[Music]
sorry
okay confession time i'm someone with a
slightly annoying tendency to be late
well slightly annoying for me very
annoying for everybody else okay this
video was supposed to come out in
january
yeah
but i'm not alone in being punctually
challenged a 2014 yougov survey found
that one in five americans are late to
work at least once a week actually us
millennials are worst at it so what's
going on are some of us just more
hardwired to be late than others
this is something author grace pacey
decided to look into to try and
understand her own struggle with
punctuality in terms of personalities
it's a bell curve at one end of the
scale there are people i call time
keepers
who are anxious to be early and at the
other end of the scale i call us time
benders a time bender doesn't like
routine we don't like tasks that are
familiar we get bored pretty easily we
can focus really well when we're
interested in something and if time is
tight we can work really effectively if
you wanted to walk into an office and
pick the time benders they are the ones
with the messy discs because
they don't finish one thing before
starting another okay not gonna lie that
does sound a lot like me and quite a lot
of this seems to be baked into our
personalities so are there particular
personality traits that might be leading
us to be more regularly late
when it comes to lateness one of the
major personality traits is
conscientiousness
now conscientiousness is one of the big
five personality traits along with
things like agreeableness and
extroversion so it's really important
you can measure it by asking people
questions about kind of how how tidy
they are how organized they are one of
the questions does concern whether
they're punctual you know all of these
things about whether you're a kind of
very ordered person right so perhaps i'm
just not a very conscientious person but
i can't help but feel maybe there's more
going on in my head with the way that
i'm able to keep track of time
grace pacey thinks that those of us who
are time benders
experience time in a different way to
others we have a different perception of
time to most people every minute isn't
the same length for us time can speed up
and slow down
we can get deeply engrossed in something
and not be aware of time at all
on the other hand if we have a deadline
we can work really effectively
interestingly a 2016 study by washington
university psychologists found something
similar they looked into our ability to
mentally measure time which they
described as our time-based prospective
memory in an experiment the subject had
a set time to complete a task and even
had a clock they were allowed to check
however the tasks were designed to be
engrossing to distract people from clock
watching their results were clear some
people were naturally better at
estimating the passing of time and using
those memories to effectively plan in
the future what frustrates me though is
that i'm not late for everything
i never miss planes i'm pretty good of
trains
but getting my daughter to nursery on
time each day or turning up on time for
social gatherings is always a struggle
one of the most
revealing things that came out of my
research
was that we're not late for everything
we can be on time
when it matters
and what that means to us is that there
are consequences for our being late the
times when we slip into our worst time
bending and when there are no firm
deadlines and no consequences and that
tends to be for social events
so
when we say i can be on time when it
matters
we can be very
hurtful to the people in our lives who
matter
because they are the ones that see us
always being late i think it's really
helpful
to recognize the power of deadlines and
how important it is that they are real
external and have consequences just
asking for a deadline or even suggesting
a deadline puts it out there in the real
world and therefore we take it seriously
we cannot pluck a deadline from the air
and work to it it has to have
consequences as it's our friends who
often feel the full force of our
lateness most friendship groups usually
have that person who is known as being
the late one if yours doesn't then it's
probably you however these social
expectations can make the problem worse
if you know people are expecting you to
be late it's more likely that you will
be
one problem with people who might be
known for being late is that they just
assume that's something that's so much a
part of their genes and their makeup
that they don't even try to kind of
correct the behavior so it's really in
this way that our kind of beliefs about
ourselves can become a self-fulfilling
prophecy um and that can actually be
quite self-sabotaging when with a bit of
effort we might be able to change and
it's that idea that we can choose to
change our personality that our
personality traits aren't set in stone
destined from birth but rather can be
malleable that's one of the most
exciting recent developments in
psychology
for example some studies have shown that
i could train myself to be more
conscientious
these studies have tended to last you
know a few weeks to a few months they
try to get the participants to just do
things like form a detailed schedule for
each day
to kind of you know set aside a time to
kind of organize their desk if that's
messy their room if that's messy you
know all of these things that we know
that people with natural high trait
conscientiousness do and they might lack
and what happens is that just by
practicing those things and kind of
being a bit more conscious about when
you do them um it just forms these kinds
of mental habits it just helps to kind
of retrain the brain a little bit so
being a time bender is to some degree
part of our personality and some of us
might be better at mentally keeping
track of time than others however that
doesn't mean we have to accept that we
will forever be the late one
by setting ourselves meaningful
deadlines with consequences and by
retraining certain behaviors we can
alter our personality and hopefully
improve our punctuality
[Music]
oh damn sorry i gotta
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you