In the U.S. military, an unwritten rule says to arrive 15 minutes before the stated time. A common motto is “15 minutes early is on time, and on time means that you’re late.”
When a senior officer is involved, the rule can double: “15 minutes prior to 15 minutes prior.”
Vince Lombardi, the coach of the Green Bay Packers, expected his players to be 15 minutes early for practices and meetings.
In 2012 a new clock went up at Lambeau Field, the Packers’ stadium. It faces Lombardi Avenue and is always 15 minutes fast. In Green Bay this is known as Lombardi Time. At the Hotel Northland in Green Bay, the clock behind the front desk is also 15 minutes fast.
The saying “Early is on time. On time is late” is often attributed to Lombardi, but without a source.
I’m running ten minutes late. I’m running behind. — The warning that comes before the lateness.
Go ahead and start without me. — Do not wait for me.
Be there in five. — I will arrive in five minutes.
Nine sharp. Nine on the dot. — Exactly at nine, not a minute later.
Fashionably late. — Late to a party, and acceptable.
At Amazon, meetings do not begin with slides. Before the meeting, someone writes a six-page narrative memo. The meeting then opens with everyone reading the memo in silence. In his letter to shareholders published in April 2018, Jeff Bezos called this “a kind of ‘study hall.'”
In Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau defines price in his own way: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” The sentence is in the first chapter, titled “Economy.”
Thoreau keeps the accounting, but he counts in life instead of dollars.
Frank Gilbreth was an American pioneer of time and motion study. Two of his children, Frank Jr. and Ernestine, wrote about him in Cheaper by the Dozen (1948), which became a film in 1950. Their father buttoned his vest from the bottom up, because it took him three seconds instead of seven. He also found a way to cut seventeen seconds off his shaving time.
For a while he shaved with two razors at once, but he finally gave that up. “It wasn’t the slashed throat that really bothered him. It was the two minutes.”
On October 19, 2021, Walt Disney World launched Genie+. For $15 a day, guests could use Lightning Lane entrances at more than 40 attractions instead of the regular lines. The paid service replaced FastPass, which had been free.
The U.S. Department of Transportation gives its analysts a dollar value for travel time. The guidance notes that many of its actions “are designed to benefit travelers by reducing the time spent in traveling.”
In the 2016 guidance, an hour of local personal travel was worth $13.60, and an hour of local business travel $25.40, in 2015 dollars. A project that saves travelers hours can count those hours as a benefit in dollars.
The IRS publishes an estimate of how much time Americans spend on their tax returns. It defines the burden as “the time and money taxpayers spend to comply with their tax filing responsibilities.”
In September 2024 it estimated, in preliminary figures for fiscal year 2025, that Form 1040 and related forms take 2.266 billion hours a year, or 13 hours and 6 minutes per filer. It put the total burden, in time and money, at $92.4 billion.
In 2006 the Stanford researchers Sanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer reported that people who are paid by the hour think about their time in terms of money. Using U.S. Census survey data, they found that people paid hourly spend about 36 percent less time volunteering than salaried people.
In a further study, salaried people who calculated their hourly pay changed too. “Once the value of their hour was made plain to them, they began to think more like hourly employees.”