Kairos.

Kairos.

[‘kīräs] noun, Greek.

The perfect, delicate, crucial moment; the fleeting rightness of time and place that creates opportune atmosphere for action, words, or movement.

We all have these friends who are productivity geniuses. They get enough sleep. They work out regularly and eat well. They are on top of their work schedules and get everything done on time and at excellent quality. They raise their kids well, spending ample time with friends and family. They run a charity, help in the community, and oh, well, they even had time to watch the latest Netflix hit and in the meantime, just finished their third book.

How is this even possible? All I know is that most of the time, I am just busy, and I don’t have enough minutes in a day to even get the basics right.

“One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

– Goethe

A few months ago, I decided to dedicate my time and efforts to understand time-management and productivity, trying to answer one core question: what is the best way to manage my time to increase my productivity?

Productivity is about energy and focus, not time. — Kevin Kruse

Our time is limited. Each one of us, regardless of our path in life, gets 1440 minutes in a day. If our output is a function of the time we spend on a task and our productivity doing it, then we quickly realize that time is a constant. Productivity, however, is not — it is the result of our energy and focus. When we are focused enough and energetic enough about a thing we do, we might be in a state of flow — basically, getting a lot more output with minimal effort in a short time. Which, in turn, will allow us to be faster in achieving our goals, giving us back more of the 1440 minutes we have in a day. Feeling less busy and having more time is not necessarily the result of spending fewer minutes sleeping or sacrificing time with our children, it is really the result of how productive we are.

In the last few months, I talked to more than one hundred people, read several studies, and covered countless productivity and time-management article and apps to help me educate myself about the topic. I also explored techniques, hacks, and tricks to better manage my time — some of them worked perfectly (Pomodoro technique, habit stacking, calendar entries, Craft.do). In contrast, others fell short of my expectation (touch it once, journaling, no empty ‘thinking’ slots).

My conclusions of this relatively short study of time management and productivity are far from profound, but they might be revealing.

Learning One

What you do and how you do it is fundamental. When you do it is critical.

If we are to summarize a day in our lives, it consists of:

1. What you do (writing, working out, watching TV, meditation)
2. Who you do it with (alone, in a group, with family and friends)
3. Where you do it (home, work, outside/inside, living room, couch)
4. When you do it (simply, at what time of the day, a sub-category is for how long)

No matter how you slice it, anything that happens has an entry point in each category. Let’s illustrate it:

• I am alone (who with) at home (where) reading a book (what) at 10 am (when).

Or:

• I am playing soccer (what) with 11 of my friends (who with) at the local field (where) at 9 pm every Thursday (when).

And while all of these categories are important on their own, a decisive piece to achieving peak output seems to be the timing of the thing I do, or precisely when. If I read before bed, my brain might be too tired to absorb the information. At the same time, at 10 am, I might be in a creative rather than a learning mode, which will diminish my experience, understanding, and even enjoyment from the activity. Likewise, my trough and less productive time might be someone else’s perfect slot for reading.

Learning Two

Each of us, based on our circadian rhythm, has a different personal peak time for specific activities.

In short, our circadian rhythm is our sleep-wake cycle which repeats every 24 hours. It establishes when we have high energy, trough, recovery period and when we go to bed and wake up. Based on that, each of us has a chronotype. Some folks divide people with a particular chronotype into larks and owls. Michael Breus defines the major chronotypes as bears (follow the sun), lions (wake up and go to bed early), wolfs (opposite of lions), and dolphins (irregular sleeping patterns). The main point is that each of us exhibits a predominant chronotype. And hence, each of us has a daily rhythm which establishes the optimum time to complete a particular task — from working out to meditation all the way to having coffee in the morning, learning a new language, or doing nothing to let your subconscious connect the dots without effort.

“A wise person does at once what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.” — Baltasar Graciàn.

A simple version of this is: there is an optimal time to do an activity (for example, work out or write a chapter in a book), but it is different for each of us based on our chronotype.

So, for now, we have: there is an optimum time for an activity, and that depends on our chronotype. If we do things at the right time, we will have more energy to complete them and get more output in a shorter time. That solves the energy part. What about focus?

Learning Three.

Building habits makes you more focused and drains less energy.

Being focused is hard. There are simply too many variables to control to ensure we are in the right environment and have the right set up to be 100% into the task we do. Different techniques might help us here — no distractions (no notifications, phones, internet), music, noise-cancelling headphones, short bursts of work (Pomodoro technique), others. These might actually work pretty well. But how do we scale this? Habits.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. — James Clear — Atomic Habits.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, explains more about the topic than I will ever be able to summarize. In my view, to increase focus, we need to turn regular activities into habits — something we do without effort and almost automatically. And while building a habit is an entirely different topic, what we can take with us is that the more habits we have, the more productive we will be (of course, if these habits are constructive, rather than destructive).

***

Let’s go back to our friends, who are productivity and time-management masters. I am sure they have given up a lot and have focused on the most critical things in their lives. But I am also sure that they might have created their days, the 1440 minutes, in a way that optimizes their output based on when they do certain things with regards to their own chronotype. And to increase their productivity, they have turned a lot of their days into habits.

Do. Or do not. There is no try.

And let’s go back to why I wanted to study this topic. Time is the only thing that we have. We shouldn’t waste it. I believe that with the right application of technology, we can achieve higher output, become more productive, and manage our time better. I yet to be convinced that the current technology tools or even a medley of them simplifies and achieves this task enough. I am excited to try and fix that — more on the topic in my next post.

No time like the present,

f.