It’s “Divide everyone into two groups.” People who want to divide everyone into groups of two are called “monogamists.”
Yes but my meetings were critically important. 
Ha! Good one. 
I’ve always liked Benchley. That’s probably why I was thinking of it. Thanks!
That’s not the usual meaning of normal.
Staff meetings may well be unnecessary. But I can assure you they are very common.
Clearly he meant that the normal amount should be zero.
At one time I had a partner who freaking loved staff meetings. When I bought out his interest in our business, the first change I made was no more staff meetings, ever.
So when somebody says “I’ll be ready at seven” everyone is supposed to accept the literal meaning of those words. Exactly seven and no later. You will not be there a few minutes later than you said.
But when somebody says “I’ll be there ten minutes early” everyone is supposed to understand that’s only a figurative estimate. You’ll actually be there a few minutes later than you said.
I think habitually tardy folks come in a few different varieties, but the one quality they share is that they are poor judges of how long a task will take to accomplish. Like maybe they’ve never had occasion to look at a clock when starting or finishing a task.
I know some tardy people that are ANYTHING BUT lazy or procrastinators. I’m reminded of my MIL. She is a model of constant industry and is always in motion, but yeah, she’s perpetually late. I remember one time we were running wayyy behind and had to go to the airport quickly or we’d miss a flight. We were all in the car waiting ready to go except my MIL. So my FIL ran in to the house to see what was delaying her. Turns out she was emptying waste baskets. Her indignant response: “you don’t want to come back to a house with lots of housework waiting for you, do you?”
You’re really grasping at straws, bro. Obviously that’s not what I meant. Like your silly hypothetical, it’s a matter of context. It is a work meeting with a bunch of other people? Is it to make a flight? Is it hanging out at a bar to watch a baseball game? Is it tickets for an actual baseball game? Is it coming to my house to borrow a tool and I will be working in the yard all day?
If you are trying to make an actual point, it escapes me.
Yeah, it’s a funny thing. When I was young I used to be hyper-punctual. The half hour early to a party kind of guy. And it was frankly anxiety driven. Unfortunately or fortunately (take your pick ), the older I’ve gotten the less anxious I’ve become. And hyper-punctuality for things not involving airline flights (I’m still slightly anxious about those) has gone out the window.
I am not always late now, but I no longer care nearly as much about being strictly punctual. The punctuality Nazis probably wouldn’t find me too flaky overall, but I am now far more likely to be ten minutes late than a half hour early. To some extent I’ve started covering my bases by being slightly vague when it is socially permissible - ‘I can probably be there somewhere around 10:30ish’. I figure that gives me enough slop to get there between ~10:20 and 10:40 ( or more depending on what the circumstance is).
And if I’m driving somewhere through SF Bay Area traffic, I get really vague. No way am I leaving my house an hour early just to account for the possibility of some freeway fender-bender.
People have different opinions on what’s important. Some people think being punctual is the most important thing. Other people think keeping busy is the most important thing.
The first person would be planning out when to go to a scheduled appointment and would think “I’ll leave a half hour early to make sure I don’t get there late due to unexpected delays. If there are no unexpected delays, I’ll just be a half hour early. No problem. I’ll just wait for my appointment. The important thing is not being late. I am clearly morally superior to those people who are always showing up late.”
The second person would be planning out when to go to a scheduled appointment and would think “There’s no reason to leave a half hour early and then sit and wait doing nothing. You could be doing something useful in those thirty minutes. I’m going to keep busy right up to the time I need to leave. The important thing is getting stuff done. I am clearly morally superior to those people who are always looking for excuses to sit around and do nothing.”
Conflicts arise when people fail to see that other people have different values. If you ascribe your values to other people, you will run into situations where you feel they are constantly doing something wrong - and know that what they are doing is wrong.
The way to avoid these conflicts (especially when they involve family members) is to talk to the other person. Find out what their reasons are for doing things a different way than you do.
I sense you didn’t put much effort into it.
If you ascribe your values to other people, you will run into situations where you feel they are constantly doing something wrong - and know that what they are doing is wrong.
I guess the Golden Rule has its limitations.
Yes, the variations of the Golden Rule express the principle of treating other people the way you would want them to treat you. The problem is that’s too narcistic. Other people do not necessarily want to be treated the same way you want.
One nice thing about working from home is that everyone is exactly on time for the vast majority of meetings. Because your computer goes “beep” so you click a button. If you need to finish up that last little bit of an email, you do that discretely at the start of the meeting. 
I retired in May of 2020 so I only had a couple of months of doing business during COVID. Since I worked in manufacturing, my teammates and I were mandated to work in the factory. I found that homebound project managers called more meetings than normal out of boredom.
My team has instituted a weekly “coffee break”, which is a meeting solely to shoot the bull, and keep in touch as human beings. It’s the only meeting where we routinely turn on video, too.
Being late to this thread (ha ha), there is a lot to sort through but I’ve found the discussion very interesting. As a chronically late person myself, I really appreciate the contributions of @thorny_locust who mirrors my internal thought processes quite well, and also appreciate @Ulfreida 's empathy for those of us who struggle with this problem.
I have been late to all of these things, with varying results. For sports events and movies, I get a bit tiny annoyed at myself for being late but ultimately don’t care too much because usually I didn’t miss anything significant in the first few minutes of the event. I’ve been late to more than one wedding which causes me to feel momentarily embarrassed, but it did not appear to cause anyone else any distress (that they bothered to communicate to me anyway) and certainly didn’t cause any delay to the ceremonies. I do think one of the things that causes me to not value punctuality that much is that I feel the consequences of being late are generally fairly minor. Nevertheless, I do acknowledge that being late is disrespectful to whomever is kept waiting. I obviously don’t mean to be disrespectful, but a lot of people say racist things without meaning to be disrespectful and I recognize this is similar in some ways. Nevertheless, I do feel that the extreme value that some people place on punctuality is beyond reasonable and their projection of the intent of people who are late is misplaced.
One thing that I’d say regarding making commitments to be on time that you cannot keep - I think for many people who are late to things, they ARE keeping their commitments in their mind, because the concept of “on time” is a lot fuzzier for them. For some people, being 30 minutes late to an event is late, while for others, they perceive it as being on time. Thus if someone is consistently up to 30 minutes late for things, they may still see themselves as being on time and meeting their commitments, and would also have no problem if they are waiting 30 minutes for other people who are later than them. See some of the later posts about the cultural context of being on time.
Thanks to the two of you for highlighting the cultural component of the importance of punctuality that not many of the time-sensitive posters have recognized. Certainly, growing up in an immigrant family, I found punctuality seemed significantly less important to people in my family compared to the average Canadian. I’m sure this has contributed to me not valuing punctuality and building habits that are hard to break.
Being late feels like it’s pathological for me, because I actually constantly am trying things to help me be more punctual and for some reason my brain keeps fighting to work around these things. Clocks in my house run 20 minutes fast but it doesn’t take long for me to adapt to the offset time. Reminders in my calendar initially work but start to be dismissed, which becomes a difficult habit to break. Consciously starting to get ready to leave the house 30 minutes earlier than I want to just leads me to being ready to go 15 minutes early, which results in me thinking that I can fit in one more activity before leaving. It honestly feels like my brain is addicted to being late or something with how difficult it is to change behaviours to try to be more on time. Being on time feels as easy to me as I expect quitting smoking feels to a lot of smokers. If being on time just comes easily to you, I don’t think you understand how hard it is for others.
This is not true - there are definitely times that people won’t accept a non-committal answer. A lack of committing to a certain time also be construed as a lack of respect. If a friend wants you to visit and asks “What time do you want to come over?” and you respond “I’ve got a few things going on, so sometime between 1pm and midnight” - some people would take that to mean that visiting your friend is at the very bottom of your list of priorities and thus would take offense. My wife will often say something like “what time are we going to go grocery shopping?” and I’d respond “after we finish decluttering the closet” and she’ll want to know what time that is. She doesn’t like the idea of an open-ended timeslot for an activity where I don’t know how long something will take. Conversely, only committing to a time that’s really far out (say, 4 hours out when I think something will take 1 hour) will often lead to the activity dragging out to fill the full 4 hours. Giving a small buffer, say 1 hour 15 minutes if I think it will take an hour, sometimes works but sometimes fails when I greatly underestimate how long something takes (which is often). Another possibility is to drop whatever I’m doing when the time comes up which also leads to a loss of productivity when I’m in a groove, resulting in that original activity taking way longer to do overall than if I had just kept doing it and accepted being late. Honestly it seems like every option has downsides.
Ironically, sometimes I feel like people who say “people who are late don’t respect other people’s time” themselves don’t respect the time of people who are late. They don’t care if being on time for something takes 1 hour more of your time than being 15 minutes late.
Good post. I do find it funny that some people would be fine arriving 10 minutes early for something and waiting, but get annoyed at waiting 10 minutes after an appointment time. Shows that it’s not the actual waiting that annoys people, it’s whether they were expecting or in control of the waiting.
And whether or not they’re wearing pants is entirely irrelevant