Better Never Than Late?

For all that hype about last week’s Super Bowl commercials how many of them do you remember? There was one with Arya Stark driving a car singing something from Frozen - any clue what that was about? Me either - let it go.

The commercials are a huge part of the Super Bowl, but it remains to be seen if a commercial can come close to matching the bar set by Apple in 1984. 

There was one commercial I remember because it got me thinking it may make a good LinkedIn post. 

Punctuality!

We all have an opinion on it. How can we not? It’s something we deal with all day, every day of our life!

Our stance has such a massive influence over us.

Does your stance make you get to a meeting so early you have to wait in your car or walk around the block a few times until it’s time to head in?

Do you find yourself getting to the wedding before the bride and groom?

Are you at the airport before the flight is even on the board? Or are you the kind of person who turns up as they’re announcing final boarding?

If you want to get a real insight into a job applicant - forget about asking them about their weaknesses, where they see themselves in 5 years or how their friends would describe them - ask them what time they’d leave the house for a movie?

Ask them what is the optimum time to turn up to a party?

If they’re meeting someone for dinner, are they likely to leave the other person waiting or do they tend to get there first?

Knowing this information may seem trivial and irrelevant, but it provides so much information about the type of person they really are; much more than the CV or LinkedIn references ever could. Can you endorse someone on LinkedIn for punctuality? If not, you should be able to!

Being late is obviously a bigger crime than being early. but this isn’t to say that being early doesn't create its own issues. Turn up more than 10 minutes to a job interview or a meeting and it’s awkward. If there’s a meeting in the conference room at 11, you don’t have to take your seat at 10.30 and you don’t have to kick out the preceding meeting at 10:58 just because you’re anxious to take your seat. 

There’s also the fact that time is too precious to while away life waiting for things. There’s a lot of life to be lived in between meetings and appointments.

Wanting to see the first pitch at a baseball game is cool; getting there 2 hours beforehand to make sure of it isn’t.

Running late is one thing, but what really rubs people the wrong way is the lack of transparency. If you are running late for a 2pm meeting, don’t heads up someone at 2.15pm that you’re late, tell them at 1:45pm. 

If your pattern is to run late, you become the late guy/gal. Soon, people will start to tell you a time that’s 30 minutes earlier and then eventually they won't tell you anything at all. 

And don’t do the five minutes thing when you mean anything but five minutes. When you say you're five minutes away, people CAN and should take that literally.

The real crime the late person commits is foisting an awkward situation onto those waiting for them

It’s 12:01 - we said to be here at 12. Let’s go. 

She’s on her way... 

That’s not the point. We all made it here on time. 

She’s 2 minutes away... 

In her language that’s 10. 

And so, the table orders, the meeting begins, or they get in the car and drive away. 

Or they wait, stewing in their frustrations, getting angrier and angrier.

Of course, there’s someone who’s never late even when they are - the boss. 

It’s understood their schedule ticks to the beat of a different clock and that the meeting starts when they get there. Even if it’s already started, it then only really begins why s/he gets there. 

Then there’s the situation when a doctor or someone similar is running late and the whole schedule is thrown off. The person who turns up for their 2:15 appointment expects to be seen at 2:20 even though the 1:40 hasn’t had their turn yet. 

The whole system of time is out the window as you’re trying to make sense of 3 parallel timelines - the doctor’s, the patients’, and the actual time. In this situation, it's up to the front of house team to have a system that maintains control. The last thing you want is for the patients to self-police. 

Then again if you lived the same day over and over and over again, you wouldn’t care less about being late or early.

====

If you would like to subscribe to receive an email notification whenever I write something at LinkedIn, click on the subscribe button at the top right of the page.

You can find my archive of LinkedIn articles written here

If you enjoyed this article, then you'll LOVE my public speaking. I teach age-old lessons through current-day news. Reach out to me if you're looking for a speaker to spice up your event.