Late is not a failure state

A thing finished after its date is a finished thing. The date was a guess about the future, made by someone who knew less than you know now. When the guess turns out wrong, the work is still true, and the part that remains is still only the part that remains.

Late is a logistics word

“On time” started as scheduling vocabulary. A train is on time so that the connecting train can be caught. A report is on time so that the meeting can use it. Those are real reasons, and they belong to a particular train and a particular meeting.

Somewhere along the way the word moved. “On time” became a statement about the person, and “late” became a small verdict. Nobody decided this. It happened the way a word picks up a smell.

Separate the two uses. When lateness has a cost, such as the connecting train, a client’s launch or a tax deadline, the cost is worth knowing about, and you deal with it as a cost. When it has no cost beyond a date having passed, “late” is just a measurement. It tells you the distance between the plan and what happened. It says nothing about whether the thing is worth finishing.

Half-credit accounting

There is a quiet scoring rule that is easy to run without having chosen it: finished on the date counts as 1, finished late counts as 0.5, and unfinished after a late start counts as 0.

Run that rule on a real case. You meant to send the proposal on Tuesday, and it is now Thursday. Under half-credit accounting, sending it today earns you very little. It will be a late proposal, an apology attached to a document. The sums point toward leaving it, or toward waiting until you can send it with a better explanation, and the explanation takes another two days to write.

The same arithmetic runs on habits. You walked every morning for five weeks, then a bad fortnight swallowed the routine. Under the rule, the five weeks are spoiled and a restart is worth 0.5 at best. So the restart waits for a clean Monday, and the clean Monday has a way of being the Monday after next.

The rule is expensive precisely where the work is most nearly done. The person two days from finishing has the most to lose from it, because the remaining effort is small and the rule has just declared the result nearly worthless. Streaks work the same way when they are the only measure of a habit (see why streaks make you quit). A single break takes down the number, and then the number gets the credit for how things went.

The rule also gets the facts wrong. Proposals sent on Thursday get read on Thursday. A habit resumed after a fortnight is a habit that is running. The thing that is true of the work on Tuesday is true on Thursday, and the extra two days are a fact about the calendar.

Late by default

If lateness were a rare lapse, a character verdict might at least be proportionate. It isn’t rare.

Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked 37 psychology students at the University of Waterloo, in their final semester of an honours thesis course, when they expected to hand in the finished thesis. The students who had finished by the time records closed (33 of them) predicted 33.9 days on average and took 55.5 days. Fewer than a third, 29.7%, finished within the time they had called their best estimate. Even the students’ pessimistic forecast, made on the assumption that everything went as badly as it possibly could, averaged 48.6 days, which was still short of 55.5.

These were people with a stake in the answer, estimating their own work a few weeks out, and most of them ran late. Your Thursday is hardly evidence about your character. The pattern has a name, the planning fallacy, and a post of its own covers the research and what helps. For this essay, one fact is enough: an estimate is a forecast, forecasts of your own work lean optimistic, and so a plan being missed is closer to the expected result than to a surprise.

Judging someone harshly for the expected result is a poor way to keep score. Revise the estimate by all means. Keep the verdict out of it.

The finish line doesn’t close at sunset

A deadline is a marker that someone put on a calendar. Its job is to coordinate and to prompt. Past the date it stops coordinating, and the work underneath is exactly where you left it.

Think of an athletics track at dusk, with nobody on it and the ribbon still stretched across the lanes. The race was scheduled for the afternoon. The ribbon does not come down when the light changes. Anyone who arrives and runs through it has finished.

There are real cases where a date does close a door: an application window, a booking, a shop that shuts. Those are worth recognising, and they are rarer than they feel. When you are unsure which kind you are in, ask one question: if I finish this now, does it still do what it was meant to do? For most things, the email, the essay, the repair, the apology, the habit, the answer is yes.

If you want to treat dates as something other than a pass-or-fail line, doing a thing on a date versus by a date is a useful way to decide which dates deserve to be firm in the first place.

Go finish it late

Pick the one thing that is currently late and still open. It may be small. It may be the one you have been avoiding being reminded about.

Work out the smallest next piece that moves it, and do that piece today. Do not write the apology first. If the person on the other end needs a line of context, one plain sentence will do: “Sorry for the delay, here it is.”

Then see what the accounting says. The result is a finished email, or a resumed habit, or a submitted form, and none of them has a late stamp that anyone but you can see.

The next time a date slips, which it will, the question worth asking is what the next step is. Whether the thing is still worth anything has already been answered.

Sources

• Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366