What is Prompt?

Prompt is defined in the online dictionary as follows:

prompt  (prmpt)

adj. prompt·er, prompt·est

1. Being on time; punctual.

2. Carried out or performed without delay:

tr.v. prompt·ed, prompt·ing, prompts

1. To move to act; spur; incite: A noise prompted the guard to go back and investigate.

2. To give rise to; inspire: The accident prompted a review of school safety policy.

3. To assist with a reminder; remind.

4. To assist (an actor or reciter) by providing the next words of a forgotten passage; cue.

Etc.

So the question comes: Is someone being prompt as long as they tell you within an hour, or 2 hours, or within a day of finding out some new information that would affect your behavior or actions?  If a meeting is at 1PM should you know by 9AM that day or 9AM 2 days before?  Is calling someone 'prompt' a purely individual decision based on your own punctuality standards?  Obviously, since I am writing about this, there is a conflict in the feeling of a 'prompt' action....

Without getting too much into it, and because I already received an apology followed by witnessing true regret on their face, I will just say that a meeting set for this afternoon was cancelled for which I had spent 2 days preparing for.  The decision to cancel was made before 9AM this morning and I, by accidental coincidence, found out about the cancellation by 9:20 AM. Some of you may be thinking "A few minutes later..that's not bad as far as prompt notification", but for those of you who work in a fast paced/always changing large company maybe you can feel my pain.  When something like this happens, the number of people to notify, cancelling room reservations, and breaking the news to any other persons who had been preparing (spending hours on hours creating slides and staying late into the night away from family) presentations is not a pleasant nor quick task. I tried my best to keep my irritation level less visible to my coworkers but inevitably they knew that if I was ticked.

So, back to the topic at hand.  What is prompt... my personal opinion is that a person is prompt when they meet or exceed notifying parties within or before a certain period of time... here is the equation....

Prompt Time frame: [Deadline hour - change hour] x 60 x 0.10


Example:
Meeting is at 2:00 PM
Change to the meeting occurred at 9:00 AM
Hours between change and meeting = 5
5 x 60 minutes = 300 minutes
300 x 0.10 = 30 minutes

This means that being prompt in the above situation would be notifying all parties of the change within 30 minutes of the change happening.  I think this is reasonable and lends enough time for people to adjust to the change.  The portion that is aggravating is the effort that may have gone into preparation for the event, but that part you can't change as we can't predict the future. In my situation this morning, I was 'technically' notified within the prompt time frame, however it was by accident not intention of the one who knew the change.  Thank you Ms. Lucky for that info...

To sum up... if you want to avoid ticking off the majority of people in the event of a change, please be prompt [see equation] and respect other people's need for that new information to be shared with them.

The pic above, one of my fav cartoonists, is from http://www.nataliedee.com/archives/2006/Apr/