Last year, I asked myself and others: what happens when you stop? At the core of the question were some deep-rooted needs – grounded in deep-rooted fears – about staying active as a proxy for staying relevant. I adopted the shark mentality: keep moving, never stop hunting, and you might survive for the next 300 years.
I don’t know about sharks, but that can only take you so far as a human. Especially if you start falling on the trap that movement equals achievement, and that all things must ladder up to more movement, done more efficiently. Total efficiency creates total anxiety.
The real problem I was trying to explore was: why do I have such a fucked up relationship with time? And why, once we open up our minds to others’ minds throughout history, do others seem to have a similar issue? What is it about time that makes it so damn hard?
Time inevitably runs out, but things get more interesting when you start exploring the textures of what this means in different contexts. Consider the words of Douglas Rushkoff – who looked at the Ancient Greeks – on two ways to think about time: chronos and kairos.
“Kairos is a more slippery concept. Most simply, it means the right or opportune moment. Where chronos measures time quantitatively, kairos is more qualitative. It is usually understood as a window of opportunity created by circumstances, God, or fate.”
Consider what this means in a professional environment. At work, we mostly tend to look at time as a quantitative measure. Scoped time means time in a spreadsheet that, day in and day out, you have less of. Time you bill for. Do timesheets about. Ask for more of (good luck!). Until the next scope of work gets signed off, and then you do it all over again. This is time as chronos. Quantity.
But for the person who got booked, time is about more than that. It’s not just a unit that runs out, but something you want well spent. If you’re booked to solve a juicy problem, you want to do it on time. But you’d also hope the time you invest until then would be exciting, enjoyed, maybe not too panicky, with a healthy dose of serendipity. This is time as kairos. Quality. An opportunity for magic to happen.
I suspect we too often default to thinking of time as chronos, and too little as kairos. Part of it comes from our overarching cultural lens of rationality, where things are parts that fit with other parts. And given we never have quite enough time, breaking it down to chunks makes it easier to manage and scale down when needed (i.e. the "can we make it cheaper but with the same level of quality?" syndrome). But time isn’t just a unit, it’s also a matter of feeling. There’s plenty of research about how time well spent creates positive feelings, which in term foster creative thinking. Yet, the kairos our mind craves is always at odds with the chronos of a scope of work.
That’s what makes time so damn hard. That it co-exists as two sides of the same coin, pressuring our brains and souls as we go along. That said, a core trait of thinking for a living is gradually losing the fear of swimming against some currents and seeing where we get to. In a world obsessed with the efficiency of time as chronos, quantity, we owe it to ourselves to try and recapture some of the feelings achieved as we see the wonders of time as kairos, quality. [tweet this]
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