Why Timeliness Is Important
Jens O. Meiert, July 26, 2007 / August 27, 2011.
This entry is filed under User Experience.
Timeliness or punctuality might be associated with Germans in particular—I can’t tell whether that’s justified—but that’s somehow a nice stereotype because it deals with an important quality. Allow me to rephrase this and emphasize just two points:
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Unpunctuality wastes time and costs money. Obviously. Five people waiting for five minutes for one or more unpunctual people in a meeting means almost half an hour working time lost for the company. Allow this to happen regularly and these incidents will cost a fortune per year. Consequently, unpunctuality may be considered unprofessional.
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Unpunctuality is disrespectful. That may well be the real motivation for this post, maybe because I just recently read Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae: Wasting other people’s time by being unpunctual is more than just being impolite.
It worries me that many people appear to have a lax attitude when it comes to time and timeliness. While we certainly have the right to waste our time and lives, we’re never entitled to do that with other people. Yet we do, too often.
I don’t want to sound like a saint when it comes to timeliness; I’m not. However, I’ve started to focus more on how I use my time, and became more conscious whether I’d cost other people’s time. I encourage you to do the same. It won’t always work but it’s an honorable goal.
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