How you can never run out of time.

I tend to write our weekly newsletter, the Provocation, on a Friday afternoon. This time last week I was struggling to write Monday’s newsletter.

I’d already written three different emails - the drafts are still sitting in a queue, unedited, unpublished, unloved. It was late Friday afternoon, and I was out of time.

Except I wasn’t. I’d just ran out of what the ancient Greeks called ‘chronos’, the linear time that runs Monday to Friday, and stops at tea-time.

I had bags of the other ancient Greek time to come - I just didn’t see it yet. Kairos is the ‘opportune’ time. It’s when the thing that took four hours on Friday afternoon and came to nothing takes 10 minutes to write at the right moment on Saturday morning.

And so that’s precisely what happened.

The two posts I ended up bashing out on the keyboard on Saturday morning went on to garner 50,000 readers in the space of 24 hours. They’re the most highly read things I’ve written all year. And they took no time at all to write.

Kairos beats Chronos, any time of the day.

If you need to get a thing done but it’s not the right time for it to happen, then don’t stress. Ask for the deadline to extend, for the delivery date to land later, or just walk away and see it works better and quicker tomorrow.