1: What are our assumptions about time?
“The ancient Greeks had not one but two words to speak of time,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.
The Greek word Chronos refers to quantity.
“This is largely how most of us in the modern world relate to time,” Anne-Laure writes. “It is the time of clocks and calendars, of productivity tools and linear goals. The eponymous god is often depicted as a long-bearded old man holding a scythe—a resemblance to the Grim Reaper that is not coincidental.”
Chronos time is how we live most of our lives. “Because we treat time as equal, objective units with a finite end,” she notes, “we feel like there’s never enough.”
This view of time is captured in the provocative image known as “Your Life in Weeks,” written about by blogger Tim Urban in 2014, which remains popular more than ten years later.
“How small and finite life feels when we see it represented like this, as a series of identical squares that can easily fit on a Post-it Note,” Anne-Laure writes. “It’s a moving and at times motivating depiction of a hard truth: the number of little boxes given to each of us is limited.
“The image urgently introduces a question, posed by [Tim] in his blog,” she notes,” ‘Are we making the most of our weeks?”
This reality suggests: “Here today, gone tomorrow.” Which naturally makes us feel anxious.
2: “But those neat boxes are not at all representative of how we experience time,” Anne-Laure observes. “The weeks of our life do not have the same weight.
“I don’t remember the day I was born, but the night before I started school stretched infinitely in my mind. The week I submitted my proposal for this book to publishers felt like an entire month of nervous excitement, doubt, and hope—and had a positive and outsized impact on the years to come. I can remember just about every moment of the day I learned a close friend passed away, making it seem like that one day lasted for several years.”
What about us? Do we remember the weeks of our lives as equal, interchangeable units of time?
Or do we experience time more fluidly?
“Deep down, we know this,” she observes, “that time is elastic, that some moments last for what seems like an eternity while others come and go in the blink of an eye.”
Research shows that various factors influence how we perceive and experience time.
For example, emotion. “Time can seem to expand in moments of acute fear, sadness, or joy, making certain moments feel longer than they objectively are,” Anne-Laure writes.
Do we feel hungry? Tired? These physiological states also impact our sense of time.
“Cognitive engagement also plays a significant role,” she explains. “Time drags on forever when we’re bored, but it flies by when we’re engrossed in a challenging task—a phenomenon related to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow.”
As we age, time seems to pass more quickly.
“Time,” Anne-Laure notes, “far from being a series of identical and interchangeable units, is a profoundly personal and fluid experience.”
When we embrace this idea of time, we realize “our most expansive, fruitful weeks may yet lie ahead.”
When we change our perception of time from “quantitative” to “qualitative,” we find a more meaningful answer to how to make the most of our weeks.
3: Which is why the Greeks had a second word for time: Kairos.
“Kairos expresses the quality, not the quantity, of time,” Anne-Laure notes. “It recognizes that each moment is unique, with a unique purpose, rather than a fixed unit to be mechanically allocated.
“Sometimes,” she notes, “the Greeks used the word Kairos even more specifically, as an opportune time for action, an opening, the perfect moment.”
A Kairos moment is like a “magic window,” Anne-Laure writes, “those periods of creative flow that often occur when we are immersed in activities that capture our full attention, when we spend time with loved ones, or when we are engaged in self-reflection.”
It’s any time when we experience “time out of time,” when our lives are immune to the world’s chaos.
“Kairos is when you feel like this moment, right now, is perfect,” she observes. “Kairos captures what the traditional view of productivity ignores—that the value of time depends on the situation. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities can sometimes feel less important than reading a bedtime story to a child.”
“The productivity equation is a nonlinear one,” author Neal Stephenson writes. “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.”
We can leave behind the idea of maximizing every second and embrace the uniqueness of this moment.
“Within these constraints,” Anne-Laure notes, “lies the opportunity to be mindful of our inner states and make the conscious choice to focus on what resonates most at any given time.”
Instead of “doing” more, we focus on “being” more: “More present, more engaged, and more attuned to the quality of our experiences,” she suggests.
Rather than ask: “What will I do with my time?” we ask: “How will I experience this moment?”
Anne-Laure’s term for this mindset is “mindful productivity.”
“In contrast to this future-focused, efficiency-driven approach,” she writes, “mindful productivity focuses on the quality of the experience at hand.
“Employing a bottom-up approach, mindful productivity recognizes the inherent uniqueness of each box and prioritizes the right course of action accordingly.
“Time is the most critical resource in traditional productivity,” she observes. “On the other hand, mindful productivity is centered around managing our physical, cognitive, and emotional resources—the ingredients that give rise to Kairos moments.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I measuring my days by how much I get done, or by the quality and meaning of the moments I experience?
Action: Pause today to notice and savor a Kairos moment—fully immersing myself in an experience that feels meaningful, rather than just checking off another box.
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