Being On Time

Here's a message we know all too well, yet practice way too little.  Well, for the most part anyway.  What does it mean to be on time?  Well if you were to ask legendary coach Vince Lombardi he would introduce you to what we know of today as:  Lombardi time which states:

"Show up for every important business meeting 15 minutes ahead of the scheduled meeting time."

Obviously if you show up with fifteen minutes to spare you would be able to collect your breath and get situated for whatever your endeavor might be.  We've also, however, grown up in a culture where we spread the message of being "fashionably late" - a time frame I've noticed means a lot of different things to many different people.

So what's really the point of being on time?  If nothing else, it reduces stress.

Hubby and I were on our way to an important meeting a couple of days ago.  If you are familiar with the differences between Utah Highways (where we just came from) and New Jersey Highways (where we live now), you would agree that they are night and day.  While Utah is built on a measurable grid system with two main highways, it's really difficult to get lost.  However NJ has about 100 highways and they all like to loop around ten times before spitting you out on a straight road.  Fun stuff for sure.

So as we have began to become familiar with these roads we decided to leave an HOUR early for our appointment to make sure we'd be "on time".  Glad we did.  We drive a sporty red Acura that has a double muffler (we bought it that way and have yet to change it back), so it's loud!  As we navigated through the potholed streets confusing the hell out of our GPS system we saw flashing lights behind us.  You got it, we were getting pulled over.

We actually got pulled over right in front of our destination and we had about thirty minutes to spare.  Apparently they were looking for a car that matched our description and we had to wait in the parking lot until they boss-man came to verify that we weren't indeed running away from the law.  After a time the officer tapped our window and motioned to us that we were free to go.  Great, no problem. We entered our building and still had 15 minutes to catch our breath.  Vince would be proud!

Had we left later or tried to make our appointment just at the right time, we would have been stressed out by the encounter and our meeting could have gone poorly.  But we weren't stressed, just a little amused at the whole thing.  All because we gave ourselves plenty of time. 

This is an easy habit to implement.  Get up a little earlier, get ready the night before, so that as you travel to work, school, or casual events, you can go in a positive attitude that will surely affect the rest of your day.