Filipino Time

If you're a Filipino, you must already heard the word "Filipino time". This is described as the habit of arriving late regardless of how planned and organized the schedule is.

For some of the Filipinos, this habit is already associated to our culture. And to some who make it a habit already, they tend to forget how their productivity is being impacted by this and hence they do not make extra effort to avoid or prevent the tardiness. They don't care of what others will feel but actually, repeated tardiness shows a lack of respect with other people.

Let me site an example.

In my work as an Application Support, we might have to deal with a shifting schedule, depending on the business requirements. In my previous work, we have to rotate into 3 shifts (APAC, EMEA , and AMER (a.k.a. the graveyard shift). Each shift has at least 1 hour overlap allotted for shift endorsement/handover.

Just imagine if you're the outgoing shift (and you're on a graveyard shift), at 7:00AM in the morning, you can already feel the sleepiness and tiredness. But then your colleague who supposedly accept your handover is 1 hour late, this means that you'll have to extend your shift 1 hour more. If this is being done say once or twice a week, it's fine and somehow acceptable. But if this happens daily for the whole week, this is already shows lack of respect and consideration to your case and is very unacceptable.

Possible Reasons for Being Tardy

Unpredictable Traffic

For those who are working in Metro Manila can relate into this. Traffic in Metro Manila is very unpredictable. If today, you spent only 1 hr travelling to your or office, or to you meeting destination, tomorrow, it can be doubled or might be tripled as well. So the tendency is, arriving very late or arriving very early depending on the traffic situation.

Due to this unpredictable traffic, commute time of every commuters are also impacted. Filipinos already used to long queue in MRT or LRT in Metro Manila.

The main problem here is, there is no specific time set for the arrival and departure of each train from one station to another unlike in the other countries where they are very strict with train schedule. This also applies to our buses. Hence Filipino commuters struggle to manage their commute time as well.

Public Transportation Availability

While for some places, public transportation is not an issue, there are some places where access to the same is not easy.

There are areas where the public transportation versus the commuter's ratio is very unbalanced already even prior the pandemic. It affects the commuter's waiting time.

This problem has worsen during the pandemic. When lockdown was initially issued in some of the places here in the Philippines, public transportations are the ones that are majorly impacted and hence the effect is reflecting back to the commuters.

Why? From the normal capacity of each transportation unit, they have to reduce it to implement the social distancing rule to prevent the spread of Covid-19 virus. This means, commuter's waiting time have been doubled as well or might as well worst that doubled.

Lack of Time Management

This can be associated as to having a lack of self discipline. Some already know their schedules ahead of time but do not make an extra effort on how to manage their time accordingly. They already know that they have to wake up early the next day for their commitments/appointment but they will still sleep too late. Hence resulting in difficulty to wake up the next day. Even though an alarm was set accordingly, they will just snooze it until only few hours are left for their preparation and travel.

How to Prevent Tardiness?

• Sleep Early. Make it a habit to sleep early cause sleeping late is one of the major root cause why some has difficulty waking up early in the morning.

• Do not snooze your alarm. When the alarm rings, don't make it a habit to extend 5 more minutes until the 5 minutes became 30 minutes or even longer.

• Allot enough time for preparation/ getting ready. Getting ready for work, or school sometimes takes time. Allot atleast 1 hour for this.

• Give time allowance for travel. Give atleast extra 30 minutes allowance for tpur travel. This is as contingency in case an unpredictable traffic occurs.

• Set a goal . Why don't you challenge yourself to set a record of having no lates for a week, and then once your initial goal has been achieved, try to increment it to 2 weeks and so on.

• Change your mindset. Erase your perception that being late is okay cause it's part of our culture. Change your mindset. Give respect and have considerations to your colleagues or boss (if you're an employee) or to your teachers (if you're a student) waiting for you as your motivation to getting early/ on-time at work.