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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

There may be some people who genuinely have trouble keeping track of time or planning ahead, but 99% of people who are habitually late (myself included at times) are just rude and inconsiderate.

Come on, in your own example you provide a white lie to the person and tell them it'll be 30 mins, when you know that it could likely be longer. Why not just say you're running an hour late instead?

I suffer from this myself, so don't feel like I'm picking on you, but I realized a long time ago that it's just me being dishonest with myself and others, and I should cut it out.

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So yes, that's not what I was saying, but it's true I also suffer from RIDICULOUS time-optimism. When I say I'll be there in 30 minutes, that's what I honestly think.

But I forget about the time to find my always-lost cell phone, the time to ride the elevator - basically everything except the actual time on the road/bus/etc... 30 minutes being that magical time every light was green and everything went perfectly, etc.

This impacts all areas of my life. It's a reason I'm reluctant to carpool or take caltrain, heck, I'm always late to my Therapist... and I pay a lot for that.

Point is that I really try to avoid things where I have to be EXACTLY ON TIME.

For instance, if I'm going to a theater show, I'll plan to meet my friends for dinner beforehand. I might not be able to eat (they will), but at least I'll make the show on time.

Incidentally "I'll plan to be 30 minutes early, so I won't stress the entire time"... doesn't work somehow.

I think you misread the example. Person A says they will be 30 mins late. Person B responds they are running late too, probably by an hour, so person A doesn't need to worry about being a mere 30 minutes late.

Ah, you're right! I did read it as "means", not "meets" :)

Leaving it for a permanent record of my crankiness. Sigh, I may be getting old...

I doubt that changes much about what they said.

I don't think "rude and inconsiderate" are the problem for most people. My wife, for example, is often late to social things. But she's also one of the most thoughtful people I know. In a lot of cases, her thoughtfulness is what makes her late, because we can't show up without a gift or something like that.

That's just her situation, but I think there's generally something larger at play. Something more like people feeling the need to squeeze the most time out of whatever they're doing right now, even knowing in the back of their mind that they're stealing from the next thing. I think it takes a certain amount of unnatural discipline to think of the current thing and the next thing as time-equal.

It's partially an executive function thing. The "back of my mind" just doesn't come to the "front of my mind" nearly as often as you'd think.

Other random crap often does.

I think it depends on the context. It's a bigger deal to be late to a lunch invitation with one other person than to show up late to a party.

Sigh. I'm truly old. That's what etiquette is for, so you have a framework to know that context.

Well, alternatively, we can use our brains and think about questions like "if I am late to this event, will other people be waiting for me/disturbed?" to determine how serious a violation of etiquette it would be to be late.

Works almost equally well. Etiquette is nothing but a way to codify the answers, a shared agreement on the rules. (I say "almost" because like any set of rules, it makes it harder to get judgment calls wrong.)

I didn't mean to imply it's a magic cure-all, just that it's a pre-shared context that makes it easy to make those decisions.

Humans are really bad at estimating time. So it may just be consistently bad time estimation born out of optimism. The solution is still to double the amount of time you expect things to take so that you're closer to the mark.

Humans are really, really bad at lots of things, but we usually learn ways to compensate, particularly if it's important. Someone like myself who struggles with being late (due to optimism, exactly as you said) absolutely knows that they have this weakness, because it happens constantly and causes all manner of friction and problems. If you don't make any serious attempts to compensate and be better, you're just demonstrating that you don't care that much.

Or maybe I'm just getting old and cranky.

I don't need friends who don't respect my time.

I'm old and cranky too.

I’m always late to things because of optimism and I compensate by considering anything up to 10 minutes late as on time. My friends have learned to just assume I’ll be late.

Does that count?

What I think is worse than being late are thr monsters that show up on time to a party. Like wtf who does that.

There are worse monsters. As someone who's learned to overcompensate for his optimism... I show up early !

But it’s far more better to time everything just right so that one arrives at said meeting right on time, no later nor sooner.

I think living in Finland has conditioned this type of attitude of not being too early(for fear of wasting time waiting) or too late (fear of being rude). One thing that helps significantly is to know travel times(by bus,car, etc) and allocate rough estimate to them. Luckily most Euro countries have good public transport to make planning ahead less stressful.

Traffic means I'll arrive to my bimonthly boardgames night somewhere between 15 minutes early and 30 minutes late. And that's before my forgetfulness and insufficiently alarming alarm practices kick in!

You routinely have 45 minute swings in amounts of traffic, and you can’t know in advance what the traffic is going to be like? That seems insane to me. Sure every now and agai there’s an accident or road works, but for it to often take 30 minutes longer, or 15 minutes less seems bizzare to me. Or is it a case of you can leave and be there 15 minutes early, or you can wait 30 mins and be 30 mins late due to traffic? In that case, you’re making he decision that you’d rather be late.

> But it’s far more better to time everything just right so that one arrives at said meeting right on time,

This is really really not true for parties. The polite thing to do for a party, as long as it is not a dinner party, is to be at least 1 hour late. Nobody expects guests earlier than that. It’s the unspoken rule.

For dinner parties the usual 15 minutes late is on time.

Ah, perhaps in the other corners of the world, but in Finland we do not play such "games". That is, if you invite someone over by 17 pm, it might mean by 18 pm, or might not. Here, if you invite someone at 17 pm, whatever the cause, that is the target one should be aiming for. Some think of our culture as too direct or blunt, but in my mind ambiguity and misunderstandings are a root cause of much misery. :)

Due to the planning fallacy, in order to rarely be late, you have to be early almost all the time.

Come on, in your own example you provide a white lie to the person and tell them it'll be 30 mins, when you know that it could likely be longer.

This is funny to read in a forum of software developers :)

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