Are you $3 billion dollars late?
Sarah Jons 
Taxi! Lateness costs American businesses alone more than $3 billion dollars each year, in lost productivity.
Taxi! Lateness costs American businesses alone more than $3 billion dollars each year, in lost productivity. I have been thinking about being late for a meeting today. Deliberately. To test a theory I have had for a while about chronobiology and the neuroscience of time. You see I am rarely ever late for meetings (not never- there are sometimesmitigating circumstances). I really hate being late; I get to the airport 3 hours before the check in time or 20 mins before a business meeting, an hour before training, 2 hours before a speaking event. I am early to a party (who comes on time to a party?), a show, or even something I've planned to do by myself. For me to arrive at the appointed time without arriving at the appointed place isn't just unacceptable me, it causes physiological stress and the release of the stress hormone Cortisol. I get this feeling even when being late brings about no adverse consequences whatsoever. Time anxiety or Allegrophobia is my own battle to overcome. Okay, so there isn't really a clinical term out there for the fear of being late, but somebody with a pretty funny sense of humour dubbed it Allegrophobia at some point in time.
Yet you will know someone (is it you?) whom is always late. They may suffer a problem now being labeled as Chronic Lateness Syndrome (CLS). But how late is late? 10 minutes? 5 minutes? According to some psychologist up to 9 minutes is acceptable in social situations (that aren’t time critical, like your own funeral). Late is when people start getting annoyed. They get annoyed because your lateness betrays a lack of respect and consideration for them and so they get more annoyed, and more quickly, if they are (or think they are) your social or hierarchical superiors. It's simply that some people no longer even pretend that they think your time is as important as theirs. Technology makes it even worse. It seems texting or emailing that you are late somehow means you are no longer late. I particularly hate the text I am running late. You are not running, if you were you would not be late. New research shows that the perpetually late aren’t always rude; they may be neurologically wired differently, have hormonal differences and have a faulty circadian rhythm that cause CLS.
Let’s look at that perception of time to decide on what is late. To avoid death and crashes on the railways, a new time system was adopted (Bristol is actually 10 minutes different from London and has a clock that shows this).Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the times station clocks displayed was brought in line with the local time for London, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). One town that stood its ground was Oxford and the great clock on Tom Tower at Christ Church featured two minute hands. Still today, if one is about five minutes late in Oxford, one can claim to be running onOxford time; and Great Tom, the loudest bell in the city, rings out 101 times every night at five past nine. Of course, no one will hate you if you are just five minutes late, which is why the Oxford time excuse is a bit of a joke. To be five minutes late is not really to be late; except for me it is, of course.
But what about the internal clock and how we actually measure time? Why can't you tell when an hour has passed without looking at a watch?The chrono-biologists who work on this problem refer to as Time Perception Disorder (TPD), Chronic Lateness Syndrome (CLS) and an internal clock timing issue. What they have discovered is that your brain is one of the least accurate time measurement devices you will ever use and it's also the most powerful. When you watch the seconds tick by on a watch, you are in the realm of objective time, where a minute long interval is always 60 seconds. But to your brain, a minute is relative. Sometimes it takes forever for a minute to be over. That's because you measure time with a highly subjective biological clock. Your internal clock is just like that digital watch in some ways. It measures time in what scientists call pulses. Those pulses are accumulated, then stored in your memory as a time interval. Now, here's where things get weird. Your biological clock can be sped up or slowed down by anything from drugs to the way you pay attention. If it takes you 60 seconds to cross the street, your internal clock might register that as 50 pulses if you're feeling sleepy. But it might register 100 pulses if you've just drunk an espresso. That's because stimulants literally speed up the clock in your brain (more on that later). When your brain stores those two memories of the objective minute it took to cross the street, it winds up with memories of two different time intervals.
Some theorists believe that always being late is an evolutionary strategy and they may be right; after all, whether we’re early birds or night owls is partly biologically determined. Psychological components can also contribute to Chronic Lateness Syndrome (CLS). Diana DeLonzor used to be late, and I mean chronically late. A former corporate sales representative for Reuters, she regularly found herself slinking into meetings already in progress, sprinting for airline departure gates, and apologising to angry clients. Although she cringed with embarrassment with each episode, she couldn’t quite manage the art of showing up on time. Even missed presentations and black marked performance appraisals failed to curb her belated arrivals. That was five years ago. Now she’s giving lessons to employees, corporations and government agencies on overcoming lateness and procrastination.
“Approximately 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. population have trouble getting to where they’re going on time,” explains Ms. DeLonzor, author of the excellent Never Be Late Again, 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged.
“It’s a huge drain on productivity when meetings consistently start ten or fifteen minutes behind, and tardiness has a snowball affect as one person’s lateness affects the productivity of his or her colleagues.” Ms. DeLonzor notes that tardiness costs American businesses more than $3 billion dollars each year in lost productivity. “One of the easiest ways to increase productivity is to cut down on tardiness, both in terms of the time-clock arrivals and meeting starts.”
In a 1990s study she led for San Francisco State University, DeLonzor identified links between chronic lateness and certain personality characteristics, including anxiety, low self-control and a tendency toward thrill-seeking. But while doctors seem to agree that chronic lateness syndrome (CLS) is not in itself a disorder, they aren't so quick to brush it off, either. For those who are frequently late, it may be a symptom of a condition they can't entirely control.
Narcissism : Everybody knows at least one narcissist: He's arrogant, expects constant attention and admiration, thinks everyone is jealous of him, and lacks the ability to empathize with others. Chances are, he's probably often late, as well.
ADHD: Adults with ADHD, especially women, show different symptoms from kids with ADHD. Rather than being fidgety and compulsive, adults are often disorganized, messy, scattered, forgetful, and introverted.
Subconscious: Those who are deadlined, subconsciously seek out the rush of sprinting to get somewhere.
Other types of late personalities are rationalisers, indulgers, evaders, and rebels.
So what can you do about being late, without switching to my anxiety disorder?
Well perhaps you could start by breaking some old patterns and adopt some new strategies. Start this change by doing some real world research, i.e. some time and motion study on yourself and re-evaluate how long your routines really take. Late people tend to remember the one time they got ready in a stunning 20 minutes or the one time they got to work in seven minutes (all lights green), instead of realising that most days it takes them 40 minutes to get ready and 15 minutes (on average) to get to work on time. It is a form of cognitive perception imbalance (like winning at games of chance).
I have written about the science of reframing before. Reframing the way you think about punctuality can be a powerful cognitive trick. What are the positives about being on time, always? How will you benefit? If you write these down you start to create new neural pathways that see the how you can change. It is interesting that people who are often (always) late often like to pack in as many activities as possible to maximise productivity, which can make any extra waiting time uncomfortable. This can be addressed with modern technology and take the unproductive dead-time (as they might see it) as excellent email time, but at the place they need to be on time.
We all know, that despite objective (perception) time and chrono-biological differs. Your brain and it's internal system allocates time slots for activities. People (like me) will give themselves round numbers to get somewhere; 30 minutes, for instance. The chronically late, on the other hand, often budget exact times, like 9 minutes, to get somewhere. This cannot work, as the stretching of the perceptive internal clock will always change the exact time in to a rush (and hence late). Start by rounding up and adding 10.
Of course, there are sometimes genuine reasons for being late. I can accept that and make (now) reasonable buffers in my own schedule for the day to account for this in others. What the CLS people need to accept is that there are no behavioural excuses for being late. Figuring out what type of late you are may be exactly how you solve this problem and what you need to make sure you finally start arriving on time. Please.
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