It is normal to be predisposed towards lateness. What’s not cool is baking that predisposition into your character so that it becomes an irredeemable part of yourself, rather than adapting what you do to minimize lateness.
I had a friend known for his lateness. He would generally be fifteen or twenty minutes late to important appointments and up to an hour late to less important ones (like meeting friends). He was aware of it and even told people to expect him to come in late. Of course, this wasn’t because he had something else to do around the same time, but because that’s just “who he was”. He was just a late person.
He didn’t take any pride in it, but he did come up with increasingly pathological reasons over the years. At first it was simply that he didn’t check the clock enough. He later claimed that it was a personality defect. Eventually he discovered “time blindness” and cited it as the reason. He discarded time blindness when he saw it associated with ADHD, since he knew he didn’t have ADHD, and reverted to the personality reason.
He didn’t appear bothered by his lateness. He acknowledged it but at the same time didn’t take it too seriously and was irritated if it got mentioned. He was also irritated when we didn’t account for his lateness in our planning, stating that because we’re familiar with his tendencies, we should adapt to him accordingly.
One day, we took a small road trip from British Columbia down into Washington, and he came along. It went nicely, even if it was a bit cold as we slept in tents. It also allowed me to examine how exactly his lateness presented, and I noticed that, as predicted, he would be late packing up his tent when we were ready to go, usually by around thirty or forty minutes.
What I did not predict, however, was that the lateness came simply from his phone use. He was scrolling reels on Instagram and didn’t bother to look at the time. A couple of minutes before we were supposed to leave, he moved more and started putting his clothes in his backpack, but then regularly paused to use his phone and fidget with the ceramic pot he used to reheat Chef Boyardee spaghetti. All of these distractions accumulated into the thirty- to forty-minute delay, after which he was ready to go.
When we stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee, I mentioned this to him. I said that he appeared to be distracted by something on his phone, but he reassured me that it was only a small, reasonable amount of time spent on his phone, and that it couldn’t possibly have resulted in a forty-minute delay. I asked him what else could have caused the delay and he just said that it’s in his personality, he’s just late to things. When I insisted that I actually saw him use his phone and fidget with his stuff for those forty minutes, he didn’t believe me, and also denied that he fidgeted, claiming he wouldn’t have done that as a responsible person.
This made me realize that chronic lateness may in part come from a complete inability to estimate how long your distractions are taking. He was sure that his phone use was reasonable and short, but it wasn’t. I believe him when he says that it felt short, even though it wasn’t short at all. Perhaps the focus from doomscrolling creates a negative “flow state” where time passes quicker? And perhaps the fidgeting comes from the same place, with the person unaware that they’ve even fidgeted?
Regardless, when our other friends came back, they observed the same thing, and thankfully, being a pragmatic person, he acknowledged the observation. He said that he wasn’t aware it took as much time as it actually did and that he would look into it. For the remainder of the trip he left his phone in our rental truck at night, which completely resolved the lateness! He was visibly happy too: he said he had always been mildly anxious checking the time when he was running late, but now he wasn’t late anymore.
Sadly, this didn’t persist past the road trip and he returned to his old habits. We asked him what he tried to do to help himself at home and he told us there was “nothing” to do because he couldn’t identify any distraction or mistake in his planning or scheduling. He again attributed it to his personality and, I’m not kidding, said the road trip improvements were due to “placebo” and “peer pressure”.
He eventually grew distant for an unrelated reason and moved on, but I wonder whether “time blindness” may be caused by all these time sinks. Perhaps time blindness is real but conditioned, not something innate or inborn. In that case there are ways to help it, but they involve the same difficulties we face in reducing our phone use, and therefore aren’t accessible to most.