Most of us know someone who is perennially late – a person who seems to have a chronic blind spot when it comes to timekeeping. It can become a source of jokey banter among friends, but in another context, it can have serious and stressful consequences, from being late for work meetings to missing flights and doctors’ appointments.
There could be various reasons why you’re perpetually late. Tardiness tends to correlate with lower scores on conscientiousness and neuroticism in personality tests or, to put a positive spin on it, you could just be really relaxed.
This might be linked to the way you were raised – perhaps you inherited your parents’ relaxed attitude to timekeeping. It might have something to do with your cultural heritage, too.
For instance, there’s evidence that people in some countries, such as Brazil, tend to be much more relaxed than those in America, for example.
Zooming in on some specific psychological processes, you could be what some psychologists call a ‘time optimist’ – that is, you tend to underestimate how long things will take. A related issue is procrastination.
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Getting to places on time means being able to stop what you’re doing and prepare to leave. Being a procrastinator might affect your ability to do that in a timely fashion.
Another mental quirk that could contribute to your problem, at least in some contexts, is over-familiarity with particular routes – the walk to your local bus stop, for example, or across campus from your halls of residence to a lecture theatre.
A fascinating study by psychologists at the University of California and University College London found that we tend to underestimate the time it’ll take us to traverse highly familiar physical spaces.
So, if your problem particularly manifests when you’re planning to travel from A to B on a route you know extremely well, this could be why.
One final causal factor to consider is whether you’ve got an aversion to arriving early. Of course, it’s very difficult to plan to arrive anywhere exactly on time, so being punctual usually entails being early – and that can mean twiddling your thumbs. You might not even realise it at a conscious level, but perhaps you hate waiting around.
If these reasons resonate, you can begin to address them. One simple, powerful step you can take is to make a firm commitment not to just be on time, but to be early.
Get into the habit of breaking down, in realistic detail, how long it’ll take to get to where you need to be, then add on a generous buffer – say, 15 minutes. (The longer the journey, the longer you should make the buffer.)
If you don’t like the idea of hanging around, think about how you’ll spend all this extra waiting time – catch up with text messages, read a book, play online chess or get stuck into a language-learning app, for example.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Alvin Pittman, via email) 'Why am I always running late?'
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