I have been writing about stress and time and I experience again and again how different it is in various countries and cultures how people see punctuality. And I often have to laugh about the German mentality in this. I have experienced several times that people want to be exactly on time and if possible even a little bit earlier. They get themselves into a lot of stress and an awful state of mind which even resembles panic of the thought of coming too late. In the end you are 10 to 20 minutes early and have to wait.
And then they complain that they have so much stress in their lives and never enough time. I also know that it feels like this to them, that they really believe they are stressed by time and appointments but in reality they are stressing themselves! Punctuality becomes more important than the actual appointment.
I believe it is good to respect time. I do not appreciate it either when people are too much Indian about time, many Indians do not really care about punctuality. We often joke and say it is ‘Indian Standard Time’, when you are an hour or more late. I like it, when you have an appointment, if both parties come approximately at the time that you have fixed. But I believe you should not get stressed about it! Take some Indian time feeling and some German time feeling together, be on time but be relaxed.
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I arrived in India a few months ago and I remember being in the UK just the day before I left to come here and calling my friend for an explanation when she was only five minutes late in meeting me. How strange that seems now.
I am from Germany and ha similar experiences when I traveled to India- first of being stressed out because nothing was on time and then remembering when time was so important and how silly it all felt.As with everything- it’s having a BALANCE that is important.
It seems hard to find a balance between the two because it’s like, you either care about being on time or you don’t. The amount you care determines how early or late you are. But I suppose it’s good to be prepared and plan on being early…and if things go wrong with the plan, then just go with the flow and don’t panic about being late.