Are We Having a Punctuality Crisis?

I’m a pretty easygoing person. For social occasions, I don’t care if someone is late, since I’m a pretty busy person and am very flexible with plans. If someone is late, great. I can catch up on law school readings, work on a project at work, read, and watch Netflix. Unless it’s a meeting or gathering where punctuality is of the utmost importance, I am anti-rigidity. I have friends who are a lot more free-spirited than me and really struggle with being on time, and I love them deeply.

However, one thing I’m big about is being punctual as a form of respect. I don’t mind personally when other people are not on time when we have plans. I do stress, however, when I am not on time and I’m the person holding other people up. It feels like I am disrespecting the other person and not valuing their time, even if they express otherwise that being five minutes late is no big deal.

Professionally, I run IEP meetings and complete close-out procedures for my job. To me, not starting on time or close to on time is a form of disrespect to the parent of a child with an IEP and the rest of the staff.

The punctuality issue is an issue in my relationship. I stress not being more than five minutes late, at most, to pretty much anything, even social gatherings where it might be rude to be on time, but I would rather play it safe than sorry.

My wife needs time to get ready. Sometimes I won’t communicate well that “we have to leave by 9 a.m.” until 8:30 a.m., which isn’t enough time for my wife. We won’t have an argument about it, but my sense of urgency and passive-aggressive ways of checking the watch and reminding my wife about the time certainly don’t help. It is something we’re working on for me to give more notice and to be more aware of how long my wife takes to get ready.

As a country, we are all at a crossroads on the issue of punctuality. I have to be at work by 7:50 every day. As a teacher, this is 10 minutes before the kids come in and start their first-period class. Previous places I’ve worked have had grace periods with this punctuality policy, but my current workplace does not play — get there at 7:51, and what kind of example and precedent are you setting for students who get marked tardy when they’re a minute late to class?

My urgency in punctuality largely comes from the summer I spent in Japan. In Japan, being on time is a critical issue — I worked in an organic chemistry lab and punctuality was everything. My friend and I were supposed to ride a bus going from one part of Mount Fuji back to the train station. If anyone were late at the lab, they would have to clean the whole office. Everyone rushed to make it in before the 9:30 reporting time, no matter how late they stayed in the lab the night before. Some of the guys would cut it crazy close, and get in at 9:29, running to make it into the lab on time.

So it’s not that other people hate me when I’m late — it’s that I hate myself. I’m in a period of my life where I’m working full-time running the special education department at my school, in law school at night four nights a week for hours, and running marathons. Not leaving the house on time not only means I may be fashionably late and look bad (which still happens when I misgauge traffic and the time it takes to commute), but de-valuing myself. In the morning, it means I can only run nine miles before work instead of 11. I know it sounds crazy, but those small nuances really matter. I also have a tendency to cut it pretty close, which leaves me always rushing to make the 7:50 sign-in book.

But I’m not the only person who has fallen victim to a greater emphasis on punctuality.

According to Katherine Rosman at the New York Times, many workplaces around the country are seeing an increased urgency around being on time. With many people returning to the office and not working from home, Professor Sophie C. Avila Leroy at the University of Washington Bothell states that managers are putting a much greater emphasis on efficiency. Workers, too, are putting a much greater emphasis on efficiency — they want to set better work boundaries.

Most people want to get what things they want to get done much faster, and this is being noticed in the restaurant industry, where OpenTable, a digital reservation company, has noticed a lot more online reservation activity instead of people just walking in for their meals. On a more systemic level, Chad Orzel, a professor of physics and astronomy at Union College, says that a greater emphasis on punctuality has been a growing trend as urbanization and industrialization have increased over centuries.

However, not everyone is on board with this greater emphasis on punctuality. Punctuality is often seen as adjacent to if not directly correlated with professionalism, a concept that I haven’t always liked, but as a result, there was a moment when punctuality was seen as anti-equity or even an agent of white supremacy, particularly in progressive spaces. I worked a summer job at a pretty progressive organization where I saw the manager really cringe and suffer a lot of angst when she had to tell us that some of us had to stop showing up 30 minutes to an hour late because we weren’t covering the material we needed to cover.

I’ve heard punctuality and whiteness be linked — often in jest — plenty of times. Most of it stems from the exploding popularity of Tema Okun’s 1999 article on white supremacy culture, which doesn’t explicitly call punctuality white supremacy, but does label a “sense of urgency” as anti-inclusive, anti-democratic, and favoring White people over people of color. The piece saw an explosion in popularity during and immediately after the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd, as well as the overall reckoning with equity and racial justice that happened after.

However, a lot of people, particularly in corporate, professional, and even progressive spaces, still care deeply about punctuality. I listen to a podcast for progressive Asian-Americans where the two podcast hosts surprised me by saying they deeply value punctuality and will cut off a friendship if a friend is repeatedly not punctual. This deeply surprised me given their gung-ho advocacy of organizing and disrupting systems for equitable results, and I think some of the “I’m going to cut you off as a friend if you’re not punctual” was in jest, but one host said that when someone is late three times or more when they have plans, it’s a sign that the other person does not value or respect their time.

It’s not a stretch to say different cultures and communities have different standards and expectations around time and punctuality. I have spoken about the strict adherence to punctuality in Japan, but Chinese people are generally a bit looser. My wife’s family is half African American, and half Nigerian and they often joke about the tardiness of the Nigerian side of the family at various events.

Jelena Mraovic at Clockify notes that Latin American countries like Brazil have a more laid-back perception of time than we as Americans do, too. Sometimes, a greater emphasis on punctuality in countries like the U.S., Germany, or Japan is a sign of economic development and a greater emphasis on individuality versus collectivism, but Japan defeats the latter classification, as it is a very collectivist society.

As America grows more diverse as a country and different cultures immerse themselves into America’s culture, punctuality will increasingly be a point of contention and tension between people on a systemic level, but also on a relational level. The podcast hosts who are only friends with people who are on time must live boring lives, to me.

Still, to many workplaces and many people, punctuality is becoming a lot more important. In some places, like athletic circles and the military, punctuality was always very important. And it’s important to remember, at the end of the day, that life happens. A horrible car accident might clog traffic for hours. A family emergency might arise. It’s a delicate balance we’re all navigating where we try to respect everyone’s time while giving them grace.

As for me, I’m not going to be the one who holds everyone up and disrespects and devalues their time. I’m going to do my very best, on every occasion, to still be on time.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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