Some Time Matters More

#132 - Why the ancient Greeks understood time better than most productivity apps

Hello friends, I hope you’re having a great week!

In the past week I have spent some time with old friends and family having meals and long conversations. And in a few days, I'll begin a two-week holiday with my wife and the kids. And as often happens when you plan some time for yourself I got a bit reflective. And last week I stumbled upon the Greek distinction between two kinds of time: Chronos and Kairos. The Greeks had 2 different words for what we currently refer to as “time”.

Chronos is the relentless ticking of the clock, measurable and linear. It's the hours spent in meetings, the weeks counted down until a project deadline, or the years noted on birthday cards. Chronos is quantitative—it marches forward regardless of what we do.

Kairos, on the other hand, captures those qualitative moments when time seems to expand or pause entirely. These are moments rich in significance and meaning: a breakthrough idea during a brainstorming session, the spontaneous laughter shared with your kids, or a meaningful conversation that shifts your perspective. Kairos moments produce disproportionately valuable outcomes, capable of fundamentally changing how we feel or think about our lives.

The post I read about this also had an incredible statistic, that got me even more reflective: “by the time your child turns 18, 95% of your time with them is gone. By the time they turn 12, 75% is gone.”

If that doesn't inspire a ruthless prioritization of Kairos moments, I don’t know what would. My goal for this holiday—and perhaps my life—is to invest more energy into these high-quality, transformative slices of time.

Chronos vs. Kairos – Understanding Time

We spend most of our time running on Chronos. Meetings, deadlines, calendars, school runs—it’s the structure behind how modern life moves. It’s measurable, predictable, and necessary. You can optimize it. You can plan around it. But it only tells you how much time has passed, not what it was worth.

Kairos is different. It’s not a block on the calendar but a shift in quality. It’s the conversation with your kid that goes somewhere you didn’t expect. The late-night talk with a friend that stays with you for weeks. It’s when time feels fuller than usual—more charged, more alive.

The issue is that our default setting leans heavily on Chronos. Most of the tools we use—calendars, to-do lists, weekly plans—are built to maximize it. But none of them help us recognize Kairos. No app reminds you that this dinner might be one of the most meaningful hours of your year. No dashboard tracks whether that one conversation changed something in your relationship with a colleague.

In a work context, this plays out all the time. You can have a packed schedule that feels empty in hindsight. Or a week that looks light on paper but includes a decision or conversation that shapes the next six months. The difference is rarely in the duration. It’s in the awareness of the moment itself.

Noticing Kairos is a skill. It means paying closer attention to texture over structure. Some time blocks just matter more. They always did.

One hour at the office, one hour at home, one hour on your phone—they’re not the same. Some experiences have a return on investment that’s wildly disproportionate to the time they take.

There’s also an emotional asymmetry. We rarely remember full days—we remember moments. And the moments we carry with us tend to have nothing to do with efficiency. They hit us because something about them feels dense: emotionally, intellectually, relationally. We were fully there. And something stuck.

In business we talk a lot about leverage, but we rarely apply that thinking to personal time. Kairos is pure leverage. If Chronos is the time you spend, Kairos is what you get out of it. And sometimes, what you get is far more than what you expected.

Prioritizing Kairos in a Chronos World

We’re not short on time. We’re short on meaningful time. The real challenge isn’t managing Chronos—it’s making space for Kairos in a system that doesn’t reward it.

Most of us are good at organizing our days. We have routines, recurring meetings, color-coded calendars. The structure gives a sense of control. But it can also crowd out the very things we say we care most about. If your calendar reflects your priorities, but never includes unstructured, high-quality moments, it’s probably missing something.

Part of the problem is that Kairos moments can’t be planned in the same way. They’re hard to force. But they’re not entirely random either. They tend to show up when we’re more present, less distracted, and not rushing to the next thing. That means we can increase the chances of catching them—by slowing down, by saying no more often, by blocking time that isn’t immediately “productive.”

Filling your schedule can give a sense of momentum, but it can also make your time interchangeable. And interchangeable time is forgettable.

One personal effort I make is focusing on reducing time spent on my phone (and I wrote about it) —especially mindless scrolling. It’s not a moral stance, just a practical one. I’ve come to believe that almost anything is more meaningful than watching short videos on a loop. If Kairos is about depth, then the infinite scroll is its enemy. So I leave the phone behind more often. Not because I’m trying to "detox," but because I want to leave room for better things to happen.

You don’t need a strategy deck to justify this. You just need to remember that the most important things often happen outside of plan.

Why Businesses Need Kairos Too

While thinking about this, I actually believe Kairos isn’t just a personal thing—it matters in business, too. Some of the biggest shifts I’ve seen at work didn’t come from long strategy docs or perfectly planned roadmaps. They came from timing, instinct, and someone being fully present in the right moment. And the same is true for the best leaders I have had the privilege of working with: they are fully present in the moment.

A decision that feels routine in Chronos can become a defining moment in Kairos. Think of a founder deciding to change course after a conversation with a customer. Or a leader realizing, in a one-on-one, that someone on their team is ready for more. These things don’t happen on a timeline. They happen when someone is paying attention—not just to the agenda, but to the signals under the surface.

You also see this in company culture. The most trusted teams I’ve worked with weren’t built in offsites or performance reviews. They were built in unplanned moments—staying late to solve a tough problem, taking the time to call after a bad meeting, cracking a joke at exactly the right time. Culture lives in the gaps between the formal stuff. That’s where Kairos hides.

Leaders who recognize this don’t just push for productivity. They create space—for reflection, for unstructured time, for real conversations. And they notice when something small is actually something big.

Embracing the Finite Nature of Time

One of the hardest things to accept is that most Kairos moments are one-offs. You don’t get a replay. You either catch them or you don’t.

This is where the idea of finiteness becomes useful—not as a source of anxiety, but as a filter. If time is limited, then attention becomes your most valuable asset. And if attention is limited, you start to ask different questions. Not “What can I squeeze into this week?” but “What might I regret missing?”

The windows close faster than we think. And we’re usually too distracted to notice.

The book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman became popular for exactly this reason. It’s a blunt reminder that the average human lifespan is just that: around 4,000 weeks. When you frame life that way, it strips away the illusion of endless productivity and future availability. You can’t do everything, and you won’t get to every item on your list. But that’s not a flaw in the system—it’s the system. The challenge isn’t to extend time but to be selective with it.

This isn’t about living in constant awareness of the clock. That would be exhausting. But it helps to be reminded that the future isn’t infinite. There’s a limited number of family dinners, of walks with friends, of chances to say what you mean. That scarcity gives those moments their weight.

The trick is not to panic—but to adjust. To recognize that Chronos gives you structure, but Kairos gives you stakes. If you take the long view, the goal isn’t to do more. It’s to miss less.

Choosing Kairos

Kairos doesn’t show up automatically. It requires space, attention, and sometimes a bit of effort. But once you start noticing it, it’s hard to go back. The moments that carry weight—the ones you remember years later—aren’t usually the ones that were planned months in advance. They’re the ones where you were fully there.

This upcoming holiday, I’m trying to be more deliberate. Not in a rigid or performative way. Just in the sense of clearing space, lowering the noise, and paying attention. I’m not chasing some idealized version of family time. I just don’t want to miss it when something real is happening.

There’s no way to measure if you’ve “optimized” for Kairos. That’s not the point. But if you end the week with a feeling that something meaningful happened—and that you noticed—it’s probably a sign you’re on the right track.

In the end, Chronos is what fills the page. Kairos is what makes it worth reading.

Have a fantastic weekend,
Giovanni