EPeople who are reasonably punctual know the horrors of being late: the grueling wait for the usual suspects; the dungeon-like state in which nothing is moving forward because a distracted or reckless fellow is holding up the shop; the recurring question of why adults are unable to keep appointments with the help of clocks, calendars, reminders and other banalities of self-organization. Unpunctual people don’t know that. They don’t mind the unpunctuality of others, says Anette Labaek.
The management consultant and co-author of the book “Time Management for Chaos” recently arrived late herself. The taxi driver was not on time, so she missed her flight from Frankfurt to Berlin. She wasn’t angry, she assures, although Labaek is Danish – and the Danes are among the most punctual people, she says. But she didn’t care about the rebooking, especially since it was free, and the flight an hour later. The only thing she didn’t like was that the taxi driver, whom she had known for years, told fairy tales about construction sites, traffic jams and other reasons for delays. This leads to the core: Unpunctuality is primarily not a question of minutes, appointments, agreements, but of causes, motives and attitudes.
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