Culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment.

| Yonatan Touval, The Iran War Is a Failure of Imagination

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Pace Layering

It has become commonplace to characterize the world as moving faster, as if the planet were spinning more energetically around its axis. This is really just a metaphor, but one that is now firmly embedded in our daily psychology.

Stewart Brand (with Brian Eno) created the Pace Layers model to help understand how the various elements of our civilization interact.1

As Brands explains,

I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are:

• Fashion/art

• Commerce

• Infrastructure

• Governance

• Culture

• Nature

In a durable society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above. “Every form of civilization is a wise equilibrium between firm substructure and soaring liberty,” wrote the historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions.

It is the friction between layers that allows them to influence each other. Fashion trends — like a transition from skinny to baggy jeans — drive changes in commerce, and innovations in commerce — like faster supply chains — drive quicker transitions in fashion.

But Brand points out in the original caption for the diagram above,

The order of a healthy civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.

Touval’s opening quote ends with a layer farther down, culture, where we are rejecting time for judgment in favor of speed. In fact, the sense many of us share — that the world is spinning faster — may boil down to our cultural acquiescence to speed over judgment and a confusion between information and understanding.

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Living at Log Level

One reaction to the vertigo imparted by a seemingly sped-up world was recently summarized by Gordon Brander in Dropping to log-level, reminding us that we may be in a situation too complex to effectively model:

A model is a map of the parts of a system that aren’t changing.

But when all parts of our world system are changing, we can’t find any stable parameters. So we have to bail on modeling. What’s left for us to make sense of the world?

Really, when things are moving this quickly, we don’t want a model, we want a log. It’s the simplest narrative structure that could possibly work.2 Just lines of timestamped comments, one after the other: “this happened, then this happened, then this happened”. No higher-level analysis. In software, we log everything that happens during program execution, because logs are invaluable when things spin out of control. We can comb through the log to find patterns, and begin to form higher-level hypotheses about what is happening.

I think this is the right level of sense-making for the moment. It’s time to drop to log-level. You’ll see me shifting away from essays, toward work in progress, technical posts, fragmentary ideas, and raw logging.

I found a great resonance with these insights, which remind me of the motivations behind writing more Short Takes, and fewer longer essays that might be outdated in a few weeks.

Brander constrasts what’s in or out when we drop to log level:

In/out:

Out: essays.
In: logging what I learn, as I learn it.

Out: theory.
In: practice.

Out: good writing.
In: good ideas.

Out: “having an audience”.
In: hoarding things I know how to do.

So, I feel my task — or calling — has shifted. More surfacing of good ideas and insights, fewer authoritative screeds (since I’m deeply uncertain about so much). Less emphasis on ‘audience’ and theory, more focus on sharing what I find, and how I found it.

Flow and Unflow

Flow

One danger lurking in the sense of a sped-up world is a decrease in the happiness that emerges from entering a ‘flow’ state, as researched by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In his work, he interviewed thousands of people to understand when they were most happy. Derek Thompson characterizes his insight this way:

He heard in these diverse testimonies a kind of singular melody—a description of how, in the best parts of life, a feeling of self, time, and anxiety melt away in the face of deep immersion in an activity. He named this phenomenon “flow.”

Thompson then cites a quotation from Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow:

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives

Thompson adds:

Flow suggests a waterway—something liquidly effortless, an unimpeded stream. But the wisdom of Csikszentmihalyi was to recognize that well-being is no lazy river. It is neither ease nor effortlessness that leads to the highest happiness. It is something close to their opposite. It is immersion in an activity that is hard, but just hard enough; it is the discovery of comfort at the outer realm of difficulty. Life feels best, not when it is smoothed with frictionlessness, but when it is filled with achievable challenges.

As with Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers, friction between the layers transmits value in both directions. ‘The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.’ The friction is essential.

But what if technology could decrease the friction?

Unflow

In our sped-up world, there are opposites to the inherent learning/activity cycle at the heart of flow.

Shishi Wu writes of ‘passive flow’ as a mechanism to understand why people absorb more streaming media than they intend to [emphasis mine]:

Passive flow is a state of low-effort immersion caused by external design features. It includes three main feelings: unclear goals, loss of self-consciousness, and time transformation. It is different from classical flow, which usually involves focus, skill, and challenge. Passive flow appears in low-effort environments where users receive a continuous stream of content. They do not need to make choices. Features such as autoplay, endless scrolling, and personalized feeds help hold their attention. As a result, users stay longer than they intended. Many say they lost track of time. Passive flow does not directly define unplanned use. But it helps explain why unplanned use happens more easily.

Thompson makes the connection between passive flow and the ‘trancelike state’ that gamblers can enter when playing the slots. And the so-called ‘shitty flow’ (from psychologist Paul Bloom) sounds like a synonym of passive flow.

I will collapse those frictionless states into ‘unflow’: a negative psychological state with some superficial similarities to flow — losing track of time, a sense of calm — but lacking the challenges inherent in flow.

But that sense of calm is phony, more like being drugged, or acting like a mindless zombie, as Thompson styles it. Removing the friction of flow leaves a state emptied of challenge, of engagement, and ultimately, of purpose.

We need to make choices if we are to gain from the spinning of the world, and one of those choices has to be to avoid unflow in its many forms, to slow down, and to experience our surroundings.

Remaining grounded in a sped-up world requires throttling passivity, placing judgment over speed, and perhaps living and working at log level, if only to remain functioning and sane.

We should take to heart this thought by Simone Weil:

The authentic and pure values — truth, beauty and goodness — in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.

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The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.

| Jonathan Hari, Stolen Focus

Pause and Patience

In October, I encountered an insightful article by Rahul Bhandari that identified patterns of behavior prevalent in business — almost required for those in C-Suite roles — that are counterproductive, even when being held up as exemplary.

[Bhandari indulges in ‘strategic speak’ which needs to be filtered. He talks about those on ‘the top’ — hierarchy, he overuses ‘strategic’ whenever referring to the decision-making of decision-makers, and a host of other leader-versus-follower distinctions. Leaving that aside, there are some takeaways worth thinking about.]

His thesis:

Many of the behaviors we admire at the top are not, in fact, signs of effectiveness. They are symptoms of over-functioning: a leadership style marked by constant motion, high mental velocity, and a persistent discomfort with stillness. These leaders aren’t modeling peak performance—they’re playing out a high-stakes version of restlessness. They don’t just run hard; they run noisily. And while they often credit their success to this intensity, what actually sustains organizations over time is disciplined clarity, not speed alone.

There’s a great deal of evidence that, for example, making decisions quickly is not the best way to operate.

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As I wrote in With Decision-Making, You Have to Go Slow to Go Fast:

A central pillar of behavioral economics: we jump to conclusions, based on our emotions, and then create stories — including facts, figures and other evidence — to justify the decisions we have made. As Daniel Kahneman characterized it, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”

So, for the class of problems that are low stakes, sure, go with your gut. Picking eggshell paint instead of sage for your office is not a big risk. But the decision to buy one house instead of a different one in the next town, well, that’s high stakes. It is important to warrant gathering more information.

And here we get to the first barrier: our biased brains want to make the necessary decision as quickly as possible. As Pronita Mehrotra, Anu Arora and Sandeep Krishnamurthy lay it out, in the context of innovation: “Trying to resolve things too quickly, especially for complex problems, is detrimental to innovation because you fall prey to premature closure. Resistance to premature closure — a key aspect of creativity — is our ability to keep an open mind when we already have a potential solution. Some of the best solutions don’t come in the initial meeting or two, but after a longer incubation period.”

To fool our foolish brains, we need to actively say -- and act -- that the process of deciding is open as long as more information, more ‘incubation’ of ideas, and more looking at alternatives is possible.

They continue: “Instead: To avoid premature closure, teams should arrive at an ‘almost final’ decision and then intentionally delay action in favor of additional incubation time. During this time, everyone should commit to thinking about the problem and sharing their ideas. If the team can’t find a better approach during the incubation period, they should proceed with their original solution.”

Returning to Bhandari: he cites several ways in which executives act like ‘caffeinated squirrels’, and companies that follow their lead, often suffer — not benefit — from that [emphasis mine]:

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Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.

| Mary Oliver

The history of time is layered.

The oldest sundial was created in 1500 BCE in China. But they give an irregular and uncertain reading of time, because of the tilt of the Earth over the course of the year and the latitude where the sundial sits. Time was very fluid, then, almost as much as it was pre-sundial.

It wasn’t until Galileo discovered the properties of the pendulum in 1602 that pendulum-driven clocks could be engineered, making accurate timekeeping possible 50 years later. His insight was that the pendulum’s oscillation was determined not by its weight or the distance from the center point of its swing, but solely by the length of the pendulum. And they are resistant to changes in the pendulum’s period once set in motion.

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Pendulum clocks — like Grandfather’s clocks — were the most accurate timepieces for almost 300 years.

In the modern era, however, the most accurate clocks are atomic clocks, which are so accurate that they only lose 1 second in 100 million years. But that doesn’t really pin time down.

Modern physics has brought back a new uncertainty to time. One aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity is that time is influenced by gravity, so an atomic clock at the top of Mount Everest runs infinitesimally faster than one at sea level, where gravity is stronger. Atomic clocks are so accurate, you can measure the height of mountains in this way.

These observations only prove what we all have sensed intuitively: time is not passing at a constant pace. It’s all relative, and not just in the Einsteinian way. And the greatest factor in relativity is not the physics of timekeeping, but the fluidity of our human time sense.

In each of these eras — pre-Galileo, post-Galileo, and post-Einstein — our thinking about time has changed. And following the pandemic — which disrupted so much — our thinking about time, and our sense of time itself, were drastically altered.

A 2022 research study showed that so-called ‘temporal disintegration’ was greatly amplified during the pandemic, where people experienced distortions in perceived time:

Continuity between past experiences, present life and future hopes is critical to one’s well-being, and disruption of that synergy presents mental health challenges,” said corresponding author E. Alison Holman, UCI professor of nursing. “We were able to measure this in a nationally representative sample of Americans as they were experiencing a protracted collective trauma, which has never been done before. This study is the first to document the prevalence and early predictors of these time distortions.

So this is another slice through time, our shifting and messy perceptions of time. In the case of the pandemic, our sense of time was distorted, with some people feeling time was slowed while others thought time was racing. In either case, time was out of joint.

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The philosopher Josef Pieper made a distinction between horizontal and vertical time. The former is the everyday experience of linear clock time: five workdays and two days of leisure time, for example, generally proceeding at a consistent pace (although weekends might be experienced as passing too fast and the workweek too long).

But Pieper also wrote of vertical time, which Jenny Odell says runs “at right angles to work” in Saving Time. She argues that to find true leisure, you need to step out of the horizontal time dimension, in which leisure exists only to refresh us to return to work.

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Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.

| Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

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All of us, at some time or other, feel like we are ‘stuck’ on a problem, a project, or some other activity.

The mathematician Dan Rockmore sums it up, neatly:

All problem solvers and problem inventors have had the experience of thinking, and then overthinking, themselves into a dead end. The question we’ve all encountered—and, inevitably, will encounter again—is how to get things moving and keep them moving. That is, how to get unstuck.

But when taking up the issue of getting unstuck, we need to start with the other end of the cycle: what is the baseline that forms the backdrop behind getting stuck? What is the state of mind that is disrupted when we are pulled off track and blocked? I choose to characterize the opposite of stuckness as stickness: which is to say, sticking to the routines that channel your work.

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One of the insights widely shared by creative people is unsurprising: creativity is honed by long hours of persistent, day-in, day-out work. The best writers generally have very set writing schedules, and an ardent desire to stick to it.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote about his routine in a letter to his wife:

I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten.

Other creatives of all stripes tell very similar stories. Denise Shekerjian interviewed forty MacArthur Fellows, from the broadest imaginable range of fields: political science, history, the arts, and sciences. The consistent thread is the willingness, no, the eagerness, of the Fellows to do the work in support of their own ‘peculiar talent’. She synthesized their insights:

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One of the paradoxes that reveals a great deal about making sense of the world is the tension between uncertainty and action. On one hand, we are often told that being effective relies on decisive reasoning, and quickly choosing a course to pursue even with incomplete information. However, opting to eliminate the discomfort of an uncertain or ambiguous situation by making a quick decision can often backfire, and in predictable ways.

When I recall events in my life where my decisions went sideways, they were often hurried, and driven more by my desire to end a period of stress and insecurity than actually determining what could go wrong… before finding out the hard way.

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And the world is more complex than ever, more ambiguous, less predictable. As Margaret Wheatley points out in Willing to Be Disturbed,

we live in a complex world, we often don’t know what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we spend more time in not knowing.

Wheatley’s formulation, that we need to spend more time in not knowing, is a first step in deconstructing uncertainty. One aspect of contemporary emotional maturity is to accept the state of not knowing. Not having a quick answer for complex questions. Being willing to admit being confused by new situations, or rapid changes in the context we are living and working in. Remaining open to spending more time listening to alternative viewpoints before shutting down gathering inputs. These are all aspects of constructive uncertainty, a term I learned from Howard Ross: ‘learning to slow down decision-making’.

The poet John Keats commented in a letter to his brothers that Shakespeare was able to accept uncertainty in his characters and their context, and coining the term negative capability to capture what he described as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

So, too, we need to cultivate a negative capability in our approach to an uncertain world. All too often we approach decision-making or strategy formulation in an overly positive manner, which may have serious downsides. JP Castlin argues

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In the most recent installment of How To Use Time, I wrote about True Asynch, adopting the thinking of researchers Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley about ‘burstiness’: where daily communication is constrained into as narrow a timeframe as possible:

Our research suggests that such bursts of rapid-fire communications, with longer periods of silence in between, are hallmarks of successful teams. Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas — deep work that may generate the next steps in a project or the solution to a challenge faced by the group. Bursts, in turn, help to focus energy, develop ideas, and achieve closure on specific questions, thus enabling team members to move on to the next challenge.

We’d certainly want our teams to be successful, so adopting burstiness — while a big departure from the default behavior at most companies — seems like a good idea.

But I wondered about the connection between the practice of truly asynchronous communication and team success. How does true asynch lead to greater success for teams?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anita Williams Woolley was the lead in another research effort that looked into team effectiveness, and she and her colleagues found that a team’s collective intelligence was influenced quite strongly by the makeup of the group.

Counterintuitively, adding people of higher intelligence to a team does not necessarily lead to higher collective intelligence, measured by teams undertaking diverse cognitive tasks. Collective intelligence is not some arithmetic average of the intelligence of those in the group: it is an emergent property arising from the interactions of the members.

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In an earlier post, Fighting for Time, I introduced the idea of time poverty, the sense that we never have enough time to accomplish all the things we need to do. In 2011, 70% of Americans reported they were time-poor. By 2018, the percentage of afflicted grew to 80%.

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On a personal level, we are fighting for time. One way to think about it in the work context is the distinction between me-time and we-time, as I defined it last week:

• Me-time is when individuals are focused on deep work -- writing, thinking, programming, planning, designing -- it’s just someone working alone with the tools and artifacts of their trade.

• We-time is when we are involved in communications with others -- meetings, calls, and working sessions; 1:1 or 1:many -- where the focus of the participants is split between the topic at issue (like discussing a project) and the many social aspects of the interaction (negotiation, arguing for and against ideas or propositions, establishing how the project will impact the project participants, and other social aspects of the topic at issue).

Clearly, organizations have a strong incentive to counter the trend of time poverty, help workers concentrate on me-time, and drastically minimize we-time. But how?

Researchers Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley make a clear case for collectively defending me-time at the organizational level. The key is ‘burstiness’: a regime concentrating as much communication into as narrow a timeframe as possible:

Our research suggests that such bursts of rapid-fire communications, with longer periods of silence in between, are hallmarks of successful teams. Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas — deep work that may generate the next steps in a project or the solution to a challenge faced by the group. Bursts, in turn, help to focus energy, develop ideas, and achieve closure on specific questions, thus enabling team members to move on to the next challenge.

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In a previous chapter, The Rhythm of Attention, I wrote,

How we envision time can determine how we make use of time, how we navigate via the clock and the calendar, and how we find our place in it.

Circumstances can conspire to disrupt our own rhythm of time. The most obvious disruption is when we feel that we have too much to do, that we lack sufficient time to accomplish all that we need to do. This turns out to be a universal, and growing, conviction.

In recent years, the concept of 'time poverty' has arisen as one factor in the paradox identified by Richard Edelin in the 1970s: while economic growth in the U.S. had steadily grown, people's level of happiness had not. In particular, even people with growing affluence expressed being time poor. Researchers Laura M. Giurge, Ashley V. Whillans, and Colin West define it this way:

Defined as the chronic feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them, time poverty is increasing in society. Data from the Gallup US Daily Poll – a nationally representative sample of US residents– shows that, in 2011, 70% of employed Americans reported that they “never had enough time,” and in 2018, this proportion increased to 80%.

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This is an installment in the How To Use Time newsletter, which is leading to a booklet of the same name. This series — and the resulting booklet — are for paid subscribers as a special benefit.

What is the shape of time?

Is time a stream of sequential moments? Is it a 7 by 24 array of hours? Is it a procession of seasons, each following another? Or is time an unmoving tableau before which we march, serving as a backdrop to our motion? Is time a force to be reckoned with, or an ally that supports our aims?

How we envision time can determine how we make use of time, how we navigate via the clock and the calendar, and how we find our place in it.

We are all aware that time seems inconstant. How it seems to drag when we are bored, or trapped in an airport waiting for a delayed flight. Or how quickly time seems to pass when we are happily entertaining friends, spending a long weekend at the beach, or engaged in rewarding activities. Time alternately dilates or contracts, based on the context of our state of mind.

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It can now be said with assurance that individuals are dominated in their behavior by complex hierarchies of interlocking rhythms. Furthermore, these same interlocking rhythms are compatible to fundamental themes in a symphonic score, a keystone in the interpersonal processes between mates, co-workers, and organizations of all types on the interpersonal level within as well as across cultural boundaries. I am convinced that it will ultimately be proved that almost every facet of human behavior is involved in the rhythmic process.

| Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time

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The Labyrinth of Time

Edward T. Hall, perhaps best known for The Silent Language, his examination of explicit and informal forms of communication, offered up the quote above, which I encountered in a labyrinthine way.

I was following the arguments of several writers about another, somewhat related, concept of Hall’s: the distinction between two endpoints on a critical human characteristic. Hall maintained that people naturally (or culturally) fall into either ‘monochronic’ thinking, where one thing is done at a time, or ‘polychronic’ thinking, where time is seen as more fluid, and many things may be undertaken in the same time frame.

Wikipedia defines monochronic time like this:

A monochronic time system means that things are done one at a time and time is segmented into small precise units. Under this system, time is scheduled, arranged, and managed.

The United States considers itself a monochronic society. This perception came about during the Industrial Revolution. Many Americans think of time as a precious resource not to be wasted or taken lightly. As communication scholar Edward T. Hall wrote regarding the Americans' viewpoint of time in the business world, "the schedule is sacred." Hall says that for monochronic cultures, such as the American culture, "time is tangible" and viewed as a commodity where "time is money" or "time is wasted." John Ivers, a professor of cultural paradigms, agrees with Edward Hall by stating, "In the market sense, monochronic people consume time." The result of this perspective is that monochronic cultures place a paramount value on schedules, tasks, and "getting the job done”.

Monochronic time orientation is very prominent in core Germanic-speaking countries, Finland, France, Japan and the "Asian economic tigers".

Another way to say this is that in monochronic societies, time is commodified: workers are paid for their labor hours, and therefore, businesses want them to do exactly what is needed, at each moment they are on the job.

And polychronic time?

A polychronic time system means several things can be done at once. In polychronic time systems, a wider view of time is exhibited, and time is perceived in large fluid sections.

Examples of polychronic cultures are Latin American, African, Arab, South Asian, Mediterranean, and Native American cultures. These cultures' view on time can be connected to "natural rhythms, the earth, and the seasons". These analogies can be understood and compared because natural events can occur spontaneously and sporadically, like polychronic-time-oriented people and polychronic-time-oriented cultures.

[…]

Polychronic cultures are much less focused on the preciseness of accounting for time and more on tradition and relationships rather than on tasks. Polychronic societies have no problem being late for an appointment if they are deeply focused on some work or in a meeting that ran past schedule, because the concept of time is fluid and can easily expand or contract as need be. As a result, polychronic cultures have a much less formal perception of time. They are not ruled by precise calendars and schedules.

And, of course, the way we experience time and our relation to it — and our relations to each other through it — are shaped by our time orientation.

Other thinkers have made related observations about the human experience of time. For example, Sarah Jaffe’s analysis of Jenny Odell’s search for a new kind of time explored Odell’s terms ‘chronos’ time and ‘kairos’ time:

In her new book, Saving Time, Jenny Odell introduces the concept of kairos time to differentiate it from “chronos,” the kind of time we usually live by. Chronos time is capitalist time: the employee time clock, the relentless pace of work, the “you have the same 24 hours in a day as Beyoncé” memes urging productivity. “Kairos,” Odell writes, “means something more like ‘crisis,’” and it is marked by a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling that time itself is passing in a different way, but also a time that is more hopeful. It is the time in which change—transformation—becomes possible. It is the time in which we become the creators of our own world.

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In a post from February, inspired by Odell’s search, I wrote:

These terms are also employed by Enuma Okoro, who lays out chronos as clock time, time flattened by machines, while kairos is seasonal time, the rich understanding of time emerging from natural cycles, like day and night, the seasons of the year, the ebb and flow of our blood and brains. As Okoro puts it, we tend to think of chronos time

as something that works against us, rather than for us, an element of life that takes rather than gives. Days marked only by chronos time bind us in ways that can feel restrictive, demanding and consuming.

Chronos takes, while kairos gives.

And that differentiation between monochronic chronos time and polychronic kairos time lies at the heart of an essay I read this week. In Why the French Don’t Obsess Over Purpose, Pamela Clapp makes the case that French culture is much less inclined to obsess over work as a source of purpose than Americans:

I don’t think most French people think about purpose the way Americans do.

What’s your purpose? What are you building? What are you here for?

They’re good questions. But in France, they’re not humming in the background of every conversation. Most people I know don’t define themselves by what they do for a living. And if they work in a corporate setting, there’s often this quiet trust that things will evolve over time. No need to panic about your life path. Just do your job — and enjoy your life.

[…]

In the U.S., the idea of *having purpose* is everywhere: in books, on podcasts, in LinkedIn bios, even in casual brunch conversations. There’s this constant pressure to align your job with your passion, your calendar with your goals, your time with your values.

But what if your purpose is simply to build a good life? To raise kind children. To cook a little better each year. To read a few excellent books. To notice the seasons. To build meaningful relationships. To help others. To give time - and money if you can - to causes you care about.

Isn’t that what people will remember anyway?

The French, apparently, fall on the polychronic kairos end of time experience; Americans, the other end.

In Decommodified Time, I cited Laura Vanderkam,

Do we need to fully unplug in order to relax? I hope we can begin to understand that, for many, work is a collection of tasks, not a collection of hours in a certain place. And time is a finite resource, but one that cannot always be neatly divided into “work time” and “free time.” Taking time for yourself during the work day doesn’t make you lazy, and working a bit on vacation doesn’t make you a workaholic. Dispensing with strict time boundaries should also mean ditching the guilt you might feel for either.

And I agreed with her:

I agree with the underlying trend: work is a collection of tasks, not a collection of hours. We should all share the incentive of accomplishing the tasks, not watching the hours burn down. Yes, tasks ‘take time’, and likewise, taking a walk ‘takes time’, but they aren’t the same ‘times’. We should resist commoditizing time, and acting as if all time is unitary, waiting to be used for work.

Tasks are part of linear, chronos time, and they can intrude into and dismantle life-renewing kairos time if we aren’t careful.

We can be time-sliced to the point where we are hammered flat, and miss all the inflection points leading outside chronos, and into a deeper realm over all horizons.

Edward T. Hall made a sweeping argument, in the quotation at the top of this piece, that human societies are shaped by ‘complex hierarchies of interlocking rhythms’. The cadence of work, the transition in and out of free-flowing polychronic kairos time and back into monochronic chronos time… these modalities and the frequency and depth of our transitions define the rhythms of life. Our ability to work together is underpinned by these ‘interpersonal processes between mates, co-workers, and organizations of all types’.

Becoming more aware of these tempos and our native inclination to operate in the sort of time that best suits us — culturally and individually — provides us a way to find our own way to dance through time and not be hammered flat or commodified by it.

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We can’t ignore the role that our fluctuating energy plays in our productivity. We mustn’t resist it or shame ourselves for it. Most productivity authors don’t talk about mood, and instead, they imply that implementing their detailed planning and scheduling structures will tame any contrary mood into submission. But I am very skeptical that this works, even if it’s become the common assumption of writers in this genre.

| Alisa Lin, Our Fluctuating Energy

The ebb and flow of mood, energy, and making headway.

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Clock Time versus Seasonal Time

Remember, the Sun and the Moon are out there, and inside us.

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It’s a natural time of year to look back and ahead, make plans, and assess last year’s efforts. I keep a journal, diligently and digitally, so I make it a regular practice at inflection points like the New Year (both solar and lunar) to look back at what I was up to a year ago.

Early last year, Cal Newport, who I respect greatly, wrote an essay for the New York Times entitled To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality. I rediscovered the essay in my journal, and my initial reaction to it. Rereading it this year led me to radically different conclusions than on my first look.

First of all, he doesn’t really dig into burnout: the term appears only once in the piece other than the title. (Perhaps the title was the editor’s, not Newport’s. It should have just been Embrace Seasonality, which I have co-opted.)

What Newport wanted to do was, in fact, make an argument for embracing seasonality in knowledge work, and moving outside clock time, the fast time model of factories, railroads, and markets, into a slower, variable time of seasons, tides, and natural cycles.

I think his argument starts off wrong-footed, and while it seems balanced and logical, and, yes, while he is arguing in favor of greater positive freedom for knowledge workers, he winds up reinforcing the mistakes of industrial thinking to make his point.

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Newton starts by taking the long-view:

For most of human existence, the pace and intensity of productivity varied widely from season to season.

And then, our fall from grace:

It was the Industrial Revolution that ruptured this natural work cycle.

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Stewart Brand was influenced by architect Frank Duffy’s ideas about architecture, leading to his book, How Buildings Learn, in which he created this diagram:

The thicker the arrows, the slower the change. This sets the stage for my essay, below.

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In an earlier installment of How To Use Time, I focused on the time distortion that the pandemic has caused, unsettling our perception of the pace of time. Even when we are not caught up in a pandemic, we are shifting from different scales of time, perhaps several times a day. However, we have become so enmeshed in this reality, that we may not even be aware of it, like fish who do not ‘see’ the water they are swimming in.

Work is a large presence in our lives, and it surrounds and buoys us, and we are subject to the many layers of time shifting all around us.

The brilliant Stewart Brand, along with musician and polymath Brian Eno, explored a model — Pace Layers — in which various elements of civilization are arrayed from fastest to slowest. (Note that he was inspired by the thinking of Frank Duffy, as seen in the opening quotation.)

As Brand’s original caption reads,

The order of a healthy civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.

He goes on in his description

In a durable society, each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above. "Every form of civilization is a wise equilibrium between firm substructure and soaring liberty," wrote the historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Each layer must respect the different pace of the others. If commerce, for example, is allowed by governance and culture to push nature at a commercial pace, then all-supporting natural forests, fisheries, and aquifers will be lost. If governance is changed suddenly instead of gradually, you get the catastrophic French and Russian revolutions. In the Soviet Union, governance tried to ignore the constraints of culture and nature while forcing a five-year-plan infrastructure pace on commerce and art. Thus cutting itself off from both support and innovation, it was doomed.

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So, the various layers have their own pace: fast at the top, slow at the bottom. Along with pace, they have differential levels of power and inertia. Fashion has a lesser impact on commerce than governance has on culture, and so on. But more importantly, since we are talking about social phenomena, these relationships have societal impacts:

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