Timeliness, the quality of something happening at just the right, suitable, prompt moment.

In business, to be on time meant to do the bare minimum. How often would the measure of someone’s professionalism be judged by the minutes of delay in a meeting or the late submission of a non-vital document? Be on time every day for a decade, and the singular late arrival on a stormy day will still be the cause of much unnecessary derision. Being on time was the expectation, being late the inexcusable.

When you really thought about it, being punctual did not mean much in the grand scheme of things. How often was it that those brief lapses of time truly did matter? Could those few minutes truly be the difference in landing a significant collaboration with a respected company? Would that delay in the submission of a patent really cause a loss of tens of millions of dollars due to stolen intellectual property? Typically these issues were simply the result of continuous mistakes or errors misattributed to the singular event that “broke the camel’s back”. Recency bias function more as a means of disseminating the blame