The Current - People who are always late aren't necessarily jerks (but they might be)

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

We all know people who are always late. Maybe you're one of them. The tardy gets a bad rap. But they aren't all self-centred, says University of Texas time expert Dawna Ballard. Some of them may be time blind. Others simply can't pull themselves away from people they value. Understanding what's behind our time personalities might help us get along better -- and rethink when and why we obey the dictates of the clock.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Time keeps on ticking. Are you watching the clock right now, counting down perhaps to your next meeting, an appointment, lunch break? Maybe you're not fussed at all by watching the clock tick on and the minutes tick by. You'll get there when you get there,

much to the chagrin of people you need to meet. Maybe you'll be on the receiving end of size or eye rolls or worse. But people who are chronically late, aren't all jerks, might just be part of their time personality. That is the basis of research by Donna Ballard. She studies chronemics, how time is bound to human communication.

She does that at the University of Texas, Austin. I spoke with Donna Ballard in September. Here's our conversation. I begin this conversation with a disclosure that I am somebody who loves to be on time. In our house, if you're on time, you're actually late, which does not earn me a lot of favors and friends from some people, but that's how it goes. Are we too hard on people who are late? I think we are. The reason is that while there might be, and I will, you know, I know some of your

your listeners know people who seem to abuse time and that there's this other, you know, power or some sort of reason why they are not on time, for a lot of people, that's just not the reason. We know biology shapes this. There's something called time blindness that neurodivergent individuals experience, and it makes it nearly impossible for them to be in time without a lot of extra labor that other people don't have to do. And then there's cultures around the world, around the world, punctuality, this whole notion, it's much more fluid than in other cultures. You use a really interesting word there, which is abuse. that people abuse time. And so the assumption, and we'll get to the issue of time blindness and time personalities,

but the assumption from some people is if people are late, it's a sign of disrespect. We said we were going to meet at this time. You show up 25 minutes late. You are disrespecting not just the clock, but the person who showed up on time. How often is that the case? So from a research standpoint, there's really no evidence of that. I know anecdotally that's how people experience it, but I can only speak about like the actual data. So we don't know.

Like that, we're not saying that doesn't exist that there are outliers, but in the actual science and social science of it, that's just that accounts. That would count as noise in terms of the data. That's just a blip on the radar. Some of them might be jerks, but not all of them. Some of them might be jerks. I will give you that. Okay, so you said something interesting about time blindness. And I want to get to the personality piece, but what is time blindness? Well, for neurodivergent individuals, they just don't experience the passage of time.

There's not, they can get very locked in on a particular event, a particular experience. And so there's just not a sense of the passage of time. It's very similar to those of us like myself who have no sense of direction, like an internal sense of space of north, southeast, west, and can get easily lost. And I don't think people judge us. Maybe they do. But in general for that, it's very similar. It's just the biology.

And there's not this internal clock in the same way that others have it. And it speaks to the fact that we, in the, this is at the heart of it in many ways. We experience time differently and we think about time differently. And that can come out in our time personalities. What are our time personalities? Wow. Okay.

So there's a range of ways we could talk about it. Some people would talk about it as a monochronic versus polychronic time personality. I like to talk about it across 12 dimensions where there's a lot of complexity here. You have like these basic assumptions like, Are you driven by past, present, or future, scarcity, urgency? And then there's the practices that things we do. Are you fast-paced? Are you a multitasker?

How available are you? Are you flexible with time? Are you punctual? Are you highly scheduled or spontaneous? And are you delayed, which is it different than punctuality? Delay is more like broader, like projects. Do you tend to have so many projects that you are behind on one or the other, but more long-term? How do I know what my time personality is?

You said a couple of things. One is, I mean, in the range of 12, there's polychronic and there's monochronic? Yes, this was a cultural anthropologist in the 50s looked across the world and just saw, oh, you know, there are real differences in the way people across cultures, orient toward time and value time. In the monochronic society, the idea was that time is scarce, and so we do one thing at a time, and we sort of separate ourselves out. Privacy is a big deal in a monochronic culture. And then in polychronic cultures, everything kind of comes together. That's where many things are done at once, hence the mono and poly.

But interestingly, that was in the 50s. And he, Edward Hall, he hadn't yet seen the fact that monochronic people would one day be multitasking and doing many things at once precisely to save time. How do I know if I have a polychronic time personality? What are some of the traits that I'm at exhibit? One of the easiest ways to gauge whether you're polychronic is so we're here in this conversation. And so I have put this in my schedule so I do have time for it. But let's say it was more of a spontaneous conversation, unscheduled. But I do have something else scheduled next.

How comfortable am I interrupting you in our great conversation, knowing the conversation is not over, to move on to this clock-based event that's next. So I have maybe a doctor's appointment next, or maybe I'm meeting with a student next. How easy is it for me to say, Matt, I got to go. And you're in the middle of a vulnerable, emotional story. And that's how you know.

And if it's easy for you, you're monochronic. You're really focused on the clock. If it's really painful, then you are polychronic. and you are focused on the event and the relationship. One of the ways that you have illustrated people being monochronic was this was like this viral moment in the middle of the pandemic, right? This BBC interview with a professor, he's talking with a host. And then the kid kind of sneaks in in the background.

Maybe you remember that? Yes, absolutely. So why do you use that example? What does that example tell us about how we think about time? Okay, so if he were immersed in a polychronic culture, neither the interviewer nor himself, the interviewee would have reacted with the same level of absolute horror that he did. And I understand that because we also can kind of code switch. So at work, I'm very monochronic.

whereas at home not so much. And so the reason that was a great example is this was an event. This is a child. And children clearly, they don't understand time. They don't understand fancy interviews with the BBC. And so the child walks in. And he could have. And at some point during the pandemic, we realized, let's just put the child on our lap, right?

Or the dog or whatever is happening. Let's just invite this quote-unquote interruption in, but in a polychronic culture, there actually, there's not even a sense of interruptions as existing. It's like, what do you mean an eruption? It would be hard to even judge what an interruption is. That's just not language that's used in polychronic cultures. That it's all just part of the experience, that you're not just focused on one thing, but this thing is happening as well.

And you can, as you said, code switch, move around between a bunch of different things. at the same time. Yes. Yes. How did we come to be we, he said, seeing punctuality as a virtue? Through a combination of two things, but the primary one was industrial capitalism. So industrial capitalism leveraged time for the first time in human history. Like time had never been a currency. And for the way industrial capitalism worked, it's like, yeah, you're trading, forget the skill, right? We deskilled work. We didn't want that. We wanted people to trade their time for money.

And that's where you got this idea of time as money. And it just neatly dovetailed with a Protestant ethic around time as moral as virtue. So you put those two together. and you get what we now have. In fact, the first, because we didn't have reliable clocks for a really long time, but the urban bourgeoisie and the monastic clergy actually funded. They put the money together for the R&D to get a reliable mechanized clock because it was so important in both worlds, so central.

To your point, and you mentioned this earlier, though, culturally, there are different senses of time, right? Different cultures think about time differently. In a world like we live in right now, how do we need to understand that? We need to understand that time is a tool. It's a technology no different than the will. It didn't exist.

Like from the beginning of mankind, it's something we have developed and refined for sure. We're very good at it in the West, especially. It's a tool. So if you think about it, that way, think about how you are using it and what you need it for in a given moment. And so if relational development matters more and you have some flexibility around your schedule, then really being attentive to the person in front of you, the conversation, the event, that's a really useful

way to use your time. If you're flying a plane, then, yeah, punctuality matters a lot. But even if you think about a pilot, think about when we've had delayed flights, you would prefer that that flight be delayed and you get to your destination safely, right? We wouldn't want a pilot to just be like, well, punctuality, we got to get there, whether we have, right, all of the technical details that are important to get there safely. So it is a tool and just think about how you're going to use it and why. So this is my monochronic personality saying that we're almost out of time and I have to let you go. The nature of radio is that we're run by the tyranny of the clock.

But you had a good piece of advice for people who get worked up about those who are late. And it is travel with a book, right? Yes, absolutely. I bring stuff. I just bring massive loads of work to do wherever I go. So you're never wasting time. If somebody's late, you can do something else. Absolutely.

There's a, I mean, with mobile com, absolutely. You can do so many other things. I love time and I love talking about time. And I have enjoyed the time that I have spent speaking with you, Donna, thank you very much. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Donna Ballard is the author of Time by Design, how communicating slow allows us to go fast. She teaches at the University of Texas, and I spoke with her in September.

This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC. Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca. slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.