Unfortunately, I’m a card-carrying member of the chronically late club (the start times for our monthly meetups are remarkably flexible). On average, I arrive at my office job and any type of social occasion 10 to 30 minutes late. I’ve spent untold amounts of money on Ubers because I didn’t budget myself enough time to get public transport, and my mornings are frantically chaotic. 

I genuinely don’t want to live my life like this. I know I’m putting other people out, spending money I don’t have, frustrating my employers and unnecessarily flooding my body with cortisol, but how can a lifetime of lateness (and an iffy perception of time itself) be changed for the better? In hopes of discovering a way to claw myself out of this self-induced lateness hole, I spoke to Dr Amanda Ferguson, an organisational psychologist and host of the Psych for Life podcast. 

Are some of us just born this way?

I’ve long maintained, much to the chagrin of those around me, that I don’t perceive time in the same way as on-time people – it always feels slightly out of my grasp, like grabbing a fistful of sand and desperately trying to keep it from seeping out between my fingers.

So are some of us just more predisposed to being late due to our personalities? Or is it down to how we were raised? 

“It’s always nature and nurture. And no one can say after centuries of research how much of which. But if you have a parent who was always late and you suspect it's partly learned, then yes, most likely it’s nurture,” Dr Amanda says. 

My parents have spent a lifetime being frustrated by my lateness, and my entire family – extended family included – take being on time very seriously, so I can rule nurture out. 

Mental health is a factor behind many people’s lateness, and while I’ve struggled with anxiety throughout my life, it’s mainly under control these days. Putting aside mental illness as the reason for my being late, I ask Dr Amanda how she’d figure out why I have such a maddening inability to ever be on time.
“First we take what's most likely to be the cause. And it's like Occam’s razor, we take the most obvious possible reason and explore that and then we go to the most extreme potential reasons. Firstly, it could be that you’re trying to do too much. The second level would be that your life or your job needs rescoping because it's blown out. Poor self-regulation, not prioritising the self and people pleasing are other reasons. The last one is personality, a separate thing altogether. Someone’s personality can cause chronic lateness,” she explains.

Immediately, people pleasing jumps out at me. Only in recent years have I realised the extent of my people pleasing ways, and how it’s impacting my life. But if I’m actively displeasing people by being late, how does my desire to please play into my lateness? 

“People pleasing is where we're focused outwardly, and when we're focused outwardly as a priority, rather than self-focus, we can't regulate ourselves properly. We’re kind of racing from one thing to the next, rather than centring and going, ‘oh, hang on. I'm going to be late for that appointment, so I'm going to reschedule’. And ‘hang on, that's too many things in one day, that's not going to happen. I'm going to be late to the last half of my day so I’m going to rescope’. But it's really hard to do that if you're outwardly focused,” Dr Amanda explains.

I’m an outwardly focused people pleaser with anxiety, and I’m a Libra – no wonder getting places on time can feel like scaling Mount Everest. Recognising where my issue with time might stem from is one thing, but I tell Dr Amanda I want to try out practical tools I can use to change my ways.  

It’s got to be a ‘paradigm shift’

Unfortunately, like most things in life, there’s no quick fix. Dr Amanda explains that if I want to become an on-time person, it will require me to make a “paradigm shift” (sounds stressful if you ask me, but arguably not as stressful as being late to everything).

“It's not going to be lasting unless you make a paradigm shift, which means that you recognise ‘yeah, I do that. I don’t put myself first’. It's like the safety drill on an aeroplane. That's why they say for mothers to fit the oxygen mask on their face first, even before the child. It’s the same with mental health management or self-regulation. If we don't prioritise ourselves marginally before even our family and our partner, let alone our work and meetings, it doesn't work. It always falls over.”

She tells me that we late people need to reassess whether the order of priority in our lives is functional or dysfunctional. I know mine is, clearly, at least somewhat dysfunctional and in need of revision. Once you’ve done that, you need to figure out strategies you can implement that can help make being on time a reality. 

According to Dr Amanda, this can look like building in time buffers when planning what time you need to be somewhere, making concessions – accepting you can’t get everything you want done in the time allocated, or to the standard you’d like – and learning to self regulate.

I’ve tried building in buffers and giving myself ‘fake’ times before (e.g. convincing myself an event actually starts at 7pm rather than 7.30pm) but it’s never worked. I see right through the lies! Something I haven’t tried, though, is making concessions. 

Embarrassingly, I’d rather be late (or catch an Uber and waste money) than leave the house in an outfit I don’t like or with my makeup half done. But Dr Amanda suggests it’s this type of thinking that needs to change. 

“If there's a decision between ‘I want to leave enough buffer time’ or ‘I need to still do my makeup’, you can do it [your makeup] at the other end. And there's the self regulation talking again, that chat with ourselves. You know, sometimes I'll do half makeup, because I'll be like ‘that's gonna have to be enough’,” she shares.

After speaking to Dr Amanda, over the next week I tried noticing when I could make concessions. This looked like accepting that an outfit, my winged eyeliner or an article I was working on were good enough as is, and leaving the house with enough time to get to my destination. 

I had a few small successes, including getting to work basically on time once or twice (impressive for me) and making it to a dinner date five minutes early (unheard of in my books), but it really highlighted what Dr Amanda said about the paradigm shift. It’s going to take time.

One of the biggest takeaways is that the scope of my life is overblown, something any of my close friends would adamantly agree with. I’m saying yes to far too many things, both professionally and personally, and I end up being late and burning myself out trying to please everyone. In a last ditch attempt to guilt the annoying little people pleaser in me into becoming an on-time person, I ask Dr Amanda for any final nuggets of advice that might motivate me into becoming an on-time adult.

“It's not a sophisticated way to run your life. And it ends up causing problems, without a doubt. It's a bad reputation, it's a non-professional reputation and it's also an untrustworthy reputation that is pretty easy to correct unless you've got chronic, severe depression,” she says. Honestly, it’s the dose of tough talk I need.

Moreover, it’s a reminder that while the whole paradigm shift thing can feel overwhelming, being on time really just comes down to being realistic and honest with myself. So excuse me while I refrain from editing this article for the fifteenth time so I can leave an adequate amount of ‘buffer time’ to get to my coffee meeting on time. Maybe I’ll do ‘half makeup’ too, and that will just have to be good enough. I think Dr Amanda would be proud.