busyMost people are late occasionally. Some people are late chronically. It is usually due to carelessness and/or lack of organizational skills. So the first things you want to check are:
* Does the person realize that being late causes difficulties for self and others?
* Does the person CARE about those difficulties?
* Have they taken basic steps to avoid lateness, such as having accurate timepieces (if feasible), making schedules, and studying organizational techniques?
The article raises an interesting issue: ability to estimate time required to complete a task. Some people are really good at this. Others are really not. To some extent, this can be compensated by timing oneself and memorizing or recording how long it takes to do things, rather than trying to imagine how long it will take. (Frex, I have timed myself writing, so I know that it takes me -- very roughly -- an hour to produce a thousand words. Sometimes considerably more or less, but that's a good ballpark estimate.) This ability is something that can be measured objectively by giving someone tasks and asking them to estimate the completion time. It should be measured with both familiar and unfamiliar tasks, because skill at estimation may differ for those categories.
Closely related to this, not explictly mentioned in the article, but implied in the fellow's description of his experiences, is the ability to get tasks done -- or lack thereof. Some people are excellent at staying on track and dealing with unforseen complications. Others are not. To some extent, this can be compensated by padding the deadline. It doesn't always work, but for most people, it reduces the frequency and duration of lateness. Like estimation, task progress is a thing that can be measured.
We'll set aside the social issues of demanding more from people than they can possibly accomplish, or expecting them to get places faster than is safe or possible, which can cause lateness. We'll also skip folks whose presence bends the spacetime continuum and/or causes timepieces to malfunction, thus making them often late (or early). Those are separate challenges outside this discussion of mental processing of time management.
It's one thing to blame people for being careless. It's quite another to demand that they perform well in an area where they have little innate talent or ability to acquire skill. The latter is a disability -- a pretty bad one, in our culture. So while most people who are frequently late probably do that out of indifference or ignorance, some probably do it out of disability. And the appropriate responses are different: indifferent people need to learn empathy (or how to emulate it), ignorant people need to learn time-management skills, and disabled people may need an assistant or some other accommodation for a potentially life-wrecking problem that can't simply be trained away.
Chance of people actually bothering to test for this? Or trying to ameliorate the various reasons for lateness? Probably almost zero, despite the fact that lateness is something people complain about frequently both in personal and work contexts. Because then they might have to do something other than cast blame or make exuses, and that would be work and likely cost money. I bet they'd rather just keep being late or bitching at late people.
August 28 2013, 00:40:31 UTC 7 years ago
And the really hard part was that being late put her in a terrible mood and she just had to some up with some reason to be angry at me. It was like if she could make it in some way my fault, she felt better. With the result being that I didn't just have to be inconvenienced, I had to be in the wrong as well.
She got worse over time, and eventually she was an hour and three quarters late *to recording* at $30 an hour, when I had only prepared for her to be 30 minutes late, and had to carry it myself for an extra hour and a quarter without a rest, and then she blew up at me when she walked in the door because I didn't answer a stranger's business phone.
That was the last straw. I haven't worked with her since, and I won't. If it wasn't for having to make it my fault all the time I could have dealt with the rest of it.
Thoughts
August 28 2013, 01:03:13 UTC 7 years ago
Many people have a consistent factor to their lateness, although not all do. Some will usually be late by the same amount of time, or it will take them half again as long to do something as they think it will. That makes it easier to compensate. Random factors are much harder to cope with.
>> And the really hard part was that being late put her in a terrible mood and she just had to some up with some reason to be angry at me. It was like if she could make it in some way my fault, she felt better. With the result being that I didn't just have to be inconvenienced, I had to be in the wrong as well. <<
This is a typical pattern that emerges from chronic lateness:
* Someone is usually or always late.
* This makes other people criticize them.
* Which makes them go on the defensive.
* So they either tell themselves they don't care, or they make preemptive attacks.
* Which makes people not want to be around them.
It's a case where knowing that someone has a disability, and what it is, and why it is like that, can make all the difference in the world. It is not okay to hassle people for something their body just can't do. Sometimes you can learn to work around it, especially if part of the problem is caused by missing skills.
Other times you just have to say, "I've got this limitation and it requires such-and-such accommodation." It's an inconvenience to work with someone who can't hit a smaller target than "Tuesday" but it's better than destroying their whole life. I think our society is so rule-obsessed and thought-averse that it would take invoking the disability act to get accommodations in a lot of cases.
>> She got worse over time <<
That makes me wonder if it's brain-related. Some physical conditions do degenerate over time. Something that's simply a bad habit might also get worse, but usually, people see at least gradual improvement in skills they use (or try to use) all the time, even in their worst areas.
>> That was the last straw. I haven't worked with her since, and I won't. If it wasn't for having to make it my fault all the time I could have dealt with the rest of it. <<
Yeah, I wouldn't have the patience for that either. But it's a case where, even if the lateness couldn't be fixed, the displaced emotional mayhem could probably be improved by better headskills.
Re: Thoughts
August 28 2013, 01:29:04 UTC 7 years ago
Though I have to say when you arrange to record at $30 an hour... it's not like the recording engineer will give you your money back if you show up an hour late. Nor should (in this case) he--he couldn't schedule anyone *else* in that hour, after all.
It is hard for me to understand *because I used to be late a lot myself.* Which I fixed by 1) making sure the night before I had everything I was going to need, including any printouts, arranged in one staging area 2) not scheduling other things when I had an important committment 3) treating t minus 20 minutes as though it were t; if I'm not in the car, set the half eaten sandwich down, pick up my stuff from the staging area, and go.
My friend was not stupid. But I had seen her come 20 minutes late to rehearsal (with me waiting outside on her front step) *with her arms full of groceries.* She cannot possibly have walked into the store at rehearsal time and not realized she was keeping me waiting. After a while, you can be forgiven for thinking that she's not being on time because her comfort and convenience is more important to her than keeping her committments. Yet she was obviously unhappy about being late--not about putting other people out, as far as I could tell, just general stress. Maybe it *was* a mental condition, like OCD. Maybe she just couldn't get going until OMG I'm LATE DRAMAZ. Except you'd think then she'd be able to say "I'm sorry; I know it is irritating; I really can't help it, but I am sorry I make you feel bad."
But she's going to have to practice whatever fixes she makes on someone else. I hope she can become a happier person, but I after I finished the recording session, drove home, put everything away, went for a walk to a quiet place, and had a good cry, I told myself "It's only five more days; you can handle anything for five more days, and then, I PROMISE, you will *never* have to deal with this again." And from that day to this I have kept my promise.
But if she could just lose the meanness. I'm sure the people around her could deal with it better.
Re: Thoughts
August 28 2013, 02:10:01 UTC 7 years ago
Yeah, when somebody does things I've learned not to do, it makes me think, "Then why the fuck am I bothering?" There are certain things I'll only do at the level other people are, because I'm not a martyr and don't feel like wasting my energy.
On the other hoof, not all solutions work for all people, and some problems are insoluble for some people even if they are soluble for others.
>> But she's going to have to practice whatever fixes she makes on someone else. <<
That's fair.
>> But if she could just lose the meanness. I'm sure the people around her could deal with it better. <<
I'd like to think so. However: 1) that kind of behavior really sounds like a maladaptive coping mechanism, and 2) my observations of lateness are that it's rarely tolerated even if it's not the late person's fault. I strongly suspect that she got picked on so much that she started attacking first, because it's less miserable for her (albeit more so for everyone around her) than being constantly berated about something she either can't help or has no idea how to fix.
Re: Thoughts
August 28 2013, 05:36:09 UTC 7 years ago
Yeah. That.