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"  I have been late my entire life. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s seven minutes for yoga class; sometimes it&amp;#039;s 12 minutes to meet friends for drinks. It&amp;#039;s not enough of a problem to wreck my life. It&amp;#039;s just enough to piss people off. I&amp;#039;m not trying to be a jerk. I swear, I&amp;#039;m not. No one knows that I actually tried really hard to be on time. I set alarms and stationed a clock near the shower. I laid out my clothes and packed my bag in advance. I e-mailed myself directions. I berated myself for not having mastered a pretty basic life skill. I even took myself on my own mini Eat, Pray, Love retreat to Costa Rica a few years ago and made a list of everything I wanted to change in my life. &amp;quot;Be on time&amp;quot; was in the top five. I asked myself if there was some secret payoff I needed to identify. Did I have a sick need to show people that my time was more important than theirs? Did I crave the forgiveness I hoped they&amp;#039;d grant me after I apologized three times upon arriving? Did I have horrendous self-esteem? Related: How to Stop Being Late to Everything I didn&amp;#039;t think so. I was just really lousy at estimating how long things take. The moment of truth came a few years ago after my then boyfriend and I sprinted through the airport, thanks to my claim that I could shower, finish packing, and be buckled inside a cab within 30 minutes. Red-faced and dripping with sweat, he bellowed, &amp;quot;We are not doing this anymore!&amp;quot; It suddenly dawned on me that my bad habit was hurting us. Instead of giggling through the security line and savoring the last few hours of our vacation, I&amp;#039;d capped off the lovely week by spiking his cortisol levels. So I was intrigued by a story that went viral last year about a Scottish man diagnosed with what was called &amp;quot;chronic lateness disorder.&amp;quot; The condition hasn&amp;#039;t made the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, perhaps needless to say, but it turns out there may be a biological reason for tardiness. Neurological researchers have discovered that at least half of ADHD sufferers have abnormalities in their brain&amp;#039;s executive center, which plays a key role in time management. Related: Can Apps Help Organize Your Overscheduled Life? We Put Four of Them to the Test According to Russell A. Barkley, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina who studies ADHD, most patients are compromised in all five aspects of executive functioning: organization/planning, motivation, impulse restraint, emotional regulation, and, especially, time management. Yet even people who don&amp;#039;t have ADHD naturally have strengths and weaknesses in those areas, he says. You could be great at figuring out how to schedule six errands in an hour but be unable to find your way out of a 7-Eleven. Or good at landing new business projects but so consumed with checking who has liked your Facebook post that you can&amp;#039;t finish a work e-mail. &amp;quot;If your parents were lousy at time management, you probably share the genes,&amp;quot; Barkley told me. &amp;quot;Growing up in that environment wouldn&amp;#039;t help either.&amp;quot; If you&amp;#039;re in the late camp, the idea that you might have been born this way feels incredibly liberating, but it&amp;#039;s still a hard sell in a culture full of punctual types. &amp;quot;The problem is that we interpret people who aren&amp;#039;t good at time management as having a moral failing, as if they didn&amp;#039;t care enough to get here on time,&amp;quot; Barkley says. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t make moral judgments about people&amp;#039;s athletic abilities.&amp;quot; Yet there are key differences: Lateness doesn&amp;#039;t affect just you, it affects others, and it&amp;#039;s hard to blame those others for judging the behavior as rude and insensitive. On my little Costa Rican retreat, I cringed when I tallied the wreckage left by my lateness: the rushed pre-opera dinner with a boyfriend who&amp;#039;d planned a special evening, the bad movie seats with a girlfriend who waited until I arrived to go inside the theater, and countless first dates that began with belabored excuses for my problem\u2014or later ones when it took half the evening for the guy to stop being mad at me. I&amp;#039;ve also lost all credibility among friends and family, who give me fake meeting times or joke about &amp;quot;Sarah time.&amp;quot; Then too, the athletic-ability analogy falls short because although we may not all be natural runners, we all don&amp;#039;t have to run marathons. We do live in a world, however, where meeting deadlines, catching planes and stuff are rather necessary. &amp;quot;No amount of training is likely to overcome an inherent disability in time management,&amp;quot; Barkley says, before adding that, thankfully, &amp;quot;we can get better.&amp;quot; But it&amp;#039;s tough, says Diana DeLonzor, author of Never Be Late Again: 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged, whose research at San Francisco State University found that one in five Americans struggles with chronic lateness. &amp;quot;Telling someone to &amp;#039;be on time&amp;#039; is about as effective as telling someone to &amp;#039;lose weight,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; she says. After her husband&amp;#039;s exasperation and countless New Year&amp;#039;s resolutions failed to change her behavior, DeLonzor says that what finally helped was realizing she was a &amp;quot;thrill seeker&amp;quot; who got a kick out of the last-minute sprint to the finish line. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t relate to calmly walking down the street with a muffin and cup of coffee,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It felt natural running with my hair flying everywhere.&amp;quot; One solution: Compartmentalizing her thrill-seeking self. &amp;quot;I said, I&amp;#039;m going to take that part of my personality and put it in a box. I can be a thrill seeker on my own time. But when it comes to arriving somewhere important, I can be different.&amp;quot; Another strategy was relearning to tell time. That means clocking yourself getting ready in the morning and finding it takes 52 minutes, not 38, as you&amp;#039;d thought. But there are rewards to lateness that may be hard to resist. Many latecomers are &amp;quot;producers,&amp;quot; DeLonzor says, people who get an ego boost from speeding through a punishing to-do list. &amp;quot;They engage in magical thinking and believe they can do an unrealistic number of things in a certain amount of time, but they&amp;#039;re usually off by 20 to 30 percent. They remember the magical day 10 years ago when they made it to work in seven minutes, and even though their commute takes longer than seven minutes, day after day, they keep trying to make it in seven minutes.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s coupled with anxiety about &amp;quot;wasting&amp;quot; those extra minutes if, God forbid, they were early. Lateness may also be a consequence of multitasking. In a study of 181 train operators, Jeff Conte, PhD, an industrial-organizational psychologist from San Diego State University, found that those who tend toward doing too many things at once are less prone to be on time for work and more likely to focus instead on connecting with people. These aren&amp;#039;t desirable qualities for a subway driver, but I don&amp;#039;t mind seeing myself as a relationship-oriented overachiever! Except, of course, that my lateness damages my relationships. My next consultation was with Mary Solanto, PhD, an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center. She runs a 15-session cognitive-behavioral-therapy program to help adults with ADHD improve their time-management skills. She&amp;#039;s a fan of using apps such as MapQuest to avoid relying on inaccurate mental estimates of time and advocates making detailed schedules and sticking to deadlines. It&amp;#039;s also a good idea to wear an actual wristwatch (if you still own one). &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t always want to rely on your phone,&amp;quot; Solanto says. &amp;quot;It takes time to pull it out of your bag, and then you&amp;#039;re easily distracted by texts.&amp;quot; I try out these tools and continue to set my alarm, but by the end of the day, I feel so hyper-regulated that I&amp;#039;m more anxious about time than ever before. You have 12 minutes to eat this salad, I think. You have seven minutes to wait in line for coffee. But even when I set aside a luxurious hour to get ready for a party, I still sabotage myself. I enjoy not being rushed so much that I lose track of time cleaning the kitchen or picking out shoes. By the time I check the clock, I&amp;#039;m late. Again! Solanto says to stop getting so molecular and to schedule blocks of unstructured time, to give myself permission to zone out. She also suggests avoiding absorbing tasks when you know you have to leave. (I&amp;#039;ve nearly missed several flights while browsing in airport bookstores.) She tells the story of one patient who&amp;#039;d start looking at his e-mail after breakfast and wouldn&amp;#039;t get to the office until noon. They decided that he shouldn&amp;#039;t turn on his computer until after he arrived at work, even shutting the door to his home office in the morning to eliminate the visual temptation. Dedicating myself anew to my punctuality project, I am getting more realistic about how long things take\u201442 minutes to get through Trader Joe&amp;#039;s on a Sunday afternoon; eight minutes to enter my gym&amp;#039;s spin studio, adjust my bike, and put on my shoes\u2014and slowly improving. It helps to accept that &amp;quot;Sarah time&amp;quot; is usually off by 10 minutes and deliberately overcorrect. Sometimes I&amp;#039;m even early, and I follow DeLonzor&amp;#039;s advice to consider the extra time as a reward, using it to browse a nearby shop or return texts. And, yes, I often have to wait for people who&amp;#039;ve learned to take account of my late arrivals. No one is going to feel sorry for me, but it&amp;#039;s really annoying! My new trick is to try to see the world through the eyes of the punctual. &amp;quot;I have a 2:30 p.m. flight tomorrow,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ll tell friends. &amp;quot;What time would you leave for the airport?&amp;quot; This article appeared in the August 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/advice/a14715/how-not-to-be-late/>