Why we are late for meetings?

Do you notice that it has becoming more and more common for people coming late for meetings?

If you are a member of any social organization, you would fully agree with me. When there is a meeting scheduled at say 6.30pm, we hardly find anyone there at the stipulated time. People start trickling down slowly from 6.45pm onwards and if we are lucky we can start the meeting at 7.00pm or it could extend till 7.30pm. Meetings starting 30 minutes to 1 hour late, from the announced time is becoming more and more common and acceptable.

I, as an organizer of many meetings and events, see this factor of people turning up late, becoming very casual and the worst part is no one seems to be really worried about this. Adding to this, people jokingly comment IST does not mean Indian Standard Time, but it means Indian Stretchable Time. But I think this is not a joke that we should laugh over, rather something we should feel ashamed of.

One of the things, we Indians are extremely bad at managing is TIME or rather being punctual. I think we need to look into this issue seriously, because it gives a very bad image of our country and our work culture. We are good to give excuse as to why we are late, rather than finding ways to be on time.

So, I was just pondering as to why people are late and I could come out with three possible reasons.

•      Priority

•      Difficulty

•       Superiority

Let us look into each factor in a little more detail.

 

Priority:  Generally a meeting information/ invitation is circulated at least a week in advance and so the concerned person would have blocked that time for the meeting, if he is interested in attending.  However there could be some last minute unexpected happenings which could distort the plan, such as a surprise guest at home or having to take someone to a hospital and so on.

These type of situations are unavoidable. As time management is all about priority management, it is understandable, that at this type of situations, people may get delayed to arrive at the meeting after attending to these emergencies.

Difficulty: Another reason could be few people have difficulty in managing time. This is because they don’t have a proper system in place such as maintaining a calendar, diary or a mobile reminder app etc. So they tend to forget their existing appointments and commit the same time for another appointment too. This leads to turning up late. Few other people are not just conscious of how much time it would take to get a work done and therefore not good at anticipating the time needed to complete a job. So they may tend to take up an overload of work and later feel that they are not able to finish it on time and therefore one delay would leads to another, ultimately making them late to arrive at the meeting.

This type of situations could be avoided by better planning and learning to use some time management tools.

 

Superiority:  Some people want to give an image of being a very busy person and consider their time value to be superior to that of others and they feel it is OK for other to wait for them. This VIP culture of making people wait is the most unacceptable part. This is common with politicians, bureaucrats and some businessmen too. Let us say they have been invited as the Chief Guest, they tend to think that they need to arrive late, to maintain their pride.  But I think, true dignity is when they turn up on time and be a role model to others.

This type of situations can be easily avoided if one starts becoming conscious that others time is equally valuable as their own.

One of the noteworthy things, I have observed while attending meeting abroad is that, most of the participants arrive at least 15 minutes early. Once they arrive they don’t create any commotion. They just choose a comfortable location for them to sit and pick out a book from their bag and start reading it. When it is time for the meeting to start they just put the book back and get to the meeting seamlessly. For them being early is not a waste of time, but it really avoids last minute hurry and panic. Moreover they have also learnt the art of using waiting time into productive time.

While some reasons for being late is acceptable, many or not.  So, let us take time to analyze, which one of the above factors is stopping us from being on time for meeting and take proactive measures to correct it.

   D. Senthil Kannan,

    Managing Trustee, PALMS, Tuticorin.

    Author of "Transformational Thoughts" - A Journey of learning 

    Email: senthilkannand@gmail.com