CJ
ALVIN PITTMAN, VIA EMAIL
Most of us know someone who is perennially late – a person who seems to have a chronic blind spot when it comes to timekeeping. It can become a source of jokey banter among friends, but in another context it can have serious and stressful consequences, from being late for work meetings to missing flights and doctors’ appointments.
There could be various reasons why you’re perpetually late. Tardiness tends to correlate with lower scores on conscientiousness and neuroticism in personality tests or, to put a positive spin on it, you could just be really relaxed. This might be linked to the way you were raised – perhaps you inherited your parents’ relaxed attitude to timekeeping. It might have something to do with your cultural heritage, too. For instance, there’s evidence that people in some countries, such as Brazil, tend to be much more relaxed than those in America, for example.
Zooming in on some specific psychological processes, you could be what some psychologists call a ‘time optimist’ – that is, you tend to underestimate how long things will take. A related issue is procrastination. Getting to places on time means being able to stop what you’re doing and prepare to leave. Being a procrastinator might affect your ability to do that in a timely fashion.
Another mental quirk that could contribute to your problem, at least in some contexts, is overfamiliarity with particular routes – the walk to your local bus stop, for example, or across campus from your halls of residence to a lecture theatre. A fascinating study by psychologists at the University of California and University College London found that we tend to underestimate the time it��
