Throughout my life, I feel like I have mostly been respectful of others’ time, making sure I arrive early to meetings/work/etc. In this day and age, it’s easy to alert the other party if I *am* running late, but I try my best not to do so. I’m human–so I don’t have a perfect track record–and I don’t enjoy the look on the other person’s face when I see that I am so terribly late and essentially disrespectful of their time. I feel a great sense of shame when this happens to me and remind myself to not do this again next time.
Understandably, not everyone operates the same way and everyone has different values. Over the course of only the past couple of months, I have realized that I need to distance myself from those who don’t respect time: those who are consistently late to meetings/events/etc. and those who cancel last minute. I understand that life comes up, and things DO happen, but still–it reflects badly on the person when they cancel last minute. I have heard many kinds of excuses: didn’t know where to meet (it was in the Google Calendar invitation….), traffic, something happened at the business, etc. Time is valuable, and that time reserved for the canceled individual could have been allotted towards something/someone else.
In the end, these individuals do me a favor and remind me of why I shouldn’t do business/be friends with them: if they don’t respect my time, then they clearly don’t respect me (even if they wouldn’t admit this fact to my face). As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.