Why is so hard, for so many people out there, to learn and embrace the power of punctuality? Punctuality can be our best friend and help us deal with the frenetic society we live in.
Raise your hand if you never, not even once, arrived late at an appointment. Raise your hand if you never, not even once, rescheduled a meeting. Raise your hand once again if you felt uncomfortable enough that time you were waiting for someone else who was late.
Let’s start with the basics. We have an appointment at 10.30am at someone’s apartment. It will take us 30 minutes to reach its place, at what time do we leave home?
After 10 am.
At 10 am sharp.
Before 10 am.
Punctuality is that feeble voice inside our head that is telling us, at 9.15am “it’s time to start preparing to leave”.
Punctuality also has a father, it’s called ‘Respect’.
Respect (in this case, to others) is the key element that allows us to develop punctuality. Why should we care to be on time? Because we have respect for the people waiting for us. Nobody is perfect, and unexpected things happen, of course. Respect is that tiny voice inside our head that is telling us, at 10.05am “I’m gonna be late, better let them know!”
What is the right time to arrive at an appointment? This is a silly question to ask, and, in such a case, perhaps we should reconsider our priorities! What is the right time? There is only one answer to this question and is “the time we agreed with our counterpart”. No, it is not right to arrive late, no, it is not right to arrive early.
This is another misconception, a lot of us think that in order to prevent the ‘always late’ behavior, they should arrive early; clearly, they are not close enough to Punctuality’s father.
Punctuality does not mean ‘not arriving late’, it means arrive “on time”.
Punctuality is that loud voice inside our head that is telling us, at 10.20am, when we arrived a bit early to our appointment, to wait a few minutes (guess how many!) before knocking the door.
We live in a frenetic society, and we are always struggling with thousands of appointments and increasingly long to-do lists. Or do we? Maybe the 10(0) minutes we allocated to browse our favorite social network(s) can be safely redistributed to plan our appointments and our work in a more efficient way. And maybe, and this is a real stretch, we can even stop for a moment and prioritize our tasks.
Why is self-management always so difficult? Usually, because we have the presumption to be able to juggle hundreds of tasks at the same time, while we are not even able to respect our self-assigned schedule. Punctuality is a great power that in principle we all have and share, and can be applied to every aspect of our life.
Punctuality means being able to respect (or Respect) our self-assigned tasks and, consequently, plan our appointments more efficiently.
Dealing with other people always involve a good amount of uncertainty, we all know that. Although we must be confident enough to implement the Power of Punctuality in our routine, starting from ourselves.
We must not be afraid to be told: “hey, you really cracked the second here!”, This is an achievement we all should pursue and be proud of.
And most importantly, we are embracing Punctuality because we have Respect for us and for others.
