At the last minute

At the last minute

“At the last minute” is an expression we use when something happens as late as it possibly can—right before it’s too late. When something happens at the last minute, there’s usually a feeling of stress or a feeling of surprise.

Just a word of warning. The expression contains the word “minute,” but it’s not about a specific amount of time. It’s about the feeling that there’s little or no time left to do something.

You’ll hear in the examples that “the last minute” might be two weeks before, or it might be just a few minutes. The exact time isn’t important; it’s the feeling of stress, the feeling of surprise that comes from a change so close to the last possible moment.

In this episode, I’ll show you two ways to use “at the last minute.” One way is when you purposely delay something. And the other way is when something comes as a surprise. At the end of the episode, I’ll show you how we can use “last minute” as an adjective, like in the phrase “a last-minute decision.”

Decide to wait or delay

So let’s start with a delay that happens on purpose. If you do something at the last minute, you choose to wait almost until the deadline.

Do you buy a lot of gifts during the winter holidays? In the United States, those of us who celebrate Christmas, we like to exchange gifts on December 25, Christmas Day, or sometimes on Christmas Eve, depending on your family tradition. And in the United States, we have this crazy thing called Black Friday, with lots of sales and discounts at the end of November. That makes sense, right? Christmas Day is at the end of December. Get started with the shopping toward the end of November.

Black Friday is usually the biggest shopping day of the year. But would you like to know the second-biggest shopping day of the year? The number-two day? It’s usually one of the last days before Christmas Day itself.

Why is that? It’s because so many people do their holiday shopping at the last minute. They purposely wait until they can delay it no more. In 2023, the second-biggest shopping day of the year was December 23. That’s two days before Christmas Day! Some people start their shopping in September. But clearly other people do it at the last minute, in those couple of days before Christmas.

So in this example, the last minute is two days before the deadline, two days before Christmas Day. If you wait until then, you feel the pressure. You feel the stress. The deadline is coming. It’s really close. You’ve started your shopping at the last minute.

I’m thinking about when I was in school. Our teachers sometimes assigned us work that would take a week or two weeks to complete. And the idea was, you could work on it a little bit every day and finish (comfortably!) before the deadline without too much stress. That was the idea.

Or you could do it all at the last minute. You could wait until the day before it was due. And that would be a long night. And it would not be much fun—at least it wasn’t for me. Some people are motivated by a deadline. Some people say they do their best work at the last minute. No comment from me on that.

So these examples have been about things that you have under your control: when are you doing to do that project? When are you going to do your holiday shopping? Are you going to do it in advance or are you going to do it at the last minute? It’s your choice.

Unexpected circumstances

But sometimes—and this is the next definition—sometimes life happens and something happens at the last minute and it’s not under your control. You didn’t choose it. Something unexpected happened.

Have you ever taken a cruise vacation? I never have. People plan cruises a long time in advance; sometimes, people make cruise reservations a year or more ahead of time. Let’s say you book a cruise 12 months in advance. And then just two weeks before you leave, there’s an emergency at work. You can’t take the vacation. You have to cancel the cruise at the last minute.

“At the last minute” here is two weeks ahead of time. That sounds like a long time, right? So why do we say “at the last minute”? It’s because it’s unusual and uncomfortable to make this change so close to the time the cruise leaves. If you cancel just two weeks in advance, you probably have to pay a high cancellation fee, maybe half the cost of the vacation. You might have to cancel a flight and pay for that. But you had an emergency at the last minute. It’s not under your control; it’s something that happened to you. So here, the “last minute” is two weeks in advance, but the important thing is how uncomfortable it feels to cancel at this time.

Now imagine you have an appointment to get your hair cut at 11:00 in the morning. But you get a call from school: your kid is sick and you have to pick him up. It’s 10:15. It’s only 45 minutes before your appointment. You call and cancel at the last minute. Here, 45 minutes is uncomfortable and stressful because your stylist is unlikely to fill that appointment in such a short amount of time.

What would your stylist say if you did that? He might say, “My 11:00 cancelled at the last minute.”

Leave something for the last minute

So that’s “at the last minute.” You can also say that you “leave something for the last minute.” That’s when you make a conscious decision to do something at the last minute. Kids might leave their school projects for the last minute, if they start them the night before. You might leave your holiday shopping for the last minute if you do your shopping on December 23.

Here’s another way you can say it. You can say, “He waited until the last minute to start studying for his exams.” In fact, that was a common thing my teachers told me when I was a kid: “Don’t wait until the last minute!” Don’t wait until the deadline is almost here.

Last-minute as an adjective

And then finally, you can turn “at the last minute” into an adjective. It’s just, “last-minute”. When it’s an adjective like this, it comes before the noun. A hairdresser might say, “I had a last-minute cancellation, so I can take another client at 11:00.” Here, a “last-minute cancellation” is a cancellation that happens close to the time, close to 11:00.

You might also make a last-minute decision to go away for the weekend. Maybe on Friday morning, you decide to go away for two days. You made a “last minute decision” to go away, since you decided so close to the weekend.

So now you know how to use “at the last minute.” You learned that “at the last minute” can be used when you purposely delay something. A student might do her project at the last minute. And we use this same expression when things happen unexpectedly, when they happen close to the deadline, like if you have to cancel a cruise unexpectedly just a few weeks before it leaves. And we can describe something as “last-minute” like a “last-minute cancellation.”