Yup. As my dad said. “Two legged animals are much more dangerous than 4 legged ones”
My Wife and I have had bears break into our cars each twice this summer. You look out and wonder why the car doors are open. It’s kinda scary cause you have to go to the car to close the car back up, but you don’t know if one is still inside.
Apparently, our dogs only bark at squirrels.
And I’ll stop this hi-jack.
There’s a huge difference between a four year old drawing a picture, and an adult meeting the commitment(s) they have made to other people. Do keep commitments, don’t try to do so.
Ah, the old “moose excuse”! I’m surprised it took somebody this long to bring it up.
A Møøse once bit my sister… No realli!
Yeah, I read nonsense like this:
Some of us have answered it, multiple times. Let me try again in somewhat different wording: Because being ready to do something at a specific time takes a huge amount of our attention, mental energy, and ability to get anything else done.
Which is completely and absolutely lame for an adult to be saying. Man up and be on time. Saying you don’t have the “mental energy” is just bullshit- it’s a matter of planning and preparation, which is something ANY grown adult should be able to manage.
Aside from the fact that I am not going to “man” up: dismissing other people’s lives as “nonsense” is not in the least a convincing tactic.
At least it was kinda a fun hijack. 
please keep being careful.
I had a boss who carpooled to work with several people, one of whom was 10 minutes late every single day, and that fellow was about to be booted out of the carpool. My boss said, “Anyone who can be consistently 10 minutes late every day can just as consistently be ready 10 minutes earlier every day.” He had a good point.
Yes, so we make that happen. They act like no one else makes this effort.
bump didn’t say that, I did.
bump said
I know, I’m trying to fix the quoting by discourse.
Sounds so easy… too easy.
I love the title of this thread. It’s not “Stop being late” or “Share your strategies”. It’s “Why are you late?”
It’s a psychological thing. With perhaps a different answer for each of us (the “Because I’m a optimist” revelation was new to me).
Reminds me of Richard Simmons’s license plate " Y R U FAT "
Just saying “You should eat less and exercise in short-shorts” won’t work, without dealing with the underlying reasons.
And yet, I keep reading things like:
and
(bolding added)
So I think it must actually BE EASIER for some people to be on time. Because I would never say that. Neither would Thorny Locust.
There’s a mathematical answer to this question. If you look at the distribution of “how long it takes” to do something, you would see something like a lognormal curve:
File:LogNormal(median=3,stddev=2).png - Analytica Wiki
It can’t take less than zero time, there’s a steep rise to the most likely amount of time, and then a long fat tail to the right, because it is more likely to take more time than less time.
When you add up a bunch of tasks that each are expected to take some amount of time, the odds of the actual time being longer than the sum of the expected times is far greater than the odds of it being less.
Now, of course you can pad your time estimate to increase the odds that you’ll be on time. And of course everyone does this to some extent. But the tighter your curve is around the mode (that is, the better you are at estimating and sticking to times) the less that costs you.
And yeah, the guy who is ten minutes late every single day for the carpool – he needs to adjust his estimates. But the guy who is sometimes 3 minutes early, and often 3 minutes late, and 10 minutes late often enough to be annoying, and rarely 20 minutes late – he is mostly just bad at estimating time, and to reliably be on time he’ll be sitting there waiting for about 17 minutes most days. Not sometimes, but routinely. To be on time every day is adding a lot of time to his commute. That probably means he shouldn’t carpool, because he’s effectively sharing his difficultly with time with everyone else in the car. And yes, that’s not fair to the rest of the group. But it’s not because he’s an evil uncaring person.
Did I mention that I try to avoid making tight time promises?
I’m probably not the person you are pissed at, because I recognize my difficulty and actively try to avoid making hard time commitments. But you timely people, those of you who say “it’s easy” are constantly trying to pin me down. “what time will you be here?” You want me to answer to within 5 minutes. This used to come up all the time with my husband’s uncle. He wanted to know when we would be back for lunch, something that made absolutely no difference. (We weren’t going to start preparing lunch until we returned from the beach, and he was going to be hanging out watching TV or sitting in his garden with a drink.) But he liked to have a precise time in mind, because that was LESS stressful for him. Different strokes for different folks.
It’s certainly easier because I can plan ahead, and I do so.
Make no mistake, my Wife plans our big trips. She LIKES doing that. All I need to know is when to get out the door.
And Make no mistake, I drive 200 miles 3 times a month to take my 92 year old mother to a doctor. Well, doctors, there are 3 now I think. I gotta plan. I gotta plan a LOT.
I also pick up groceries for her. In weather conditions that most on this board can’t fathom.
I make it on time because I plan. I, we all have tools for that. I have never been late.
I’m sorry but people that say it’s hard to be on time don’t really know that it can take a bit of effort. If you’re not willing to put in that effort, say so.
puzzlegal - It’s not always easy or simple. I do what I have to do though.
And yet, you say “no stress, no rush, don’t even have to think about it”. That just doesn’t jibe with “it’s not easy or simple”. It’s hard and complex but yet stress-free?
Also, 200 miles? Each way? Surely that’s a weekend trip, not something you do in a day. (or a “couple of days” trip, anyway.) If I needed to drive 200 miles and THEN get to a doctor’s appointment on time, I would be arriving the day before. And chewing up all that time would probably be all kinds of stressful. But it’s good of you to care for your mom.
Yup. Because I have a plan.
Lets see. the upcoming stuff -
The good news is that all I think I have to do on Sunday is get home. Things change and if they do, I’ll plan for it.
It’s 100 miles each way. Mountain roads.
I don’t do it so much now, but about a decade or so ago, I would have jobs in Indianapolis (I’m in Chicago) and I would do a day trip down to Indy a couple times a month for a wedding (so important to get there on time) and be back the same day. That’s about 200 miles each way. It was actually easier getting there on time and predicting travel times that working my way through Chicago traffic. But Christ, I-65 is boring.
Colorado mountain roads in winter are not boring. Summer too. I say that with the certainty of someone that has driven over them for 40 years.
But I always make it to whatever commitment I make on time (not saying you don’t pulykemell).
Sure, it takes a bit of planning. Do I need to get up at 4am, 5am or 6am?
I often have to do x by y. So I make the appropriate plan and do it. It’s much less stressful, and safer than rushing to get something done.
Sure. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to me why somebody is late. I can’t control what other people do; I don’t really care about the thought process. I empathize and understand for some people this is simply very difficult for whatever reason. It could be psychological; it could be physical; it could be intentional; it could be laziness. Whatever the reason, the result is the same.
So, I have two choices: I can choose to be pissed off at crabby every time someone is late, or I could find a way to mitigate that. I can only control my thoughts, my feelings, my actions. I can choose to be more flexible about my time and find a way to enjoy myself, despite someone’s tardiness. I can choose not to invite that person to anything time sensitive. I can invite them earlier with the expectation they will be late. I can go on with whatever I was doing without that person and tell them to catch up with me later. Life’s too short for me to stress about what other people do. This is presumably a person I like, that I want to hang out with, they just happen to suck at being on time. At the end of the day, so what?
Also, in my line of work, wedding photography, while I have to be punctual, the wedding day events often run way off schedule, and, when scheduling, I have to account for that and be unphased by time pressure, other I would drive myself nuts. Every wedding I shoot, I get a schedule, and for certain weddings especially in certain cultures, I know shit’s gonna deviate, sometimes seriously so, from what is given to me. This affects my job and the time I need to take certain pictures, but I have to deal with it and be flexible and remain cool and calm through the whole thing. I’ve developed practical and mental strategies for dealing with that, and the first step is going into things assuming nothing will be on time. For me, it works.
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