What running late costs

You may think of the habit as costing the odd apology. I think it costs a great deal more, and most of this chapter is my own reckoning. I'll say where a study comes in.

The first ten minutes of everything. Every meeting, every appointment, every evening begins for you in a flustered catch-up. Over a year that's a large number of beginnings spent badly, and beginnings are when people form their view of how the thing is going to go.

The work you do in the dash. The last email, sent with one eye on the clock, with the figure checked less carefully than it should have been. Whatever the last thing was, it was done at your worst.

The apology tax. Each late arrival costs you a sorry, and each sorry costs a small amount of standing. Chapter 10 argued that after enough of them the sorry means nothing, and you've paid for nothing.

The discount on your word. People tell you earlier times than they mean. They start without you. They don't ask you to bring things. They book around you. They don't tell you they're doing it, and you've probably noticed some of it and put it down to their being difficult.

Other people's time. The eight people in the meeting, the patient after you at the dentist, the friends with the lasagne, the child at the school gate who's watched the other parents arrive. You never see this cost. It's paid where you aren't.

The one person who waits alone. Somewhere in your life there's a person who waits for you more than anyone else. A partner, a friend, a parent, a child. They've adjusted, and they'd never say. But if you added up the minutes they've spent waiting for you over the years, it would be a long time to have kept someone you love standing about.

Your own view of yourself. You've come to think of yourself as bad with time, and a person who thinks that stops trying. The description, as chapter 11 said, isn't true. But you've believed it for long enough that it's started to do harm.

Money. Missed trains, the taxi that replaced the bus, the cancelled appointment fee, the parking ticket from the space you had no time to check. Small, and adding up.

The body. The dash puts you in a hurried, keyed-up state several times a week. I've no study to cite on what that costs over years, and I won't invent one. I'd only say that it doesn't feel like nothing, and you know that.

In return for all that, you've been spared the ten minutes of waiting that chapter 6 was about, and you've had the last thing done, badly. That's the trade, laid out. I'd take the other side of it.