Why are you always late?

Extremely true.

I remember dating and eventually breaking up with a girl who was constantly late for…everything. Too bad 'cause she was a total hottie, too. She was just totally non-punctual. She also had this thing where she liked to change plans at the last minute. I couldn’t deal with it and broke it off. She was otherwise a very decent person and was fond of her. Just not as a partner. And I knew that’s something that would drive me nuts, so it wouldn’t be fair to me to subject myself to this misery and it wouldn’t have been fair to have her feel my piss poor temper over things like this.

Definitely not my experience. When early-morning faculty or department meetings ran long and the warning bell rang, we’d pack up and leave. (Admins, OTOH, seemed much less concerned.) But then, I taught HS, and nobody was shepherding kids into the classrooms if we were late. When I had lunch duty, I couldn’t leave in time to get to my classroom before the tardy bell, but I sure as hell hurried and got there within a minute. A sign on my door told my students what was up.

There were a couple of teachers who were chronically late for school and early-morning faculty meetings. The rest of us seethed. Frankly, we wanted them fired. They robbed their students of 5-10 minutes of instruction time.

I’m not a time zealot, but I do think teachers, who are usually expected to be at school 30 minutes or more before school starts, should be in their classrooms before kids get there. And 58 of us did. So I disagree about teachers having “difficulty making transitions.” When you have to get class wrapped up in X minutes and have to move from activity to activity within that time, you tend to be more time-conscious, not less so. It was definitely not my experience as a student or as a teacher.

ETA: I don’t know why it shows this as replying to @Delayed_Reflex. Sorry.

Looking at this post, I have a number of comments:

I know both men and women who are able to handle very complicated lives and be able to be on time.

I worked with a project manager in Tokyo who had the ultimately responsibility for having multimillion dollar projects, with a dozen major contractors and scores of subcontractors, finish on time, with major financial penalties for being late. At any given time, he had hundreds or even thousands of items on his open ticket list.

He simply had to be super organized to handle it.

This comment is also outdated in that it assumes that only mothers are responsible for getting kids out the door.

My wife drives our kids to school and they need to be out the door at 7:25 am. My wife tends to be the type who tries to do too much, while at the same time overestimating our kids abilities to accomplish things on their own. It was frustrating until I just took it all over.

On school mornings, our kids needed to get dressed, get all their homework together, have their lunches, special project, filled out formed, etc., etc. and there just wasn’t time in the morning to get it done. I just changed it so that the kids need to have their bags ready the night before. My daughter actually puts her bag in the car before she goes to bed. They have their clothes ready on their dresser. This allows me to do any emergency laundry the night before and we find all those damn shoes that are missing. My daughter gets her lunch ready the previous night. We check for any forms needed. On days they take their instruments and music, then that gets rounded up as well. On days for the sailing club, they need to have their special clothes, including making sure their sailing shoes are washed, something that my son constantly forgets until the last moment.

With elementary and middle school kids, getting ready to go is just going to take far longer than expected. So expect it will be longer. Getting it done sooner makes reduces the overall stress level.

Because I sucked at getting things done on time, I studied time management. One of the best books is David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

He makes a point that people need to either find a way to get their commitments done more effectively or stop committing yourself to doing too much.

I think this is more likely the problem than being female. If you can’t feel time pass then it’s going to be difficult to be on time.

For me, being on time was involved learning a number of skills. While I didn’t have the same problems, I had my own. I have an anxiety disorder and when the anxiety was really bad, then it was really hard to even actually make it to events, meeting friends or sometimes even work, let alone be on time. Consequently, I have a lot of empathy for people who are chronically late. I also assume that even though I was able to develop some skills which have helped me, that’s not easy for everyone.

I disagree. The on-time people I know, including myself now (mostly), plan extra time when going to new places. It’s easy to anticipate that new places will take longer, and I suspect that more on-time people may be thinking more the process earlier on. Google maps is a godsend. When going to new places (outside my “comfort zone,”) I run though the route in advance and look for confusing places. GPS has made it much easier.

I, again, disagree. My kids are engaged in far too many extracurricular activities, my wife and both have many activities ourselves and we have anything but a minimalist lifestyle. I think you are unfairly judging and looking down on people for being on time and believing that their lives are being ruled by being on time where there are many people who simply have better skills.

It doesn’t matter if getting ready is a 5-minute process or a 50-minute process, generic you just has Being on time does require planning and a number of skills which may be more easily learned by some than others.

Something else I needed to learn was better organization. My keys get set down in exactly one place in my house. Same with my wallet. My glasses are given more flexibility; one of two places. My kids have in-baskets for all their school stuff, including homework and school forms. Sure, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass, always putting things away, but it saves so much more time because we don’t have to look for it. If that means that our lives “revolve around being on time” then so be it.

Maybe it’s just many of the teachers at my school (and most of the big offenders left). We had several years where meetings would drag on forever while a few of us were chomping at the bit for it to be over (I couldn’t leave, because the meetings were in my space). This was during a period of several years where there was a massive teacher turnover. Also, my POV may be due to the fact that I was someone who was affected most by teachers being late. My post obviously demonstrated the danger of making generalizations based on microscopic sample size!

See, much of your post is making up reasons why other people’s lifestyles make it easier for them to be on time than you, when it really all boils down to this.

I have noticed that sometimes (not always) people who are very insistent that everyone be on time for the meeting are not insistent at all about getting it over on time, and keep wanting to fit in one more thing, and then another, and then yet another, after what was supposed to be the ending time. This seems to me a similar phenomenon to the person who tries to fit in one more thing and then another before leaving for the meeting, with the result that they get there late; and it also often discommodes others. It does sometimes also draw opprobium; but it seems to me to usually be a different type of opprobium, less likely to include a component of moral shaming.

Not ending a meeting on time is just as bad as being late to a meeting. It’s theft of other people’s time. Very few punctual people do this. They generally have their shit together enough to have appropriate time management skills to begin and end their meeting appropriately.

At the last place I worked, we had the usual annual sexual harassment training. Before we switched to an online course, the class was run by this smarmy asshole lawyer who loved to hear himself talk. It always ran over.

One year I read the form we were given. It had to be signed at the end signifying that we attended. It explicitly said that we were required to have “one hour” of training per year. At one hour on the dot, the lawyer dude was still droning on. I walked to the desk off to the side where the HR person was sitting, signed the form and started to walk out. The HR person said “wait”. I said that my one hour of training I was complete and bailed. Sadly, only a handful of people followed me out.

This is exactly the opposite of what I have observed in individuals, organizations and cultures. People who are punctual, organizations that emphasize punctuality and cultures that are “monochronic” are more disciplined about finishing on time and moving through the steps of a process.

The idea that people who are Time Nazis are then slack about progressing through agendas, and staying on task is just fanciful.

I don’t know the exact percentages; but I certainly do know some cases – one of them currently recurring routinely in my life. It’s possible that some have used up all their punctuality spoons in getting to the meeting on time and don’t have any left by the time the meeting’s nearing the end. It’s also possible that for some ‘you must BE on time to an event’ is in a different mental category than ‘you must LEAVE the event on time’.

So how come I’m routinely experiencing this?

I don’t doubt for a second that the situation exists. I personally hate being kept late at the end as much as waiting around at the beginning.

Just curious, how does it make you feel when your time is wasted because that prick can’t end a meeting on time?

It makes me feel that I wish he wouldn’t glare at me or comment if I’m two minutes late.

Running over in itself doesn’t make me feel that he’s a prick, though. And recently I’m inclined to cut him some slack because he’s got a new kid and often looks exhausted.

I will call his attention to the time, eventually; not until we’re over by rather more than two minutes, though if we’ve clearly got two or three more things on the agenda five minutes before the meeting’s supposed to be over I’ll sometimes ask about those items.

The hypocrisy would annoy the hell out of me, unless he was purposefully ending the meeting late by the exact amount that you were late in which case the childishness would annoy the hell out of me.

No, that’s not what’s going on! And a good thing, too; that would be taking out an annoyance at me on everybody else at the meeting.

He just seems to get a bit lost in the agenda, towards the end.

That makes a lot of sense. I’m really impressed with your gracious admission, too. I think we all tend to make those sorts of generalizations from time to time. Thanks for yours.

My late wife was almost uniformly late for EVERYTHING we scheduled as a couple…concerts, movies, dinner reservations, parties, flights, etc. After trying a few things (like telling her a time that was actually up to an hour earlier than necessary), I finally had to “go nuclear.” If it looked like we were going to miss the start of a movie, I would simply not leave the house, or I would even stop driving and go back home if we ran into traffic. A couple times I actually sat down and rescheduled flights while waiting for her to get ready to go to the airport. If it looked like we would be 15-30 minutes late for a dinner reservation, I’d call and see if we could be moved. If not, we wouldn’t go at all.

I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but I’m not going to let anyone (including a spouse) make me regularly miss the first 15 minutes of a movie, or run through the airport trying to make a flight, or wait for 2 hours at a restaurant for the next available seating. Better just to call it off and cut the losses.

OTOH, my stepdaughter still manages to get to family dinners at restaurants almost exactly 90 minutes late every single time. She will show up when the rest of the family (10-15 people) has just finished desert. She will then expect us to wait while she orders appetizers for herself, a main course, and then a desert. This is not an exaggeration. The family will be on the point of leaving for our homes and hotels and she will extend the dinner by another hour or so, even with babies and younguns who should have been in bed by then. Unfortunately, this type of late can’t be cured by a cancellation. I usually just say, “We have to feed the dogs,” and leave.

That’s what everyone should have done.

This sounds more like passive aggression than an executive function deficit.

Reading ZonexandScout’s post with carrps’ response along with my own experiences with others, I wonder how much of people’s late behavior continues because people condone or accept it. What would happen if someone shows up at 10:20 to pick you up at 10am and you say, “I asked you to be here at 10. Never mind, it’s too late now.” How would the late person feel? Shamed that they showed up late? Pissed off that your an ahole because you wasted THEIR time? Think you’re an idiot for saying 10 when you wanted them to show up at 10?

But now what if everyone did that? What if their boss wrote them up every time they were 5 minutes late and made it clear that 3 write up = firing for cause? What if their significant other said, “I don’t want to walk in 10 minutes late to a movie. Take me home.” or started cooking a meal (for themselves) when you are 15 minutes late to picking them up for dinner reservations saying, “Go ahead without me. I didn’t want to wait for dinner.” Would the person put it on everyone else how much of a jerk they are for not accepting their lateness OR would they somehow miracle being on time?