Right On Time

It always feels good being right on time.


Walking into a meeting right when everyone is sitting down, coming into your house and watching the clock turn to 12:00 when that is when you had to be home, and submitting a paper online minutes before the due date rears its ugly head. It's like a little victory in the day when you just barely make a deadline. You challenged, and succeeded. It never fails to feel awesome.


Now, I don't mean to say that things should be put off until the last seconds of available time. Not at all. In fact, that should be avoided at all costs - it merely is epic when you pull off a last minute goal. I'm a big advocate of getting things done early. The reason I am is because I never get things done early. I procrastinate. A lot. Heavily. To extreme extents. If there was an award for procrastination, I'd have it sitting in a glass case so i could show it off. Regardless of how I carry myself, I still think people should try hard to work hard. Having nothing to worry about is such a worthy cause for being early.


Think of a workplace scenario. Early is 100% always better than being right on time. How do you think your boss or supervisor would feel if you handed them a report exactly at the deadline they gave you? Don't you think they'd feel a little better if they had gotten it a little sooner? Maybe they would need to review it before talking to their superior about it later. Everyone wants more time to do what they need to do, and in the workplace, everyone's time is interdependent. Your slacking might mean someone else will have to rush. Less problems will come up if things get done early. It's just easier.


It's not just in a serious scenario like during office hours that this applies. Suppose your parents want you home at 11:00 PM. As soon as you get home, they plan on going to sleep, because they know you are back and safe. If you came home at 10:00, they would go to sleep then, and get an extra hour of Z's before getting up the next day. That sounds nice for them. But for that to happen, you would have to be early. Being right on time would feel cool just for the sake of barely making it, but more good can come from being early than from being on time. More people are better off than just you.


If anyone has been keeping up with the past few days of my blog posts, they would know that I was going to do two posts two days in a row in order to avenge myself from missing a day. The time stamp below this post will end up reading 8:59. The program works through the west coast's time zone, so really I am posting it at 11:59 (two minutes from the moment I am writing these words).


Right on time. I could have crashed and burned and not been able to put the post up on time. But I didn't. If you are wondering - yes, it does indeed feel awesome. Never fails.