People are wildly in a rush. Sometimes I’ll be going 20 KM/HR over the speed limit, watching cars pressure me to go faster. I often wonder why we’re all trying so hard to shave off 3 minutes from your trip. I spent the better part of my adult life being late for things, I do get that pressure.
I wonder how many people rushing around are late versus being adrenaline junkies. I’m sure a % of people just do not believe in driving slowly. I think for the most part, people are just in a rush a lot, overcommitting in their lives and are generally late.
Even today I saw people online, proposing millions of dollars of city infrastructure projects, so some people can shave 10 mins off a trip downtown. Anyway let’s see where the writing takes me today.
The perpetual rush may be cultural
I got to wondering how it is that some cultures are super early and other cultures are perpetually late. Recently I was talking with a concert promoter about their experiences with Montreal. He was describing his shock. The crowd only really started coming around an hour after doors open, meaning punctuality would have artists performing to an empty room. The artists had paid to perform, so he couldn’t start the show at the scheduled time.
Basically when people pay to perform, they get mad when there isn’t a crowd. EVEN THOUGH they are literally paying for the right to be an opener, they get salty because they put up bread. The promoter is in theory supposed to use that money to ensure the show is popping, but still, none of us can control the crowd. They can show up whenever they want.
People I meet from other cities are often surprised by how late our crowd shows up. In other cities, people respect the flyer time. In our city, the crowd comes later on.
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation. People come late because the shows start late. The shows start late because the crowd comes late (or 3 artists skipped sound check/are AWOL and one was supposed to literally open the show). For the life of me I don’t understand why people book shows on nights they have work and other obligations.
I know I’m a bit off topic, but there’s something to tardiness being accepted baked into our reality. I used to be a big time, always late, always rushing guy. Then I grew up.
Being late is almost always a choice
I was listening to the Chris Do podcast and they were talking about being late. The way it was put is you have every second up until the moment you are late to be on time. When things, like airport flights, are important to us, we somehow muster the skill to be somewhere 3 hours early. (Maybe that’s just me).
Other activities we treat with less regard. I was habitually “late to work”. I was a very skilled employee so my stats and performance made it simpler for my bosses to overlook that which would otherwise get me fired. But I was late, almost every single day. One day my homie won the perfect attendance award. We had been hired on the same day and I realized for years this guy never clocked in late once and I clocked in late all the time.
We were both similar kinds of stoner degenerates at the time. Similar lifestyles and hung out a whole bunch. The difference between him and I is he just made sure to arrive 20 mins early and I aimed to arrive on time. He took into consideration things like snow storms and adjusted his life to leave earlier. I did not.
I’m going to say right now, I don’t know what being a parent is like. But I have parent friends who are punctual, so I assume parents have the same dichotomy, those who are on time and those who are late AF. The similarities are that good planning and foresight avoids unnecessary rushing.
This blog has made me rush in life
This blog takes a solid hour a day. That is a good 7 hours a week from my life that used to go into things like dishes and other grind efforts. Now I am feeling the full burn of burning like 3 wicks at the same time and my planning game fell right off.
This week I opened up Clickup and realized it’s time to get my shit together because otherwise I will be late on everything. I’m already feeling really behind on most projects and missing deadlines on certain things, mostly ones I set myself. What is late anyway, let’s take a definition break (Google quoting Oxford):
doing something or taking place after the expected, proper, or usual time.
That’s the definition we care about. The specific time that makes someone late is arbitrary. It only really matters when tardiness impacts the lives of others. If you are speeding in a snowstorm because of poor time management, different choices could lead you to not speeding in a snowstorm.
When you take the time to plan your week, make some calendars and really think about the steps required to accomplish your goals, you can start to predict when you will deliver more accurately. A lot of our lateness is these arbitrary things like daily blog posts where the pressure is put on ourselves. Then when I’m not late on the blog, I am late on something else. I could also just plan differently.
After I reevaluate my life and plan out the 2024 structure, recognizing I set my own hours as a hustler. I won’t be as late because I’ll be able to set other people’s expectations accordingly.
Expectation management is the key to not rushing
Expectation management is the art of ensuring you don’t disappoint people. You tell them ahead of time what to expect. This softens the blows when bad things happen and keeps people grounded when good things happen.
A lot of times expectation management sounds like a person being negative about the prospects of success. Most of the time it’s just someone acutely aware of their time and how much they are willing to budget for this new/existing idea. When done correctly, it’s as simple as telling someone you are going to be 45 minutes late.
Something I see in the Uber game sometimes is people exaggerating how close they are to a destination. These two girls were holding up a dinner engagement. They lied about how fast they would get there. It was like a 4 minute difference from the truth.
When you tell people the facts on when you will arrive, or what you will do, you can just go about your day. The other person knows you will be there when you will be there. Then no one has to lie and no one has to rush. You may have to deal with the consequences of your actions ahead of time though.
This may be a fluffy piece but sometimes I’m just trying to not answer a Facebook comment. I’ll write it here instead.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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