Oprah has the answer: Polychronism!

A couple years back, I posted about my inability to be on time for anything. It's annoying to some, infuriating to others, and accepted by a select few. I've worked on it, I really have. I even got a little "talking to" by my boss recently, asking me to please keep an eye on the time and to give myself a few extra minutes. I'm never horrendously late for work - usually just a minute or two - but I'm late, nonetheless.

So. This morning while relishing my last true day of vacation (I go back to work tomorrow and start school in another week - for those who don't know, I took this week off to relax and hang out with some pals elsewhere), I found myself on Oprah's website. Now, I'm not normally an Oprah fan - at least not since I lived in Chicago and spent a good portion of my last four (unemployed) months there parked in front of my television - but yesterday I just happened to catch a preview of today's show while eating lunch in a restaurant. She was going to be interviewing Jeanette Walls, whose book The Glass Castle was a much-enjoyed read of mine last year. Since my television doesn't really work (the reception is maddeningly awful, so I don't even try), I logged on to see if I might be able to watch the show online. While poking around on the site, I stumbled upon a link to an article from last month's O Magazine. The headline was "Transition Anxiety," and the lead-in read, "If you're always running late, carelessness might not be to blame—your perception of time could be the culprit." Hmm...this sounded like something I might do well to read. And read I did!

Martha Beck, the author of the article, explains that people with "Polychronic" time perception aren't necessarily procrastinators, but rather have difficulty perceiving the amount of time it will take to complete a task and underestimate the transitions from one thing to the next. In other words, it's not getting to point B that's the problem, it's leaving point A that is. Polychrones, according to Beck:

• Do many things at once and are highly distractable.
• View time commitments as objectives.
• Are committed to people and relationships.
• Change plans often.
• Base promptness on the significance of the relationship.
• Have a strong tendency to build lifelong relationships.

Yep, that pretty much sums me up. So, thank you, Oprah and Martha Beck, for finally putting a name to my problem. Now I can figure out how the hell to fix it...as soon as I finish what I'm doing at the moment.