Well, those that are consistently late are being uncharitable to a larger group. Most of us have figured it out. Internal or external clock.
And I love the Pizza Principle, Cheesesteak.
Yup.
Oh, nonsense.
If I put a pizza in the oven, I go do any of a batch of possible different things within range of the smell of the pizza or the sound of a timer. If, when the pizza’s ready, I’m in the middle of whatever it is, I don’t have to take the pizza out that exact instant; another few minutes won’t hurt it, or I can turn off the oven and go back to what I was doing and eat the pizza when I get to it. By which time, who knows, maybe it’s cold. Or maybe it got burned a bit. That happens.
I don’t spend that time concentrating on being ready to take the pizza out of the oven exactly twenty minutes after I put it in; let alone spend much of the earlier part of the day concentrating on being able to put the pizza in the oven exactly twenty minutes before some arbitrary time at which I’m supposed to take it out.
I was going to say exactly the same thing. I certainly don’t stand there staring at the oven as the pizza cooks. And yes, it might be slightly cold or slightly burnt. That’s fine.
I suspect maybe this is a guy thing where it’s not so complex. But then the answer would be, set the timer on the phone earlier to allow for time for you to finish your hair.
But, yes, I do the timer thing, too, in the shower if there’s any chance I’ll zone out or even fall asleep. When I’m showering, it means I have to be somewhere (otherwise, I take a bath), and if I’m doing more than my typical 5-minute-tops in-and-out and want to veg out for 20 minutes, I set the alarm. (For example, if I have to be out the door by 5:30 a.m. for a shoot, I set two or three alarms for 4:35 a.m., set a 5:00 alarm for my shower if I want to take a longer one, get dressed, eat, and out the door with all my stuff, prepared the night before. More likely, I’ll have taken the shower the night before, too)
There’s a lot of effort in being on time, even for us punctual ones. Procedurally, it’s not any less difficult. Mentally, perhaps, it comes a bit easier to us – my natural sense of time and estimating time is quite good. My own problem is tidiness. I like things neat; I am terrible about keeping them neat. The solution is easy: fucking clean up after myself. Yet, I am terrible at it except in fits and spurts. I’ll let the clutter accumulate bit by bit until, finally, one day it drives me nuts, I get it 100% clean, only to repeat the cycle. And the answer is simple: get into a routine to keep up on it, like normal people do. And I am in total control of that, but – speaking for myself – I’m just lazy about it. I absolutely can change that.
Well, there you go. The pizza gets more consideration than being somewhere at an agreed upon time.
How on earth you got that out of what I wrote is beyond me.
I said that I gave the timing of the pizza no attention whatsoever until I actually put it in the oven, and only minimal attention about either taking it out or turning it off. If I gave that same amount of attention to being somewhere on time, I’d routinely be late by several hours, and sometimes by days.
The attention given to the pizza isn’t the equivalent of my showing up to go to the mall ten or twenty minutes late. It’s the equivalent of ‘maybe I’ll go to the mall with you tomorrow, or maybe I won’t, and if I do I’ll get there sometime between 11:30 AM and 3:00 PM.’
This is pretty much how it works for me, but I have a fairly good sense of time, and no focus issues (like ADHD). If these things were not true, I can easily imagine I would have burnt a lot of food.
This entire thread has nothing to do with going to the mall (or whatever) alone. No one cares what time you go to the mall alone It’s about breaking agreements, not a maybe with others that you will meet somewhere at a certain time.
There is a huge difference between I might see you at the mall, and I’ll pick you up at 10am.
Are you? I’m not seeing any posts that indicate a genuine attempt to understand. Please quote them if I’ve missed them. What I’m seeing is punctual people explaining to non-punctual people that the non-punctual people are wrong about their own struggles, and instead that their lateness is not merely disrespectful in its effect, but intentionally so.
I guess for me, it’s a lot easier to understand people who lack time management skills than people who lack reading comprehension. “Case in point” does not mean “hey, this person agrees with me!” It means, “this is an example of what I was talking about,” which was, in context, people who can do something with minimal effort not understanding that others are different. I was likening two somethings: being on time, and relaxing in an airport, the latter of which puzzlegal said she simply couldn’t do, and people were arguing with her about that.
It’s one thing to say “I don’t care how much effort it requires; I don’t care if you have to wake up at 5 for a 10 a.m. appointment, shower the night before, and sit in your car outside my house for an hour before we agreed you’d pick my up; you either knock on my door at 10 or we’re not friends anymore.” That may be harsh, but it’s totally your call. What you don’t get to call is the reasons all late people are late, including people you haven’t met, and what their inner thoughts and feelings are. But that’s what’s happening in this thread, and the sheer arrogance was further exemplified by those insisting that puzzlegal was wrong about what she found more relaxing: rushing to get to the airport, or arriving way early and having to wait. That is not something you get to argue with someone about! And that should be so obvious that, at least once it’s pointed out, it should cause a rational person to say “hmmm. Maybe as annoyed as I am with late people, and as justified as I am in my annoyance, I could still be mistaken about why they’re late and what it means. Maybe, although I will continue to exercise my right to remove these frustrating people from my life, I could still learn something about my fellow human beings that might come in handy someday, and so I will listen instead of talking. Or, maybe I don’t care why people are late, so I’ll stop reading this thread.” Instead, people kept commenting to deny that there could be any sort of difference in executive functioning that could make punctuality more difficult for some than others, and when I pointed out the huge blind spot of those people in failing to grasp that something they found more relaxing than the alternative was less relaxing than the alternative for puzzlegal, you chimed in with the old refrain of how you and they are no different, you simply gotta do this, it’s a choice, it’s about values and character and caring about other people and absolutely nothing else. Case in point: you don’t get it, and you’re not even trying to get it.
What matters here is the batch of possible things you do, you choose these things to ensure that you’re not irretrievably engaged when you need to be ready to act. You choose things where you can monitor the pizza and deal with it. You are aware of the fact that the pizza MUST be dealt with, you cannot simply ignore it for an additional 15-30 minutes because you are busy with something else. You are actively planning 20 minutes of your life to ensure you’re not 30 minutes late returning to the oven.
If you actively planned 20 minutes of your life to ensure you get in the car on time, you wouldn’t ever be 30 minutes late meeting a friend at the mall.
Ah, yes, I remember those days. Back when somebody else would be in the house to make sure windows were shut, stove turned off, cats fed, dogs walked, greenhouse and barn doors adjusted for the weather; and back when my bowels moved rapidly and on demand so I never had to spend extra time in the bathroom. If I had to be out the door by 5:30, and it really mattered that I do that, I’d have to get up at 3:15 (and that does presume the shower’s the night before). Which would seriously risk my being insufficiently awake to drive safely, no matter how much caffeine I had in me.
And that wasn’t what I was talking about.
What I was talking about was your claim that if I show up fifteen minutes late to take you to the mall when we both know it doesn’t matter what time you get to the mall, I’m paying you less attention than I pay to making a pizza. Which is absolute nonsense. To show up at your place within a given half hour or even hour time span I need to start planning at a minimum several hours in advance, and possibly the day before; and to take into account dozens of things that might intervene. To make a pizza I need to do no planning whatsoever until I put the thing in the oven, and the only planning I need to do about taking it out is to be somewhere close enough so that I’ll smell it if it starts to seriously burn.
Indeed. If I had all that stuff to do, that’s exactly what I’d do, as well. As I’ve said through this thread, I can empathize with the late people, and I’m forgiving of lateness, and choose not to be bothered by other people’s tardiness. Why let somebody else – or, rather, my thoughts about somebody else or their regards for time – spoil my fun? But we on time people have lots of shit to do, too, to get ready. It doesn’t all just magically happen.
Nobody is routinely exactly on time and if you can be ready by 10, you will be ready when I arrive at 10 - which is all anyone really cares about. It doesn’t matter to me at all if you are ready at 9:30 and spend half-an-hour reading or doing something else that you can stop doing easily when I arrive ( or until it’s time to leave) What’s annoying is when I arrive at 10 and you aren’t ready - you haven’t gotten dressed or you’re still in the shower and we don’t end up leaving until 10:30 when if you had told me you wouldn’t be ready until 10:30 before I left my house, I could have spent those 30 minutes doing something other than waiting for you. If you’re ready at 9:50 that won’t happen.
Sure, but you stay within the sound of the timer/the smell of the pizza and my guess is you don’t decide to do something that is likely to take you more than 20 minutes, can’t be stopped easily and/or which is located somewhere you can’t hear the timer or smell the pizza. Sure, you might decide to fold clothes while you are waiting for the pizza- but I bet you don’t decide to paint your bathroom. And if you can do those things for a pizza, it’s not clear to me why you can’t set an alarm to leave at 4 to meet me an 4:30 and not start at hour long project at 3:30. I’m not at all saying that you don’t have to spend the whole day concentrating on meeting me at 3:30 or that it doesn’t screw up your whole day - I just don’t understand why needing to leave at 4 would have any effect at what you could do at 10 am except for not starting a 5+ hour project. Unless you’re simply talking about being conscious of the need to leave at 4 all day so you don’t start a 5 hour project at 10 or a 4 hour task at 11 and so on -I’m pretty sure everyone has the need to leave at 4pm on their mind all day at that level but I’m not sure why that would screw up your whole day. I mean, thinking about the need to leave at 4 pm shouldn’t prevent you from deciding to start a three hour chore at 10 am.
No. But what I’m pointing out is that the “lots of shit” may genuinely take some people two or three times as much time as others, and include two or three times as many things that are difficult to time exactly; and therefore take two or three times as much effort to arrange and time taken from other responsibilities. You’re recognizing that; but some in this thread seem not to be doing so. Instead we’re getting claims that we won’t put as much attention into this as into making a frozen pizza.
It’s taking a significant chunk of my attention the whole day. It makes it difficult for me to settle to anything else. I understand that a lot of people’s minds don’t work that way; but mine does, and obviously mine’s not the only one.
And I often can’t tell a 3 hour task from a 6 hour task. A lot of what I have to do can genuinely take significantly different amounts of time depending on how the job goes. So not only can’t I start the 6 hour task, I can’t start the 3 hour one either – or I can only start it after first planning what to do if it takes longer than 3 hours, and can only do it while thinking about the time all of the time, which is distracting and tiring and likely to make the job take even longer; and yes it will happen even if I set an alarm, because I can’t just turn off that awareness until the alarm goes off.
And if I’m going to have to be somewhere exactly at 10:00 or 4:00 on Tuesday, this often means that I have to rearrange not only Tuesday, but also Monday around that need. So some of that tension around Tuesday will work its way into Monday.
None of that remotely applies to the pizza that I may or may not decide to stick in the oven at whatever time I feel like on Tuesday (yes, I know you’re not the one going on about pizzas.)
This is mostly true, but I’ve seen at least two factors that screw this up for people I’ve known. First, one guy I knew simply had NO IDEA what time given tasks take, even things he did often. He was equally capable of thinking, “After I start the pizza I’ll fill the time by watering my plants” or “After I start the pizza I’ll fill the time by straightening up my desk.” When, in actuality, it took less than five minutes to water the only three plants he owned while ‘straightening up his desk’ could take anything from ten minutes (rarely) to several hours, depending on which rabbit holes he finds to fall down.
Which brings up the second factor, I know several people who seem to have a, well, drive to COMPLETE tasks they start. Say this guy is straightening his desk, finds some bank statements, credit card bills, tax info papers. He’ll start to file them away, carefully putting them into the proper folders, gets out his checkbook to pay the bills – and this may take more time than he expected. And then if the timer on the oven goes off he just can’t/won’t leave the rest of the papers unfiled/the payment check written but not ready in the envelope, whatever right away to tend the pizza. He instead carried on with whatever it was so that it would be DONE. To him, having the task at hand COMPLETED was far more important than allowing the pizza to bake for, hopefully, not ALL that much longer. (Often it was.)
This was alien to me at first, since I’m perfectly capable of walking away from writing a letter in mid-sentence if something else comes up. For me, it’s not even making a choice, I’ve a mindset that goes “timer goes off, take care of whatever was being timed” and it took me ages to realize that for him it was “timer goes off, finish up what you’re doing and then deal with the timed thing.”
I won’t claim my natural way is ‘better’ – there are far too many partially done tasks lurking around the house where I’ve never gone back and finished the job – but I don’t end up with many burned cookies or pizzas.
If i need to leave at 4pm sharp on Tuesday, it probably won’t affect my Monday, but yes, it certainly affects what I’m doing and thinking at 10, and yes, it’s stressful.
And all of @StarvingButStrong 's post resonates, too. There are tasks i can interrupt (doing a jigsaw puzzle) and tasks that only take a minute or two to interrupt (browsing the SDMB – but I really do want to finish those post I’m in the middle of) but in general i find it very hard to shift tasks. When i was studying for actuarial exams (a multi-hundred-hour project), there were some people who preferred to study an hour a day, every day. I preferred to study all day Saturday. It took me a really long time to engage with the material, and a moderately long time to disengage. I got a lot more actual studying done per hour spent by setting aside long blocks of time to do nothing but study.
The same is true for smaller tasks. If i start to organize my desk and walk away midway through, I’m probably worse off than if i never touched it.
I will. If i could be like you with regard to tasks and scheduling, i would.
Yes, of course. 15 minutes for something that is not important is not a big deal.
If I’m serving dinner at 6pm and let people know that they can come between 5pm and 6pm, don’t expect to be fed at 8pm. I’ll do my best of course, but it is very rude to the host and other guests.
If you had a flat tire or whatever, of course that’s not a problem. But if it’s because you can’t plan your day to leave a X time, well, that’s your problem. It makes problems for others that may now need to change their plans. This seems to be hard for some to understand.
There have be many suggestions in this thread on how this can be overcome with simple or free programs and tools. Make a plan. Don’t vacuum the entire house, just do the living room and leave when you need to.
I drive mountain roads 100 miles 3 times a month to pick up my mother and take her to various doctors. I have to make a plan for each trip. Do I have to pick up groceries for mom, which office are we going to. Is there a storm moving in? So I make a plan and adjust for when I need to get up and have to hit the road.
And I do it.
No stress, no worries, and I’ve never been late.
What I think many here, including myself, are having a hard time understanding, is why can’t people that are chronically late stick to a plan? Or is it a problem to just make a plan?
yeah, you and I are made differently.
You know, I am extremely good at math. I have always known how to add and divide. Algebra is just common sense. Trigonometry is beautiful and fun. Calculus was intuitive. I never have stress or worries about needing to use my math skills.
And just as most people can get through a calculus class, I can be close enough to “on time” when I need to be. But the calculus class was a joy – literally one of the highlights of my life – and being on-time is stressful and deeply unpleasant.
I know that other people are wired differently. I understand that most people don’t find joy from their high school math classes. Why can’t you accept that other people are wired differently with respect to keeping track of time.
People keep going back and forth in this thread about what they mean by being late. Sometimes that’s because it’s different people. But there have certainly been some posting in this thread that they do think it’s a big deal to be 15 minutes late for something that doesn’t matter.
Whereas I don’t think there’s been anyone at all in this thread saying that if they’re told to arrive for dinner between 5 and 6, they expect to be able to show up at 8 and still be fed.
Try re-reading the thread?
Or are you saying that you’ve read the multiple detailed explanations, but they just don’t make any sense to you because your mind works differently? I do recognize that there are many people who can’t imagine that everyone else’s minds don’t work like theirs. I wish more of them, even if they have trouble imagining it, would accept that it happens.