Analysis: our habits and beliefs around time-keeping begin as children and come from our parents and the school environment
We all have that friend who is always late (confession: I am that friend). But why do some people struggle with being on time? The chronically late aren't just rude, lazy, disorganised people with zero regard for your time. In fact, from personal experience, they tend to feel excruciatingly bad for it and unfailingly optimistic about their ability to arrive on time. They even experience or think about time the same way you do.
Some people are late for everything, others for some things. Research has found that it could be your personality type. Maybe you think you’re good at multitasking but you're actually not, maybe you’re not good at judging how much time has passed and don’t check the clock. Lateness is something that many people dislike and consider bad form. Within a working environment, it can even be a fireable offence.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, a brief history of time management
But it would be a bit unfair, if understandable, to hold on to all those negative perceptions about the punctually challenged, says Dr Jolanta Burke, psychologist and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Positive Psychology and Health at RCSI. It has been posited we live in varying 'time zones’ or ‘time perspectives’ in our heads, that are, at least in part, culturally informed and learned.
"Within psychology, there’s way more research around the negative aspects of human beings than there is about positive characteristics. So from a psychological perspective [focusing on the negative about being late] kind of makes sense," says Burke.
Therapists often "try to get to the bottom of why people have a pattern of behaviour. It doesn't necessarily have to be good or bad, but they're trying to tap into it and they look often at the person themselves; their opinions, their beliefs. Rather than the bigger picture; the circumstances, the culture."
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From RTÉ Archives, Pat Sweeney reports for RTÉ News in 1989 on awards for 178 people at Braun Ireland in Carlow who had perfect punctuality records over the previous year
People's attitudes and feelings around being on time can vary, there are of course some who just love to be early, nay, must be. "It depends on what you as a person are about. So if you perceive being late for a meeting as being rude, chances are that if somebody is late you will perceive them the same way. So we are kind of searching for confirmation of our own beliefs in other people's behaviour."
We pick up these beliefs and habits around time-keeping as children, from parents in particular, but also from the school environment. "It all depends on what culture we're in. For example, researchers have found that clock-focused or clock-based cultures, where we live our life according to the clock, we learned that as soon as parents introduce us to the system, and that routine of the clock is not our natural routine, but it's a routine we get used to," she explains.
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From RTÉ 2fm, Des Bishop speaks to listeners who are always late for work, meetings, drinks, weddings and job interviews
In school we learn the value of not being late, because lateness is often penalised in schools. This is also where we begin to pick up the negative associations with being late. "Again these characteristics that we attach are: ‘you're lazy’, ‘you sleep too long’, ‘you're disorganised’. All these labels, we live with them and then it's like we become what people tell us we are. So if kids were late early on, sure, it's no surprise that you're going to be late, later on in life." You might become known as "the late one" and in a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, you end up often being late.
Speaking on BBC Women’s Hour about her research, author Grace Pacie, a late person who wanted to change their ways, says some late people are ‘timebenders’. The people who always arrive last to meetings or classes, dropping their child off at school at the last minute. The people who "don’t want to be late but they have a strange resistance to being early and they don’t allow enough time. They are the ones that assume lights will always be on ‘green’," she said.
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From TEDx, Grace Pacie on 'timebenders'
One way to look at lateness from a new lens is through psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s "time perspectives", says Burke. Zimbardo's Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI), indexes individual differences in time perspectives across five categories: Past-Negative, Past-Positive, Present-Fatalistic, Present-Hedonistic, and Future. According to Zimbardo’s research, we all live predominantly in one of them and you can even do a survey to discover your own mix of time perspectives. Research has shown that the "time perspectives" relate only to clock-focused cultures, mainly western, not all around the world, Burke says.
ZTPI investigates how people place themselves in time psychologically (past, present or future) and their feelings or attitudes towards it (positive, negative, hedonistic or fatalistic). If you are past-negative, you might focus on negative experiences in the past. Past-positive is a more nostalgic or sentimental view, the good old times that bring you warmth. Present-hedonistic reflects someone risk-taking, with less regard for consequences and the future, while a present-fatalistic outlook has a lack of hope for the future because of a feeling that fate is out of your control. Someone with a future time perspective is very focused on achieving long-term goals.
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From RSA, Philip Zimbardo on the secret powers of time
"The reason why we're looking at it, is because these time perspectives are associated with a lot of actions, with a lot of decisions we make every day, a lot of symptoms that we experience throughout the day. For example, people with post-traumatic stress disorder tend to live a huge amount of their head space within the negative past," Burke explains.
"There's a really interesting series of studies looking at various cultures and what the researchers have found, was that some of the northern countries in Europe would focus much more on the future than the southern countries. The closer you are to equator, the more in the present people live. Within Europe, Spanish people, Italians they would be much more focused on the here and now than Norwegians and Danish people."
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From RTÉ Arena, Kevin Gildea's essay about the importance of punctuality
Zimbardo suggests those who are future focused are also averse to being late, but present-oriented people are the ones who might be late. "I have a friend who is Italian and she's constantly late to meetings, she’s late sometimes an hour, and she walks in as if nothing happened," Burke says. "I was getting annoyed, because I was thinking this is a little inconsiderate. Then once I was introduced to this whole concept of time and how we all live in a different time perspective, I started to realise, this is just where she is. She lives in the here and now. It’s nothing malicious and she's not being rude by doing it."
"But then I'm Polish, so we are really strict with time. I remember when I came to Ireland first, I found it really frustrating that the Irish are constantly late for everything. So as part of me adjusting to being part of this culture I started to be late. Now I am always late by about 10 minutes. If you make people understand where they're coming from, there was no frustration anymore. Because it's not malicious, it’s just a different time perspective."
I remember when I came to Ireland first, I found it really frustrating that the Irish are constantly late for everything
"Researchers have identified this balanced time perspective that is associated with higher levels of well-being, because when it's out of kilter then it becomes detrimental to our own health and well-being. You need the flexibility of flipping to another time perspective."
But if you’ve identified that you’re someone who is always late and want to change it, how do you go about that? "One thing I don't like about this research, is that not there's not enough about the interventions for us," Burke says. "When we are able to adjust, that’s wonderful for us, because it has bad consequences when we are too rigid within our own time perspectives and can't look at this from another point of view."
"It might not be beneficial for you to be so stuck [in your time perspective] and when you realise this, that you're one of those people who's always late, or one of those people who who is stuck in a specific time perspective a little bit too much, and people notice, it’s important for us to make a decision whether we want to make a change or not."
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
