Time

I took my brother Sean and sister-in-law Hannah to the airport yesterday morning. My brothers, especially the Third Born, take punctuality to a whole new level. If Sean says their flight leaves at seven, we should be on the road by 4 am. Never mind that they were checked in online and had no bags to drop off. Yesterday we arrived on time, with plenty more to spare.

One thing you should know about my family: we are hardly ever late. We got it from our father, who, contrary to the prevailing culture at the time (that's changing now), was conscious of time. My mother doesn't like the feeling that people are inconvenienced because they are waiting for her. Preparing to go out of the house is clockwork, chop-chop, paspasanay. Anyone left behind, dilly-dallies, nagapadugay-dugay, invites criticism. It baffles me how some people, who are not celebrity and who have not  massive strokes or disabling neurological diseases, can take hours just to shower and put on clothes and arrive late to their appointments.

I can take this concept of time even further to describe why I avoid meetings in general because they take so much time and often end with what one could call "progress." These meetings are unstructured, do not have a fixed agenda, and people are unprepared to give updates. All organizations should have a flow chart on how to determine if a meeting is really necessary. This is brilliant. The flowchart should incorporate whether a face-to-face or a Zoom meeting is preferred. I like online meetings better, to be honest. That's one good thing that came out of the pandemic, in a sense: the realization that meetings can be done virtually. It removes the hassle of driving to the venue, time that's better spent doing something else. It's also more economical: no snacks, no venue reservations, and no airconditioning.