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How to Deal With a Chronically Late Friend
You won’t be able to change them, so focus your energy on other solutions
Laura Vanderkam, the time management expert who wrote Off the Clock and Juliet’s School of Possibilities, is here to answer your scheduling questions. Check back every week for more advice, and send your own productivity problems to asklaura@medium.com. (Your name will not be used.)
Dear Laura: I love my best friend. I love spending time with her. She is also chronically late. We agree to meet at 3 p.m., she’s there at 3:30 p.m. There’s always a reason, but as I become busier with work and family responsibilities, I’m increasingly resentful of time spent in a coffee shop or in the waiting area at a restaurant, wondering when she’s going to get there. What should I do?
As a comically punctual person — one who shows up awkwardly early for social gatherings — I sympathize with your dilemma. When I agree to do something or be somewhere at a certain time, I figure out what steps need to happen for me to be there. I calculate how long each of those steps will take. I count back by that amount, and then I build in a buffer, in case something goes wrong.
This means that I’m walking into Starbucks for a 3 p.m. appointment at 2:53 p.m. To go to all that bother, and then be stuck waiting for 37 precious minutes, is incredibly frustrating. It can be easy to tell yourself a story that your friend doesn’t respect your time, and by extension, does not respect you.
But since you love your friend, you probably know, deep down, that this isn’t the case. You have probably realized that she just has a very different relationship with time than you do.
Late people are often wildly optimistic. Your friend might not realize that the number of minutes that pass between putting on her shoes and backing her car down the driveway is not zero. She might think it takes five minutes to get to Starbucks, even though it has never taken her less than 15 minutes to make this journey. But who knows, today might be her lucky day! This is why she always has an explanation. Something always happens, and that something is never accounted for in her blue-sky scenario.
