Always Late? Maybe You Are Living in the Wrong Culture?

How Brazilians treat time differently, from London to Rio de Janeiro.

Nikola Grace Radley
7 min readAug 26, 2021
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

You know, the person that people make jokes about always being late and friends use fake earlier times to arrange to meet them. I am THAT notoriously late person. I like to call myself a time optimist. I genuinely believe that I can do many more things than I physically can with my time before being somewhere.

Or quite often, to be honest, I laze about on my bed naked after taking a shower and only start really getting ready at the last possible moment. Life is about balance, right? I dislike time constraints put on me by others. I like to manage my own time, and living by others’ differing mentalities of time can be pretty frustrating. So living in the UK with its very fixed cultural way of seeing time didn’t quite combine with my attitude.

So living in the UK with its very fixed cultural way of seeing time didn’t quite combine with my attitude to time.

However, ironically many of my old jobs in finance had stringent deadlines, some even multiple times a day. And I did well with them. When given a firm deadline with no-budge, I always rise to the occasion, doing all my work at the…

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Nikola Grace Radley

Freelance writer. You can find me reading under a palm tree in Rio de Janeiro. E-mail: nikola.grace.radley@gmail.com