1: In Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll’s dark and menacing sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Alice runs hand in hand with the Red Queen, struggling to keep up because the Queen is running so fast.
“Faster! Faster!” the Queen calls out.
“The most curious part of the thing,” Alice observes, “was that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything.”
Alice asks the Red Queen about their lack of progress. “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
2: The Queen’s observation is a pointed metaphor for our modern struggle with time. “The Red Queen Effect” was coined by the American biologist Leigh Van Valen in 1973.
One powerful story goes like this: “When a gazelle wakes up in the morning,” Sahil Bloom writes in his book  The 5 Types of Wealth, “it knows it must outrun the lion or be killed, and when a lion wakes up in the morning, it knows it must outrun the gazelle or starve, so whether we’re the gazelle or the lion, when the morning comes, we’d better start running.”
When we ask someone how they are doing, we often hear: “Busy!”
“Busy has become standard fare, equal parts reality and pseudo-dystopian status symbol,” Sahil observes.
“Ironically, that busyness, and the scattered attention it creates, is the very reason we lack control over our time—it is the maker of the modern struggle.”
We are increasingly distracted. Many of us go through our days constantly checking our smartphones and trying to multitask. The problem? When we shift our attention from one task to another, there is a residue that remains of the prior task that impacts our cognitive performance on the new task.
Says bestselling author Cal Newport about our inclination to “just check” our phone or email notifications: “If, like most, we rarely go more than 10–15 minutes without a just check, we have effectively put ourselves in a persistent state of self-imposed cognitive handicap.”
There is a mental health impact to living this way. In Time Smart, Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans writes: “The data I and others have amassed show a correlation between time poverty and misery. People who are time poor are less happy, less productive, and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food, and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease.”
The statistics are telling:
“In a 2009 survey, 75 percent of British parents said they were too busy to read bedtime stories to their children,” Sahil notes. “According to a 2021 report from the email platform Superhuman, 82 percent of knowledge workers check their email within the first thirty minutes of waking up, and 39 percent check within the first five minutes.
“Eighty-four percent of U.S. executives have canceled a vacation to work,” he shares. “An astounding 80 percent of professionals say they simply don’t have time to do everything they want to do.”
On the one hand, we have been freed from many menial tasks from past centuries. We “have more time than our ancestors but less control over how we spend it,” Sahil explains. We “have more time, but somehow we have less time for the things that truly matter to us. It takes all the running we can do to keep in the same place. We’re running faster and for longer, but we’re not getting anywhere—at least not anywhere worth going.”
3: There is, however, a solution.
“The ancient Greeks had two different words for time: chronos and kairos,” Sahil writes. “Chronos refers to sequential, quantitative time—the natural sequence and flow of equal parts of time.
“Kairos refers to a more fluctuating, qualitative time—the idea that certain moments are weightier than others, that not all time is the same. Kairos brings to life the notion that time does more than simply pass and flow, that it has substance, texture, and weight, but only if we are perceptive enough to recognize it (and capitalize on it). . .
“There are windows and moments of particular importance—kairos time—when energy can be invested with the greatest possible return. This insight is the foundation for the solution to the modern struggle: Identify those moments of greatest time leverage and direct your attention to them.”
We can play a different game. One where we don’t always feel behind.
“It’s time to stop running faster,” Sahil writes, “and start running smarter.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I running faster each day just to keep up, or am I intentionally creating space for the moments that truly matter?
Action: Block time this week to focus deeply on one meaningful activity, practicing presence and recognizing the difference between simply being busy and truly moving forward.
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