It’s about time
What’s more important–to be on time or to have a good time? Robin Swithinbank asks whether being a stickler for timekeeping maketh the gentleman
What’s more important—to be on time or to have a good time? Robin Swithinbank asks whether being a stickler for timekeeping maketh the gentleman
IDON’T know if you’ve ever come across the psychological theory ‘planning fallacy’. It’s predicated on the idea that we routinely underestimate the time it takes us to do something or get somewhere. Psychologists reckon most of us are out by a whopping 40%, which I suppose must be 24 minutes in every hour. Worse, its proponents believe that its symptoms— shabby timekeeping, by any other name— are extremely difficult to reverse.
Unfortunately, I’m convinced I’m afflicted by it. This would, at least, help explain why my children are always among the last to pass through the school gates in the morning and never the first to be collected. I’m not proud of this. Not least because it makes me a terrible hypocrite. I value timekeeping and punctuality in other humans enormously and am only too quick to upbraid one of my leaden-footed children for delaying and then dallying over simple tasks, such as eating a bowl of cereal or putting on a sock: ‘We’re late! Again!’
Although, I must say, I’m torn. On the one hand, sloppy time management can appear symptomatic of laziness, rudeness or, frankly, stupidity, but it can be disarmingly endearing, too. Yes, of course, being late is rude and inconsiderate. There are only so many gritted-teeth emoji faces you can send on ahead when your excuse for appearing late at a dinner party has no more backbone than ‘Sorry we’re late; we left late’ before you deserve to be blacklisted. Sometimes, it’s tortuous. The egg-and-spoon race won’t run again just because you had to send one more email before you left the office.
However, in the same breath, there’s something intensely irritating about people who are fastidious about time. The starter at your local golf club who tuts as you walk onto the first tee at 8.43am, when you were supposed to tee off at 8.39am. The host who can’t quite let go of the fact that you were 10 minutes late—problems with the District Line or no—and ends the evening still agitated by the fact the nibbles and starter had to be taken at the same time. ‘Lovely to see you!’ they say as the door closes, only to turn to a spouse before the latch has clicked and fume that ‘they are always late!’.
What’s more important? To be on time, or to have a good time? I have a good friend who appears not to suffer so much from planning fallacy as the Vanessa* Paradox. Vanessa will casually appear as much as two hours late for a gathering without so much as a computable explanation for her dilatory travel arrangements, but will then swiftly become the life and soul of the party, full of stories, witticisms and interesting
There’s always more time than we think, isn’t there?
things to say. The party is better when Vanessa arrives, even if it’s just about to finish.
And besides, there’s always more time than we think, isn’t there?
Don’t take it from me. Earlier this year, I interviewed Michael Clarke, former Australia cricket captain and Hublot ambassador, during an event at Harrods. I asked him what one piece of advice he would give the 2011 version of himself when he first took the armband. ‘To realise you always have
more time than you think you have,’ came the reply. He wasn’t actually advocating turning up late for the team bus, but he was suggesting we shouldn’t hurry decisions or be over-anxious about appearing to have all the answers at the drop of a hat.
Some of history’s most compelling characters were terrible timekeepers. Sir Winston
Churchill, star of at least 40% of all good
anecdotes, was notoriously ambivalent towards his schedule. His household staff were said to set clocks 15 minutes fast to ready him for cabinet meetings and the arrival of guests, a largely fruitless endeavour given
that he carried a Breguet pocket watch with him wherever he went. Legend has it that even when he asked Clementine to meet him at Blenheim Palace to propose to her, he was so late that she’d almost given up on him by the time he finally arrived. Evidently, he had enough about him to persuade her to ignore his diary disdain—by the time he died in 1965, they had been married for almost 60 years.
The watch industry, which I’ve spent most of my working life covering, seems equally divided on this. Some watch companies appeal to our wallets with claims of superlative precision and accuracy, as if these were somehow the ultimate proof of value and relevance. Others seem content to advertise time’s less measurable by-products: companionship, the longevity of good design, the romance of the skills behind a mechanical watch and, of course, the lifetime of service fulfilled by a proper timepiece.
I suspect watch owners fall into two similar categories. I know plenty who would sooner not leave the house than step out sporting a watch without a hacking or stop-seconds function. This is a device that stops a watch’s seconds hand when you pull the crown out to set it, so that you can align it exactly with atomic time, should the need compel you. Of course, you can’t set a watch exactly to atomic time, because you’re not a machine capable of performing functions accurate to less than one second every 15 billion years, but let’s not dwell on that (gritted-teeth face emoji). There are others for whom the few minutes lost here or there are no more important than a best-before date.
Actually, maybe there’s a third category: the rest of us, who straddle that spectrum. One thing I imagine all of us agree on is that a proper Swiss watch shows you have plenty of character, whether you’re on time or not.
*Names have not been changed. Vanessa, you know who you are.