I am Always Late

Punctuality is something that has been highly valued and esteemed for centuries. “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late,” Shakespeare wrote, and Lord Nelson opens his secret to us, “I owe all my success in life to having been always a quarter of an hour before my time.” “Punctuality is a virtue, if you don’t mind being lonely”, somebody wise said, and in our life filled with communication, social activities, friendly ties and obligations, punctuality is simply a must!

Since our early age, we are being taught punctuality by our parents, our teachers and our friends. It becomes apparent that if we do not follow this simple practice of being always on time and never making other people wait for us, we will most likely have problems and suffer in our academic, professional, social and personal life. It is impossible to cover up and hide this nasty habit of being always late from the people around us since they will sooner or later be involved in the negative consequences caused by our tardiness and lack of punctuality.

Usually, punctuality is strictly linked to very effective planning and scheduling skills. If a person is not able to estimate correctly the time necessary for completing one or another task or action, he or she will be constantly late and have to face such failures as missed opportunities, lost friendships and unachieved goals. In other words, if you are not punctual, you are a loser, and the best idea is to demonstrate punctuality in every part of your life, from getting to work on time to going to bed on time.

However, it is really hard sometimes, and chronic latecomers are constantly looking for advice on how to change their life and their attitude. To be more punctual, start controlling your daily activities an find the point, when you are starting to run behind the schedule. This can be getting up late and staring the day with missing your bus and arriving to work late, or waking up too eary and being unable to pull yourself together for hours in the morning. Try to spot the first thing that makes you late, and changing it can help you to become more disciplined and punctual.

Also, analyze your daily activities closely and find out what exact things or actions make you run late. There are good chances that you will be able to find 2-3 particular activities or occupations that take too much of your time and efforts and stop you from your being on time. Spending too much time surfing in the net in the morning, talking too much to the phone in the afternoon or doing so much shopping in the evening – whatever it is, you can start changing this very thing and open a new path on your way to being never late again.

As I have told you before, I know quite a lot of things about being late and being late no more because just few years ago I myself was a kind of latecomer. And, using my knowledge and willpower I managed to beat the habit and win the battle. Now, I rarely run behind the schedules, but still sometimes I feel familiar calls for lazing and doing nothing for long time. I guess, being late no more is not about self-discipline or self-respect. It is about achieving your goals. It is about the things that you need to think about all the time, every day and every minute. If you want to achieve something in this life, of course.

There are few important ideas and conclusions I made on my way to becoming a more punctual person. I hope at least some of them can help you to change something in yourself, or at least begin thinking about being late no more.

1. Learn to speak persuasively and prepare several phrases which can help you to interrupt a meeting or a talk. “I am very sorry but I have to our talk because I have a meeting in 20 minutes”. It is not easy to learn doing this, but making your person understand that you are following your schedule evokes nothing else but respect.

2. Always be pessimistic in your time estimations. Be sure that one or another task will take longer than it usually takes. This will help you learn finishing your tasks and assignments on time, and probably even come earlier. Also, it is important that this will help you be calmer and more organized.

3. You can stimulate the development of guilt complex for your being late. Imagine that a person who is waiting for us feels cold or hot and uncomfortable waiting for you.

4. If you are always successful in justifying yourself for your chronic lateness, it can be very hard for you to change your habits and learn to be late never again. Do not look for justifications and try to implant the idea in your mind about changing your attitude and learning to be more organized and disciplined.

5. Do easy exercises for those who want to be late no more. First if all, learn to estimate and feel the time correctly. Get a timer, start it and begin counting 60 seconds (not looking at the timer). Compare the results you received (most likely your 60 seconds will last longer than actual minute). Besides, you can train yourself to be always aware, what is the current time. These easy exercises will help you to feel time better and value it.

Do you know that our good-old excuses are the worst enemies on the way to self-discipline and effectiveness? We always say to ourselves “I have no time for this now”, or “It is not the time for this”, or “It is a worthless waste of time”, or “I have no money for this now”, etc. The main idea of all these excuses is doing nothing. In other words, these excuses help us to justify our laziness and inertness. It seems that there’s nothing new in what I am saying now, but give it a thought: how many times a day you use these excuses…

For example, you want to start doing exercises every day and give yourself a word to get up 30 minutes earlier in the morning and exercise. In your mind, you start picturing how your body is becoming more fit and stronger, and you are set up for positive results and new exciting changes in your life. However, when the alarm rings in the morning, you start thinking: “No, why so early? I’ll stay in the bed for just 5 more minutes, it is so warm here.. Well, I’d better exercise in the evening…” And, when you come back home in the evening after hard working day, what kind of exercise can you think about? Especially when it is your favorite show on the TV…

This goes on and on day by day. Every time you have some important problems to solve and things to do which will distract you from making important steps on the way to your goals. We repeat to ourselves that “we have no time for this now”, and in many situations, this way we avoid positive changes. Sometimes we get really used to all these bad things in our life and we are not trying to do anything to change our life for better. I know a lot of such people who go on complaining about their life, but when I offer several solutions for their problems, they just say that they do not have time for that. Therefore, they avoid the things that can change their life for better.

This way, our excuses make us give up solving our problems, that leads to personal degradation, depression, psychological disorders and so on. Our problems multiply and turn into real troubles. What to do? How to get out of this circle? You should look for power in yourself. If you really want to change something in your life, you can always do that. You will destroy your obstacles and achieve your goals no matter what. Do not think that tomorrow (the next week or the next month) you will have more time and opportunities to solve your problem. It is only one of those good-old excuses. What can hold you from making at least a little step to solving your problem right now?

Do those little steps and fight against your laziness, your apathy, uncertainty, fears and hesitations. It is always easier to postpone and procrastinate, but your problem will not be solved this way. When we are trying to solve our problems and overcome obstacles, we develop and progress. If you have a problem, you always have power and means for solving it. When you overcome the obstacle and solve your problem, you are becoming stronger and more powerful. The obstacles we overcome give us power! Remember this all the time, remember that you are a strong person and remember that there is always the way out!

Procrastination is a serious problem of many modern people, which actually goes several hundred years back and was troubling humanity centuries ago. St. Augustine, a Father of Latin church, who lived and worked in the IVth century, spent years in studying the issues related to procrastination. This concept helped St. Augustine to fight against his physical and mental temptations, that is why he was looking at positive sides of procrastination. Another famous scientist, Leonardo da Vinci,  was also a victim of this negative behavioral model. Due to his chronic delaying, lots of his paintings and bright technological ideas were left half-done. Mark Antonius, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Douglas Adams, Agatha Cristie and many more of famous successful people were chronic procrastinators as well.

Why do we always start a new life or a cholesterol lowering diet tomorrow, not today? Why our kitchen should be cleaned right before important exams? Why we have a tendency to check out our e-mail messages every morning instead of coming straight to work? Why do we go on putting the things off even knowing about negative consequences of procrastination? A scientist from Canada Piers Steel, as associate Professor of industrial psychology at Haskayne School of Business (University of Calgary), studied these issues for more than 10 years, and his research ended up with creating a new concept called the Temporal Motivation Theory, publishing a wonderful book and a series of articles in the journal of the American Psychological Association.

“The heart of procrastination“, the specialist says, ” is an adaptive natural tendency to value today much more than tomorrow“. It is interesting that Steel decided to use a complex mathematical approach to the problem of putting things off and attempted to create a formula, which would define procrastination. The specialist claims that chronic delaying can be expressed by the following Procrastination Equation: U=EV/ID, where U is our desire to complete a certain task (or our drive to delay the completion). At that, E is expectancy to succeed at the task, V is the value of the completed task, I is the degree if urgency of the task and, finally, D is our individual sensitivity to delay.

After studying the subject both from theoretical and practical perspectives, Steel offers several innovative explanations of procrastination as a social phenomenon. The expert is convinced that the majority of today’s procrastinators (which, according to Steel, account up to 5% of today’s population) are not just lazy people who want to avoid doing the things they do not want to do. He says that such factors as our natural impulsiveness, a lack of self-knowledge or self-confidence,  an absence of strong motivation and our natural desire to see immediate results are among the main factors that contribute in development of this bad habit. The Temporal Motivation Theory, the procrastination equation and the study in general received positive reaction of many management specialists, who found it applicable to modern business leadership practices.

As I have already said, many of those people who are chronically late or tardy have a tendency to justify their behavior by various outside factors. In other words, it is difficult for them to be honest with themselves and recognize the problem. That is why they go on looking for reasons and making up excuses for their improper behavior. However, there are times or certain situations, when these people start feeling sad or embarrassed because of their chronic tardiness. In such moments, there’s a great opportunity for them to begin working on changing their personality and giving up bad habit of being always late.

If you are one of those tarides, you should try changing your chronic tardiness and lateness in three steps. According to Diana Delonzor, the best option for you is to begin with monitoring closely your daily activities and write down, how many times you were late due to really important outside reasons and influences. Then, the expert recommends to recall all those regretful and embarrassing moments connected with your being late, as well as numerous uncompleted tasks, wrong steps, missed opportunities, canceled projects and so on. In order to acknowledge the problem you should fully understand negative consequences of your tardiness and lateness.

The second step is changing your mind and attitude toward punctuality. You should understand that being always late is nothing else but your personal choice, which takes source from the way you precept this world and look at your environment. To change your idea about chronic lateness and punctuality, you should look at the situation with the eyes of other people. Would you like the others making you wait all the time or breaking their promises? Will you still value and respect such people? It can be helpful to talk about your problem with someone you trust, with  a good friend or a relative who can give you an objective feedback on your usual behavior.

Finally, the third step is going into action and starting making some practical changes in your life. Rewarding yoruself for every successful attempt of not being late  is one of the most effective practical techniques, which can be generally used wen trying to change any bad behavior. Besides, you can punish youself every time when you are not punctual. For example, you can say your friends that you will pay for their meals every time you are late for a meeting or a party. This technique may work real great! Finally, you can ask people around you to assist and encourage you when you manage to be on time. Positive reaction of the people you love can be an excellent motivator for you to start changing yourself more effectively.

Success, advancement, high incomes and high social status are among the greatest motivators for further professional and personal development. Many people are trying so hard to be successful in this life and achieve something, but very often they fail over and over again. In the end of the ends, they get disappointed, dejected, depressed, and give up all their hopes for better life, eventually turning into lazy and grumpy guys. Maybe, they were doing something wrong?

There are 7 rules for those, who want to be successful in this life. All of these rules are simple and well-known. Try to use them, and very soon you will feel positive changes in your life and career.

1. STOP PITYING YOURSELF AND START DOING SOMETHING RIGHT NOW! It is always easy to find the reasons for failure. Women believe that they have less chances for success in this “business world of men”, and men are sure that everything is easier for women. Overweight people tend to connect their failures with their weight, and slim or short people do the same thing. Stop looking for reasons and remember that you and only you are the master of your destiny and your life!

2. BE READY TO INVEST IN YOURSELF. Moreover, learn to pay a real price for really good things. Think carefully about everything that is really important in this life, and avoid being mean about such things.

3. DO NOT PLAN TO RECEIVE EVERYTHING RIGHT AWAY. Our hunger for fast and easy money can lead us to bankruptcy.  Those people who do not understand that it is better to start their career with getting an average salary in a strong reputable company than receive good money from a company with doubtful reputation. If you want to reap something, you need to throw a seed first.

4. REMEMBER THAT TIME IS MONEY. Treasure your time and know how you actually spend it. Only loses can afford wasting their time and time of the people around.

5. DO ONLY WHAT YOU REALLY LIKE DOING. It is impossible to talk about any success and advancement in the business which does not actually bring you satisfaction and enjoyment. If you hate what you are doing, immediately start looking for new directions and new horizons for yourself.

6. AVOID DOING SOMETHING OUT OF ENVY. Envy is one of the most terrible feelings, which makes many people take inconsiderate actions. If you want to be successful in this life, you should learn to value your own skills and abilities and not to look at what other people have or can do.

7.  AVOID BORROWING MONEY. We always want more money to buy a good name and reputation, a fame of generous and kind person, a feeling of personal importance, and so on. However, learn to say “no” to yourself in many situations and know how to manage your life by your own means.

Those who are always running late are quite interesting people. Like for the majority of drinkers or smokers, it is also difficult for chronic latecomers to acknowledge their lateness as a bad habit. Certainly: they got used to being constantly accused in their tardiness and procrastination, and also they have perfectly mastered the art of creating never ending excuses for their being always late. That is why they try to make an impression of chronic victims of the circumstances. Ask a tardy, why is he/she late again? Most likely, you will hear something like “No, no, I was not running late, but then…”

At that, this phenomenon does not always mean that the person is not troubled by his/her chronic lateness. It is a common knowledge that tardiness and being chronically late is something negative. The tardies know so well that being always late means disrespect to other people’s time and failure to meet their expectations. They know that chronic tardiness can seriously affect the career development and social life. So, late folks hate being reminded that they are always late and hate being reminded about that when they are called ‘latecomers’ or ‘chronically late people’. Instead, we can call them ‘punctually challenged’, or those who have continuous problems with punctuality and being on time.

This effective term was defined by Diana DeLonzor, an experienced time management specialist, in her book Never Be Late Again, 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged as the following: “Punctually Challenged [means] having the inexplicable ability to arise at six, yet still be late at work at nine“. DeLonzor is convinced that chronic lateness is a very nasty habit which is really hard to overcome. In her book, she uses a bright comparison of punctually challenged people with those who suffer from overeating. Just like those, who are on diet, have to fight their temptation to eat cakes and cookies, chronic latecomers have to fight against their “… temptation to do one last thing before leaving the house. Resisting that sudden urge to make the bed, unload the dishwasher, water the plants, or finish a newspaper article can be nearly impossible“, she writes.

Unfortunately, as we already know, being always late or punctually challenged is not only about punctuality and time management. Changing a bad habit is something like peeling the onion: you start removing the upper layer and see many more other layers coming. While trying to fix your problem with punctuality, you can face the problem of effective time management, time preception, chronic procrastination or simple laziness. There are few strategies and tactics which can be used for breaking a bad habit, but all of them are connected with making lots of efforts, lots of  patience and willpower. However, it is really worth to spend your time and mental power for building a new yourself and giving up looking for those endless excuses and apologies for chronic lateness.

We all got used to the idea that laziness in any form is always something bad and negative, something we all need to fight against and feel embarrassed to demonstrate in public. However, there are always two sides of the same story, and there are situations when laziness should not be considered something shameful or embarrassing. Nothing is good in excessive amounts, as well as a habit to work hard. In such situation, using a little bit of laziness to calm down the urges to work hard without any rest will definitely have positive effects. Another type of healthy laziness is the one, which is supported by a good motivation. Fred Gratzon discusses the issues related to a motivated laziness in his blog, My Lazy Way to Success.

In his writing, Fred talks about two types of laziness. One is  a true evil, a type of laziness, when its owner tries by all means to avoid any possible sort of work which requires making some efforts. It is a basic form of laziness and it will never result in something positive or useful. Another is a good, healthy laziness of a higher level, which can always work for the good of its owner. Fred describes it as a tendency to “skillfully avoiding work“. In other words, such laziness results in looking for the ways of accomplishing everything by making minimum efforts. Obviously, knowing how to have the things done faster, cheaper, more effectively and with minimum losses of the resources should not be considered destructive.

Laziness is not always a bad thing which ruins people’s lives and creates obstacles for becoming reach or successful. You know so well that working hard is not the only factor which leads to success. It is not less important to be educated, talented, insistent and, certainly, lucky. “If correctly utilized, laziness is a one way ticket to great success“, Fred Gratzon writes in his blog. A healthy motivated laziness can help us learn to find the shortest ways to achieveing and accompishing the tasks that must be done. Therefore, transferring your passive, apathic and depressive laziness into an energetic, alert and skillfull laziness can be a great key to a personal success!

For the last two-three decades, the changes in our life resulted from technological development were more than miraculous. Internet, computers, notebooks, e-mails, smartphones, Wi-Fi and bluetooth technology, flash cards: is it possible to imagine our life without them? That is why we all love technology. However, specialists do not stop warning us that we rely on the latest technological achievements and innovations too much. The truth is: all those devices and inventions were made to help us to save our time. But very often they play a role of very powerful time killers and cause a lot of unwanted stresses. Let’s take a closer look at this problem.

For some years, my friend Carla worked as a secretary in Precision Intermedia, a huge marketing agency. Every time when I used to meet her she was complaining about one of senior managers in her company. He was always extremely busy and unreachable, but when she used to tell him that she could not contact him on time, he never accepted that as an apology. “Look, you have 5 ways to reach me at any time. I have my mobile phone, which is never off. I have my personal assistant who is always next to me. I have a phone on my office-table which also works fine. Finally, I have 2 business e-mail addresses and I check them out every hour from my PPC. I will never believe that all these communication channels failed at the same time.” What to say?

Undoubtedly, every technology and every innovation has positive and negative sides. For example, using e-mails substantially facilitates and fastens communication, as well as lowers its costs. However, numerous viruses and spam messages we receive through e-mail damage our computers and affect our productivity. Mobile connection allowed people to stay in touch with each other regardless of the distance and other circumstances. At the same time, using mobile phones has negative effects on our health and also affects our productivity. The same can be said about using Internet or PPC. It is obvious that we must keep using technological developments under control, and here are some recommendations for those who want to be less dependent on technological failures:

1. Be sure that you use full capacity and all functions of your devices or technologies. Do not keep any device or technological tool only because it is a brand new and fashionable one, but can not satisfy all your professional or personal needs. Avoid using the technologies which can not bring the expected utility, otherwise you will lose more than win.

2. Always look for more information about your new device or technology. My dad had to spend 4 hours to learn using his mp3-player because he was feeling shy to bother other people and asking for directions. Spare your time and ask your friends, relatives, shop assistants, distributors about new functions and new opportunities that can be opened to you by using your new device or technology.

3. Update your technology. Just a decade ago our mobile phones were quite simple and could offer us hardly something more than just mobile connection. Now, we can use these devices as a photo camera, internet service provider, file storage and God knows what else. If you have the latest model of Samsung or Nokia mobile phone with a powerful high zoom camera, give up using your old digital camera: at least you will save your money and time for battery replacement.

I hope that this article did not make you think that I am an opponent of technology. Technological innovations and inventions are doing a great job for the humanity, and technology is extremely useful until it does not stop helping people to progress and advance. So, technology itself can not be blamed, the problem is us. In our epoch of multiplicable gigabytes, increasing number of web-sites and space ships, a great deal of people use too many various devices and technologies in their daily life. As a result, we frequently spend our time on less important things and sometimes even waste those precious minutes and hours of our life for solving various avoidable technical problems.

We always say “I have no time for this, I have no time for that…” However, many of us know so well that we spend a lot of time for noting. Watching TV and spending time in traffic jams are supposed to be the most common “time killers”. But, actually, there are so many more of them… Many of us have own sites or blogs, and the majority of such site owners are infected with the virus called “checking out the Statcounter“. Some of us tend to check out recent visitors activity every 15 minutes. What for? Certainly, to kill the time…

There are internal and external time killers. External ones include all factors or circumstances, which grab our attention easily and make us lose control of our time. The list of such time killers is quite long:

• Delays when leaving home (looking for the keys, etc.)
• Delays on the way to the work (traffic jams, etc.)
• Chatting with the colleagues
• Using MSN and other IMs
• Problems with the PC and Internet connection
• Looking through spam messages in your e-mail box
• Looking for files, pens, coffee cups, etc.
• Talking on the phone
• Vendors and visitors
• Smoking and coffee breaks
• Surfing on the net and reading various blogs
• RSS and various e-mail subscriptions, and so on

In addition to all those external time killers, there are also internal ones: all the factors connected with your personal traits which cause delays, problems at work, stresses and other unwanted side effects. Inner time killers are actually our habits and the parts of our life, therefore, it is usually harder to get rid of them. They commonly include such things as:

• Our inability to say “No”
• Our tendency to doing a lot of things at the same time
• Our inability to estimate the time necessary for competing one or another assignment
• Our desire to be useful and help everyone around us
• Our natural tardiness
• Our drive to communication
• Our neglect to making notes
• Our habit to start our work without thinking properly about all necessary resources
• Our inability to prioritize
• Our usual lack of normal sleep and rest
• Our habit to rely completely on our memory
• Our natural absence of mind
• Our habit to procrastinate and leave important tasks for the end of the day
• Our bad habits, such as smoking, snaking and so on.

The list is quite impressive, isn’t it? Some of these habits are sourced from our social norms of behavior. For example, if a colleague comes to ask for some little help, it is considered rude to refuse. Moreover, such factors are taken as parts of our working routine. However, sometimes we really waste a lot of time for walking along the corridor to prepare a drink, or looking for office-manager to get some blank paper sheets, etc.

Is it possible to get rid of all these time killers? Sure thing it is. But the key point is: in order to win the battle against time killers, it is necessary to fully understand the problem. We have to admit being dependent on time killers and acknowledge that they are really strong and powerful enemy to fight against. This understanding can help us to achieve maximum effectiveness and productivity. Remember that killing the “time killers” is a very important and necessary step toward effective time management and optimization.