The Weekend Edition

Back to the future: The Nokia 3310 is about to be reborn. That’s right, the indestructible “feature” phone from 2000 will be back in a slightly re-imagined form on or about 26 February, according to a report from Evan Blass, the Man Who Brings Technology Leaks. Fastcodedesign has more. Privacy nerds and people who need to stay in touch — but not that in touch — with loved ones or the office will rejoice.

Speaking of which, our privacy tip of the morning: On your iPhone, go to Settings and find the Privacy pane, then tap on Location Services. Then ask yourself: Do you really want Photos to be geotagging your pictures? Does CNN need to know where you are all the time? Why is that chain bookstore in New York tracking your every move? Tap any one of them and switch their setting to “Never” or (maybe) “While Using the App.” (Can’t find the Privacy pane? Swipe down when you have Settings open and type ‘Privacy’ — without the quotes — in the search box.)

Want more iPhone privacy tips? Try The privacy enthusiast’s guide to using an iPhoneon Lifehacker. And for the super-paranoid (which may just be us) using any platform at all, try: A Guide to Getting Past Customs With Your Digital Privacy Intact in Wired.

America’s Morsi Moment (h/t Taymour H.) continues: The president has, effectively, done nothing since assuming the office. The deep state and the press are pushing back against a deeply unpopular head of state. Nearly a third of the nation is having problems concentrating at work, because all they can talk about is the political event of the moment. Journalists, battered and groggy, have found “a renewed sense of mission.” A night-time comedian is skewering a political figure, earning talk of awards and the adoration of the left. Ring a bell, for those of you who lived through Egypt in 2012 and 2013?

This sounds a lot like a real-life version of the TV show “bns”: The largest ever known insider trading case in terms of actual profits was when Steven A Cohen’s SAC Capital made a profit and avoided losses of USD 275 mn. Sheelah Kolhatkar talks with Dave Davies about the case against Cohen on an episode of NPR’s excellent show, Fresh Air. Kolhatkar discusses her new book, Black Edge, which delves deep into the case and East coast hedge fund culture.

She says Cohen designed a system to help teach young employees the differences between different types of information. “There was white edge, which was essentially very readily available legal information that anyone could get… There was gray edge, which was in between. It was perhaps something you’d heard from an executive working at a company, but it wasn’t totally clear what they meant. It was sort of in this gray zone, and you weren’t necessarily sure it might be helpful. And then there was black edge, which was clearly inside information. It was material non-public information that was likely to move the stock.”

Kolhatkar says big hedge funds employ state-of-the-art technologies: “They are spending money on, you know, hiring people to watch truck traffic in and out of manufacturing facilities in China. They’re studying satellite imagery of parking lots in Wal-Marts across America … And they are willing to spend money to gain any type of advantage or to take advantage of any resource possibly available. I mean, they literally will hire people to install their own fiber optic cables so their trades can be executed faster.” After the case was uncovered, Cohen was forced to shut SAC down and to stop operating a hedge fund, but he was able to keep his USD 10 bn in personal wealth and operate a “family office” (runtime 35:42).

The USD 65 bn Madoff ponzi scheme was the biggest in history. We all think we know something about it, but have never heard the story from Bernie Madoff himself. Radiolab invited over reporters Steve Fishman and Ellen Horne to play snippets from their Audible series Ponzi Supernova, which features exclusive footage of Madoff. Madoff had “the greatest seat in the house to what was going on behind the scenes,” Fishman says, and he just wanted to know why someone, who was already rich, would build this ponzi scheme. Fishman and Horne interviewed dozens of FBI and SEC agents, investors, traders, and attorneys and also scrutinized Madoff’s account to understand exactly why he did it, how he managed to pull it off, and how culpable he actually was. Madoff’s calls from prison are fascinating in their own way, because everyone knows he did it and that he’s guilty, but it is interesting to hear how he describes what his life in prison is like and how he perceives himself. “I’m a good person,” Madoff says. His family had nothing to do with the scheme, “I kept them out of the loop,” as he recites his own story (runtime 39:35).

The automation of M&A at Goldman Sachs is scaring bankers: It’s revenge of the nerds over on Wall Street, as top firms look to automate M&A transactions to the dread of junior bankers. Programmers at Goldman Sachs have already taken over the trading floor, and the ‘strats’ — as they are affectionately known inside the investment bank — have now moved to support equity underwriting, leveraged buyouts and other financial services and real estate transactions — jobs that instinctively lend themselves less to tech than does trading. The move has gotten some bankers sweating, as advances in technology could thin the ranks of low-level staff at Goldman as much as 10% in the next few years, people familiar with the matter said. Research firm Coalition says that the top 10 Wall Street firms have cut the number of client-facing investment bankers they employ by 15 percent since 2010. While these cuts are part of a wider series of layoffs by Goldman Sachs as 4Q16 revenues fell 9% year-on-year, the proportion of hires from schools like MIT (as opposed to say MBA holders from Wharton) is on the rise, writes Olivia Oran for Reuters.

Goldman Sachs is not hiding that this is the direction in which it’s heading. At a Harvard event in January, Deputy CFO Marty Chavez — a computer scientist who’s risen up the ranks by leading teams of strats and a contender to succeed CEO Lloyd Blankfein — said some investment banking tasks were "begging to be automated," according to MIT Technology Review. Yet despite this frankness, top executives belittle the concerns and state that the goal is to free up juniors to help executives make more money. In the end, as with manufacturing, bankers may have to end up developing skills which cannot be replicated by software, something Chavez himself has been calling for.

Ikea is partnering with over a dozen African designers from seven countries for its new African line, Quartz’s Lynsey Chutel writes. “We want to learn from the creative explosion which is taking place in several cities around Africa right now and spread it to the rest of the world by working with designers from several African countries that all have different takes on design,” Ikea spokeswoman Johanna Martin told Quartz. The collection is set to launch in 2019. The designers met once last year in Sweden are meeting again next month at Design Indaba conference in Cape Town. “All the designers collaborating on the collection are in some way preoccupied with reimagining Africa’s urban spaces in cities as diverse as Cairo is to Luanda,” writes Chutel.

On our TBR list this weekend: At least one of us is stuck reading about transfer pricing this morning (trust us, you don’t want to know) and plans to cleanse his brain afterward by re-reading Barbarians at the Gate, a classic from 1989 that created the genre of “inside the deal” business reporting we know today. It combines larger-than-life business personalities, phenomenal writing and a dose of 1980s nostalgia — what’s not to love? If you, like us, missed it the first time around, it’s a great way to kill a quiet Friday afternoon.

Something that would turn ugly in Cairo: Flying taxis. In the parallel universe that is Dubai, the Road and Transportation Agency announced self-flying taxis will be in the city’s skies by July, Leslie Josephs writes for Quartz. Yes, this July, as in July 2017. Check the video above for a display of the taxi’s features: A four-legged drone with eight propellers can send a single 100-kg passenger through the air about 50 km on one charge (watch, runtime 1:39). The vehicle is made in — you guessed it — China. This is about relieving what the folks in Dubai call “traffic congestion.” We hope officials here are not listening to this, as we cannot help but be reminded of the ‘Egyptian Monster.’

Walkable cities are marvelous creations. They give us freedom from cars, freedom from sprawl, and freedom to walk our cities, as urban planner Jeff Speck says. Speck gave a TED Talk where he explained four planning principles to transform sprawling cities “into safe, walkable oases full of bike lanes and tree-lined streets.” His main point is that if you want to have a walkable city you can’t start with the sprawl model, you need the bones of an urban model and then build on it (runtime 18:37).

An Italian held hostage in Mauritania over a multi-mn USD transaction gone bad? Just another Tuesday in the shadowy, high stakes world of cyber warfare. As demand for cyber espionage continues to rise, a thriving international cyber-weapons arms market worth bns is developing fast. Companies and countries are dishing out mns for “offensive technology.” Hackers are now a hot commodity at weapons trade shows, peddling their wares and skills to governments looking to spy on other countries. It is a world where a guy like Maniche Kumar, who taught himself how to code through Youtube videos in his poor village in India, can sign a USD 2.5 mn contract with the government of Mauritania. But, as one security analyst said, the cyber weapons market operates on a “trust deficit,” meaning it is mired in scams, cons and strong arm tactics by governments. It perhaps unsurprising that Kumar’s agreement goes sour. Bloomberg’s Decrypted podcast takes you through the story of how it all devolved, and how an innocent Italian bodyguard hired by Kumar ended up imprisoned for the last 16 months in a Mauritanian jail cell. You can check out the episode on SoundCloud (runtime: 22:26).

Getting paid to travel to some of the world’s most remote places to entertain your palate with mouth-watering authentic dishes sounds like “a fantasy profession” that’s just too good to be true. Except in the case of the globetrotting food connoisseur Anthony Bourdain, whose life for the past 15 years stands in sharp contrast to the experiences that set him out on this path to begin with. His travel cooking show has been featured on a number of channels over the years under different names — A Cook’s Tour on the Food Network, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel, and now Parts Unknown on CNN. The premise, in Bourdain’s own words, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of [redacted], and basically do whatever the [redacted] I want.” Now who wouldn’t want that? In his profile on Bourdain for The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe, delves into the particulars of this New Jersey-bred, “well-heeled nomad’s” life, what makes him tick, and the awe-inspiring journey that led him to be filmed “pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg (runtime 42:54), or spearing fatted swine (runtime 49:55) as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo,” Keef writes.

So who exactly is Anthony Bourdain and what’s his story? For more than 20 years before he began his television career, Bourdain worked as a professional chef, and while he was good at what he did — having learned the basics at the Culinary Institute of America — he casually admits that he really was not the most creative. During those days, he hardly ever traveled and also battled with a serious addiction to a few types of drugs.

His lucky break only came in the year 2000, when he published his memoir Kitchen Confidential, which quickly climbed up best seller lists, as it offered people a unique glimpse into the inner workings and drama of the hospitality industry in an unabashed, “savagely honest,” gonzo-style way. From there, Bourdain soon grew into a new type of avant-garde food master who “makes a fetish of authenticity” and believes that the days of 15-course meals are long gone. “Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy.” Nine-times-out-of ten, that delicacy is some form of street food in some remote part of a city or island that most people would not normally venture into. One thing about him and a tip for the every traveller: Bourdain says he will never eat somewhere with a dirty kitchen or bathroom. Check out Parts Unknown’s official YouTube channel for more of Bourdain’s thrilling food-capades.

If you want to improve education, figure out what actually works, says researcher John Hattie. In 2015, Hattie published a paper entitled “What Doesn’t Work in Education: The Politics of Distraction,” in which he picked apart some common (but ineffective) approaches to improving education, which he says “distract from other, potentially better, solutions.” Among them: The rigorous implementation of achievement standards for schools and the frequent administration of standardized tests to determine students’ performance, which Hattie denounces as wrongheaded. Schools that accept struggling students are often perceived as failures, whereas other schools with more rigorous vetting of its incoming students are ten steps ahead because they select the cream of the crop and therefore have to exert minimal effort to maintain high achievement standards, while frequent standardized testing does not give teachers the kind of feedback they need to improve their teaching methods.

Hattie also says that “too much attention is often paid to parents’ desire to choose which school their child attends, when the evidence shows that the classroom they attend is more important. Indeed, there is increasing pressure on parents and children alike to keep up with constantly intensifying competition to land a spot in the best educational institutions, and the pressure begins to present itself earlier on in the child’s life as more people seek higher education, Ryan Avent writes for The Economist’s sister magazine 1843: “Woe unto the Manhattan parents who waited until the birth of their young one to put her name on the list for that top preschool, which feeds so many of its ‘graduates’ to that perfect primary school, which is a pipeline to the secondary school to the prep school to the university that is meant to bring nirvana and perfect happiness and good fortune to the people who complete the path.” Avent reaches a similar conclusion to Hattie’s, but from a parenting point of view: In the race to prepare their children as well as possible to land a spot at the top universities, high-earning and highly educated parents are investing more of their time into their children, which in and of itself is beneficial, regardless of admissions outcomes.

NPR’s Anya Kamenetz (expectedly) focuses her discussion about the implications of Hattie’s research on the United States, but there are certainly lessons to be learned for Egypt, particularly as education reform continues to be one of the most pressing issues our society continues to face. For example, Hattie’s research suggests that smaller class sizes and greater amounts of injected money actually don’t add up to a better educational experience, which flies in the face of the wisdom behind the private schools that are viewed as the best educational institutions in the country. The researcher says that the crux of the issue here is the teacher’s approach to teaching, which he found is unlikely to change in relation to the size of the classroom. Instead, Hattie finds that altering teaching methods — which, arguably, are not contingent upon school choice, class size, or money spent on each child — by taking steps such as focusing on individualized growth, providing students with immediate and effective feedback, and encouraging classroom discussions, would be far more effective in improving a child’s educational experience.

Soukaina Joual often uses meat as a medium for her art. Joual is not afraid of blood, and doesn’t understand why anyone else would be, either, Zoë Hu writes in contemporary Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine Reorient. Flesh and blood lend much inspiration to Joual, the 26 year-old Moroccan artist whose work is described as spanning “multiple mediums and often invokes the raw, the red, and the repulsive. Because of its vivid imagery, it sometimes darts into the territory of gore; but what makes Joual’s pieces so provocative in particular is the playfulness involved. There is an underlying gesture in her oeuvre that swivels like a weathervane between the fake and the real.” Her first performance piece “I’m not so innocent” (runtime 05:43), for example, is gory, fascinating, and mind-numbing at the same time. In the performance, she takes a piece of meat, slices it, and then manually grinds it. “Flesh: I don’t know if I can call it alive or dead,” she says. “‘At one point it will rot, it will change. In a way, it’s still alive.’ The performance is about killing, of course, but also transformation and — another dry quip — the boredom that can be found in both processes.”

For her second performance piece, Joual veered away from meat. She attends a mass protest in Seoul, South Korea wearing a mirrored cube on her head. Joual says she attended the march not as a citizen or artist, but “as an incarnation, a mirror, a reflection of my external surroundings and how the world around us currently appears… I was reflecting light, physical images, people’s thoughts and actions.” Hu says the performance “evokes a Daft Punk-esque techno-future of dissent, wherein the watched and the watcher become endlessly confused. Whether it is Joual’s own observance of the protest, or the bystanders taking photos of her (and in turn, themselves reflected in her mirrors), the beam of surveillance bounces back and forth endlessly.”

On her work with meat, Joual tells Hu “what I found funny is that even people here who are used to seeing meat … pull back. They say, ‘Oh, that’s too much.’” Much of Joual’s work explores meat’s presence in Morocco and the MENA region, and her work could sometimes seem to have political undertones. “The Arab World, which she presented in 2014, is a map of the Middle East and North Africa reconfigured as a wall of packaged raw beef. Meat’s link to violence is an easily made one, and it only takes the viewer another thoughtless step forward to affix the MENA region onto that relationship; but Joual avoids the obvious constellation of meat-violence-Arab world, instead tinkering with a type of humour that seems almost prankish in how it addresses viewers. For example, an LED sign with the word ‘halal’ blazed into its surface may seem to signal vaguely towards meat’s position in a religious value system; yet, a second look discloses the mutually informative relation between language and sense of place that undergirds much of Joual’s work,” Hu explains. “The joke of the piece is perhaps its own redundancy. The sign’s neon glints slyly off people’s own assumptions, showing how attitudes towards meat are so unthinkingly rooted in personal context; Halal panels can be seen as a necessity, a logical fixture in the urban landscapes and immigrant neighbourhoods of Europe and America. For many, the sign is commercial and utilitarian.” Joual says her inspiration comes from Morocco. “Pointing to the café’s refrigerated display, in which sausage links and kebabs have been laid out like pieces of jewellery,” she tells Hu, “I see this image, and I want to take that whole thing and put it in a gallery. I want to say, ‘This is art.’”

How many of us lie awake in bed at night feeling guilty about all the unchecked items on our to-do lists and beating ourselves up for not being productive enough? In her latest piece for Quartz, Sarah Todd argues that it’s not an issue of productivity, but rather one of unrealistic expectations. The solution, as she recently learned, was that some things have got to give. Todds’s inspiration was the work of author Tiffany Dufu, who suggests in her new book, Dropping the Ball, that “a lot of us are simply taking on too much.” Drawing from her own example, Dufu—a mother, wife, business owner, writer, and women’s rights champion—says that “I might be better than my staff at drafting annual fund letters, but I brought the most value in face-to-face meetings pitching major donors. No one else on my team could do that.” Naturally she began delegating the task of letter writing to her employees. Dufu arrived at that conclusion through English economist David Ricardo’s 1817 theory of comparative advantage, which she says can help us set more realistic goals for ourselves.

But how does this apply to practical life and to-do lists? The textbook definition of this principle is “the ability to produce goods and services at a lower opportunity cost, not necessarily at a greater volume,” which means that a country for example should dedicate its resources to producing what it can do very well rather than trying to produce everything it possibly can. So while France can cultivate some great avocadoes (tried and true), what it really excels at is making wine.Dufu’s main premise here is that if we can consider the opportunity cost of everything we set out to achieve in the day—or our lives in general—we would be able to really decide and focus on what is more important at any given moment in time. All it would take is for us to stop for a second to think of the bigger picture: What really matters? What can be postponed? What is really unimportant? Perhaps that way, we might really find ourselves achieving much more than what we originally thought we would.

Why hasn’t evolution wiped out our susceptibility to depression? Depression is a highly pervasive condition, with some researchers estimating that 30-50% of people have experienced a major depressive episode at some point throughout their lives.

Evolutionary psychologists seem to believe that not only is our susceptibility to depression not an evolutionary glitch, it could even serve a positive purpose. Researchers have really gotten down into the nitty gritty of depression in hopes of explaining its evolutionary purpose, to the point of looking at the evolutionary significance of depression in pathogen host defense (for those of you who don’t speak science, the research basically suggests that depression actually plays a role in protecting people from dying of infections). On a more tangible level, though, depression can also serve as a function to force us to analyze complex issues, according to psychologists. Evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews “sees [depression’s function] in the condition’s bouquet of symptoms, which include ‘anhedonia,’ or an inability to feel much pleasure; people who are depressed ruminate frequently, often in spirals; and they get more REM sleep, a phase associated with memory consolidation,” writes New York Magazine’s Drake Braer. Psychologist Laura King expands on Andrews’ postulation by discovering (through decades of research) that “the meaning people derive from difficult experiences depends not on the amount that they’ve suffered, but the extent of reflection — or meaning-making.”

Are you depressed? For the uninitiated, the diagnostic criteria for a major depressive episode include symptoms such as a significant change in weight or appetite, a change in sleeping patterns (manifested in either insomnia or hypersomnia), feelings of guilt and worthlessness, and having suicidal thoughts. So why hasn’t evolution worked its magic to make us immune to depression?

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• Egypt gets a lot of love on V-day. (Enterprise)
• ‘100% Egyptian Cotton’ to be featured in the International Fashion Showcase 2017 Presented by Mercedes-Benz (News release, pdf)
• Egyptian American Enterprise Fund’s annual letter for 2017 (EAEF, pdf)
• Watching a frozen engine warm up using a thermal camera. (Engineering Explained, video)
• Michael Bloomberg’s advice for students on how to succeed in business (New York Times)

Capital Market Intaxication

The taxman is knocking on the door yet again, so whether you like it or not, you best be ready for a Tobin Tax.

For the uninitiated, a Tobin tax, a phrase first coined by Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin in the 1970s, is a tax levied on transactions in connection with different types of financial securities.

One of the Egypt IMF loan conditions, as part of the overarching economic reform program, is the (re)introduction of a capital gains tax or stamp duty tax on the trading of financial securities. As I am sure you recall, the introduction of a capital gains tax on listed securities back in 2014 caused so much uproar by some capital markets players that the government had to back-peddle and suspend the tax for two years.

That period ends this May 2017, so it stands to reason that a short-term change on this front is inevitable. The campaign against the reintroduction of any tax on the capital markets (along with the customary doomsday predictions) have already started in earnest for the second round of this bout.

The way the taxman (this time, supported by the IMF) should be looking at this is pretty straightforward. Tax policy, in general, is designed with three primary objectives in mind: the first is to collect as much revenue as possible for the state without materially discouraging the underlying activity, the second is to redistribute wealth, and the third is to incentivize (or disincentivize) certain types of behavior based on wider policy considerations.
Turning to taxing capital market transactions specifically, this is a lucrative market and the taxman should definitely be seeking to take their “cut” of the action. Considering the additional tax burden so many have had to bear over the past period, not to mention the wider economic hardship over the past few months, any arguments against levying this tax will, for the most part, fall on unsympathetic ears.
Would the imposition of either a capital gains tax or stamp duty tax, deter market players from investing and trading on the capital markets? The camp against argue loudly that the capital markets will effectively crumble with any new taxes levied and point to days of steep decline and overall selling on the EGX whenever the topic of a capital markets tax comes up.

Looking at other vibrant capital markets, however, tells us a different story. In the UK, home to one of the elite capital markets of the world (for now at least), the taxman imposes both a stamp duty tax on the trading of shares and a capital gains tax that taxes the gains on financial securities. In the US, again home to elite capital markets, a capital gains tax is applied to gains from the investment and trading of financial securities.

Some might argue, rightly in my opinion, that looking at mature capital markets alone is not a fair comparison and that a more sensible approach would be to also look at realistic comparables in order to gauge whether introducing taxes on capital markets transactions would be competitive.
If we look at Turkey, for example, there exists a capital gains tax on marketable securities. However, this was very recently reformed to exempt any capital gains tax payable if the securities were held for two years or longer for unlisted securities and one year or longer for listed securities. What the Turkish taxman is trying to achieve is to use tax policy to incentivize long-term investors in securities as opposed to short term trading and speculation. The same policy is used in the UK and the US by using a range of mechanisms, including a lower applicable tax rate and higher capital gains allowances for long-term investors.

In Morocco, a capital gains tax is also levied on the capital appreciation of shares. In the UAE, however, no taxes are imposed on capital market transactions, but one does have to wonder for how long this will go on, considering the current trend in the GCC countries to move towards some basic levels of taxation to balance their books.

Clearly, in almost all of these markets, there is an appetite by the taxman to levy a tax on these lucrative markets, but at the same, some policies are introduced in order to incentivize long term investors as opposed to short term traders and speculators.
Under the current tax policy in Egypt, there are no taxes on capital gains of financial securities and no stamp duty tax on transactions, but there is a tax on dividends. This incentivizes the activities of short-term day traders and speculators over longer-term fundamental investors, which is contrary to what everybody else is doing and, in my humble opinion, doesn’t make any sense at all.

If we think of both equity and debt capital markets as efficient markets for sovereigns and corporates to raise capital in order to fund growth, then it stands to reason that the taxman should incentivize patient, long term institutional investors. In contrast, the policy should disincentivize speculators who, while admittedly add liquidity to the market, arguably do not contribute a whole lot of value to the economy.

Currently, we are incentivizing short-termism in our capital markets, when in fact we should be incentivizing long-term investors. Unless we plan to flout the Egypt IMF loan conditions and the agreed economic reform program, a tax on financial securities in the form of a capital gains tax or stamp duty will be levied, so there is really no point in resisting this. Instead, let’s focus on re-aligning policy to incentivize long term investors of capital. By observing mature markets as well as comparable emerging markets, there are plenty of different ways to achieve this, while remaining competitive.

The most recent statements by the government indicate that they are leaning towards a stamp duty tax regime, which is probably the simplest to understand and implement effectively. As my learned friend Dr. Ziad Bahaa El Din previously commented in connection with this issue almost two years ago, the real danger to a stable investment climate is a lack of clarity in the legal and taxation regime, as opposed to the tax itself. Whatever we do, let’s do it right and let’s stick to it.

Beyond the Rubicon is a column written exclusively for Enterprise every other weekend by Aly Shalakany, senior partner at Shalakany Law Office, which he joined from Linklaters in London. Aly is a noted specialist in finance, projects and mergers and acquisitions; his column appears exclusively in our Weekend Edition, offering an “inside baseball” look the intersection of business, economy and finance from the point of view of a practitioner at the top of his game.

Rejoice, all ye who are always running late: Psychologists are defending your honor and letting us all know that your lack of punctuality is not a sign that you’re rude, disorganized, or inconsiderate — your mind might just be malfunctioning. Sure, Cairo traffic throws us all curveballs that guarantee we’ll be late to the most important meetings and appointments, but there are certain people out there who are consistently late — and it’s not entirely their fault, Laura Clarke writes for BBC.

“The punctually-challenged often share personality characteristics such as optimism, low levels of self-control, anxiety, or a penchant for thrill seeking, experts say,” all of which are characteristics that affect how they experience and perceive the passing of time. Optimism, for example, pushes the “punctually-challenged” to be overestimate how much time they have and underestimate how much time they need to get a certain task done (known among psychologists as the planning fallacy). If your punctuality issue has more to do with procrastinating tasks than with budgeting your time poorly, psychologist Linda Spadin says the key is to adjust how you mentally process the task ahead of you: “Rather than figuring out how to get beyond the fear, the fear becomes the excuse — usually expressed with a ‘but’ statement.”

Whatever the case may be, the bottom line seems to be that being “punctually-challenged” is not a fatal diagnosis — as long as the underlying issues are identified and addressed.