Maybe an inability to estimate time is part of it–certainly I have trouble remembering / guessing how long it’s going to take to get through traffic at a certain time. Or how long it’s going to take to write an email. Or how long a conversation with a co-worker will take.
Scarlett67, thanks for posting that. It’s pretty much what I wanted to say but wasn’t sure if I wanted to do that much work. Thanks for doing the work.
I have had periods of my life when I have had to write down pretty much everything I did down to brushing my teeth to avoid missing something. In fact, I still do this when I have important meetings to go to and I think I might not be concentrating adequately due to stress or the fact that I’m concentrating on something else. I make checklists and set things up beforehand. I didn’t find it exhausting or awful. In fact, I thought it would be more awful to forget something and be in the precarious situation of having to improvise later because improvising would create more mental strain for me and potentially cause further difficulties.
When I did these things on a continual basis, they would become habits and sometimes I could remove the items from the list. I’ve found a computer planning system that would seem to be helpful in this endeavor. I haven’t gotten it because I’m using an index card system that seems to work for me. But in this computer planning system, one puts everything in it and the computer announces (via speakers) when things need to get done and hijacks the browser screen when the person needs to leave. This might be a useful system for those that would be helped by more reminders.
Err. . . this seems a little contradictory. If we’re going to try to understand others, doesn’t this run both ways? You seem to be much more understanding of the plight of the people who are running late and much less understanding of the person waiting. Telling the punctual person to change their behavior while asking the punctual person to understand that the non-punctual person need not change theirs seems a little one-sided from this perspective.
While I’m glad you worked this out between yourselves, I’m confused by this behavior. If he can be on time when he knows it matters to you, why is it not possible to make that a habit?
This behavior/issue seems to limit your choice of friends and activities. Do you find it to be an acceptable trade-off for you?
I am a punctual person whose lot in life it is to love unpunctual people. It’s rough. I spend a lot of time feeling like I’m the last priority, unloved, avoided, forgotten, and overlooked. I don’t know if I am those things, but I do know that I have a soft spot for arrogant, absent-minded men.
One eventually learns to work around it. A promise that “I’ll stop by for thirty minutes after the meeting” basically never reaches my brain–I know it won’t happen. “I’ll pick you up for lunch at 1” means “1:30, if I don’t get any phone calls.” I never agree to meet them at certain places–they’ve gotta come get me at my office or my house. I gave up completely on trying to cook for them. I say “I’m going to have dinner at 6,” make enough for everyone, and package the leftovers if they don’t make it.
The upside is that, while they’re habitually late getting to me, they’re also habitually late getting away from me. I get my time, it’s just time-shifted.
The test is whether the person will be on time for something they truly consider important and are really looking forward to doing. 95% of habitually late people will get their act together and be on time in a situation like this.
Which shows that there is nothing wrong with their frontal lobe. They are just subconsciously not assigning a lot of importance to being on time, either to get a sense of power over other people, to avoid unpleasant situations, because they don’t care about other peoples’ feelings, or some other reason.
Read mine again. We’re talking broken brain. If you are a punctual person, you have two choices when dealing with the unpunctual; you can choose to believe ill of the unpunctual person and that you are not cared for, or you can realize that the unpunctual person is not doing it wilfully to hurt you but is at least as distressed as you about being forever in a rush and have a little empathy.
However it seems to me that people would rather get mad at others than accept their flaws and allow themselves peace of mind. So get in a snit if you really want; it won’t fix the unpunctual person’s inability and it won’t help your own health either. Me, I understand that these folks don’t ‘choose’ to be scattered and disorganized so I don’t need to get myself in a lather about it.
I’m not so willing to accept that unpunctual people all have a broken brain. So far in my experience, every non-punctual person I’ve met or heard about could be punctual if something very important required it. So I agree with stutteringjane that most people can be punctual if need be. While I don’t know the exact proportion of people that can be punctual, I’ve never met or heard of one that can’t, so I too would place the percentage quite high if asked to do so.
And even if I decided that some lateness is caused by an emotional dysfunction, I still wouldn’t be so willing to excuse the behavior. I believe we all have emotional dysfunctions of one type or another. Perhaps the punctual person has the emotional dysfunction of being chronically on-time. So perhaps the non-punctual person should be the one doing the understanding and try to be more accommodating.
If we were really talking about a broken brain, it would be less like asking a color-blind person to consider the traffic lights while driving despite their inability to distinguish colors and more like asking a deaf person to understand what you’re saying with their eyes closed. One takes extra effort and the other cannot.
