Why it’s not your fault you’re late

Zofia Nowaczyk

If someone asked you to define time, what would you say? We can draw a straight line on a piece of paper with three points determining past, present, and future; or explain the workings of a watch and different time zones, but there is still something bigger and complex missing. It seems that time flies differently for us. Think of this – we all have that friend who always shows up late saying, “Sorry guys, I thought I could make it on time,” or maybe that’s you? Naturally, some of us are better, some worse at organizing our schedule and, luckily (for latecomers), there is a scientific reason for it. As I fall into the always-late category as well, this text is a compendium of science-based excuses for not being on time.

Once, when I visited my brother in his apartment, it turned out he was living three blocks away from my friend from university. It was only a five-minute walk so we decided to drop by. Due to reasons I do not recall, and most probably as a result of my thereis-always-time approach, we were late by around half an hour or so. Later that night, as this topic was raised and we had a laugh about it, my answer to why we could not come on time was “because of the gravity!”. My brother and friend did not want me to elaborate since it seemed like an obvious lie, but there was a grain of truth there. Let me explain why.

The theory of relativity says that time is highly dependent upon the observer’s standpoint. Yet, there is one law we live by – the stronger the gravity is, the slower the time goes by. For instance, time on Earth goes slower compared to that on the Moon, as the latter’s gravity is weaker. The same applies to when we go further away from the Earth’s surface - gravity yet again gets weaker. GPS satellites that send the signals to the ships on Earth also need to have their clocks slowed down in order to even out the time differences. If we didn’t take them into account, the satellites in space would not give the exact position of the ship and there would be a gap of even a few kilometres! Knowing what we know now, my defence for being late because of gravity starts to make more sense as my brother lived on the 3rd floor and my friend on the 7th. Gravity worked stronger on me and my brother in his apartment because we were closer to the Earth’s surface. That means time seemed slower to us and faster to my friend. Clever, one would think. Of course, it was a blunt exaggeration and the time difference would not be even noticeable at such a small distance but the idea was somewhat correct and true to reality, in a way.

That’s not all! We still have one, more downto-earth rationalization on tap. A lesson taught by Albert Einstein was: everything might be relative, meaning that all you can see, touch or feel, and how you experience the world is highly subjective and someone else may have a different perspective. Even your basic cognitive functions like memory can mislead you.

On the other hand, how many times have you said “I’ll finish writing my essay in 2 days” and it took you 4, or “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” when you were there in 15? Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in Economics, dubbed this phenomenon a “planning fallacy”. It can be described as an overly optimistic approach when arranging tasks. In other words, we tend to underestimate the time we need to do something. The reason for it may be that, when planning, we think of a single task instead of a wider set of background information, the so-called “distributional information”. So let’s imagine that the bus from one place to another may take five minutes, but we fail to consider the distributional information part, such as the average time it takes to get to your friend’s apartment, find the proper door or go three floors up. Therefore, the crux of the problem here is that this distributional information usually escapes our thinking process.

We are also usually in denial about the past failure in doing something on time, so we overestimate ourselves the next time we are about to do the same task. Even if you did not manage to make it on time in the past, a new better you will most definitely do it quicker THIS time. For sure. You will get up in the morning, drink your coffee, exercise, go to work, go running, cook a meal, meet with friends, do laundry and read some book before going to sleep – how many days like this have you planned and how many of them ended up on coming back from work and going to sleep? There you go. It happens as we may be thinking about each of these tasks separately but we forget about the time in between and how much it takes to switch between these activities.

We also appear to be measuring time based on how we feel and what emotions accompany us in some specific moment. Think of how you are in the middle of a boring conversation – time stands still. Or the other way around, when you are on a long-awaited date with your crush, time flies by in a split second. It seems that both of these rely on how much information is reaching our brains – the more data about a given time period we have to process, the more we feel that the time drags. For that reason, if you experience a dangerous situation like a car accident, when you are exposed to some novelty like exploring a new route to work, or simply when you are in shock, you will most likely feel like time goes slower. And vice versa – the less stimulus we need to store, the quicker the time passes. This includes all the routine situations, as less attention is required from your side because you already know all the details, e.g. when choosing your standard route to work. So our saying “Sorry I’m late, I lost track of time” is on point – experiencing something new or stressful may cause losing awareness of how much time has passed.

So how accurate can we be at measuring time when so many factors can influence our temporal perception? We do not usually take into consideration distributional information w h e n planning the future schedule. We often forget how much time something took in the past, we think of the activities as separate, instead of counting all the time inbetween and, finally, our emotions can significantly influence the duration of a task as felt. Considering both, the fact that time in space passes at a different rate to all of us and that also our memory plays a trick on us, it may come as a shock that some are on time at all!