Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal: Rethinking Time

Time was engineered for factories, not humans, making it a design question, not a given.

Author

Jess Price
October 06, 2025

Welcome to the 13th edition of Paradigm Makers Moonlit Minds Journal.

Table of Contents

Jess’ Monthly Reflection

I debated whether to acknowledge my two-month absence from Moonlit Minds. It felt dishonest to ignore it because those weeks reshaped my relationship with time, inspiring the topic of this edition.

I’d never given much thought to how humans decided to measure time through clocks, calendars and quantitative metrics. Growing up in Australia, I remember learning that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have understood time for over 65,000 years as cyclical and relational, inseparable from Country, community and culture. But I don’t remember ever questioning why our approach to time was so different. Then, in a conversation last September, I discovered the Greek distinction between chronos (quantitative, clock-time) and kairos (qualitative, the right moment). I started exploring the concept earlier this year, but didn’t fully understand it’s value until I was living a purely kairos life.

An unexpected incident left me with an empty calendar. For the first time in years, my only goal was to respond to what my body needed that day. Gone was the pressure to stack my schedule with meetings and deadlines. What felt unproductive by chronos standards gave me a rare glimpse at a different rhythm.

This experience echoed sociologist Barbara Adam’s 1995 critique of clock-time. She argued that when management and society reduce time to quantifiable units, we lose touch with the many other rhythms of human life. The last two months proved her point: by chronos metrics I achieved nothing, yet in kairos I recovered, reflected and realigned.

Today, most of us feel pressured to keep up. The usual question is How can I find more time? But a better one might be: How can I slow down? As AI accelerates efficiency, I’m not looking for new tasks to fill the hours. I want to move slow and build things. That phrase has become both a personal life motto and a design principle for Paradigm Makers.

My intention in this edition is to invite you to do the same. Embrace kairos where possible, limit chronos when you can and remember that time, like every system we’ve inherited, was designed, which means it can be redesigned.

As always, we will examine the historical context of time, identify opportunities for today and create new paradigms for tomorrow.

Enjoy tomorrow’s Harvest Supermoon,

Jess Price

Founder & Chief Vision Officer

P.S. I recently shared how I’m building a kairos-aligned company in an article for Digital Entrepreneur. That article is underpinned by the research and insights outlined below.

EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Research Approach: AI-assisted synthesis to access and distil credible historical and contemporary sources; insights cross-checked; citations included.

From Kairos to Chronos

To understand why today feels like a race against the clock, we need to trace how time itself has evolved throughout history. The Ancient Greek distinction between chronos (quantitative, clock-time) and kairos (qualitative, the right moment) has always existed in tension. But over centuries, the balance shifted steadily towards chronos, until it became the dominant operating principle of modern life.

Pre-Industrial (before 1760)

Before mechanical clocks, time was cyclical and event-based, marked by sunrise and sunset, seasons and festivals. Kairos guided the right moment for harvest, rest or ritual. Monks experimented with mechanical clocks in the late 1200s, and by the 1300s, public clocks appeared in European towns. Yet timekeeping remained local, tethered to daylight. Work was ‘task-oriented’ and the day ended when the task was done. Punctuality was a minor virtue; rest was natural, and rituals like holy days and harvest festivals reminded people that time flowed with life rather than against it. Multiple ‘times’ coexisted, unlike the single chronos framework we inhabit today, creating resilience for those who experienced it.

First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840)

Factories shifted this rhythm. Chronos moved from religious communities to the factory floor, where employers paid by the hour and installed clocks to discipline labour. Civil and penal codes reinforced obedience to time. Conflict was fierce. In 1817, Robert Owen proposed the slogan ‘Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’ as an act of resistance. By the 1840s, the workday stretched 10-16 hours, six days a week, and Benjamin Franklin’s mantra that ‘time is money’ became common sense. The workweek itself emerged as a structure for trading human hours for wages. This early time discipline logic continues to echo in contemporary work, where platforms use digital chronos tools to monitor and manage labour.

Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914)

New global technologies demanded global time. The Atlantic cable and international railways made local clocks insufficient, leading to the 1884 International Meridian Conference, which established Greenwich as the prime meridian and fixed a universal day. Time was no longer tied to nature but to standardisation. Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management pushed precision and efficiency further, embedding chronos into industrial culture. The busyness we still valorise today traces back to this moment. A world where being efficient with minutes defined human worth. Globalisation created a broader ‘temporal empire’, exporting Western chronos norms worldwide, a process that still shapes how global labour and trade are coordinated today.

Third Industrial Revolution (1970-2006) 

By the mid-20th century, the eight-hour, five-day work week was normalised. Offices replaced factories, and computers created a new class of knowledge workers. But while technology promised to reduce labour, the saved hours were rarely given back to workers. Instead, time savings were reinvested into doing more, reinforcing chronos logic. Counterculture movements in the 1960s experimented with kairos through meditation, artistic exploration and a search for presence. This was another early rejection of the stopwatch mentality. By the 1980s, ‘work-life balance‘ entered mainstream vocabulary, signalling a growing recognition that the chronos model of business extracted too much. And researcher Herbert Freudenberger identified ‘burnout’ as a workplace syndrome decades before the World Health Organisation gave it formal recognition in 2019. Yet the deeper logic of acceleration was never questioned. What appeared as freedom often reinforced dependency on chronos metrics like deadlines, logged hours or KPIs, leaving little room for kairos. This revolution entrenched two defaults that continue to shape us: the ideal of balance without structural design and the acceleration loop, where efficiency gains amplify pressure rather than relieve it.

Fourth Industrial Revolution (2011-now) 

Smartphones, social media and algorithmic management collapsed boundaries between work and life. Workers became always on, and the pandemic magnified the strain. Remote work was initially associated with stress, burnout and reduced wellbeing, though these effects eased over time as people adapted. In response, governments began experimenting with Right to Disconnect laws. Yet implementation remains contested, with some companies treating it as a symbolic gesture rather than an attempt at systemic redesign. Meanwhile, digital tools both measure and monetise our time. This digital intensification drives cycles of fatigue and cognitive overload. At the same time, pilots of four-day work weeks demonstrate that reducing chronos can boost productivity, wellbeing and retention. The pandemic proved that chronos models of busyness are fragile, and yet we are now seeing a return to these pre-existing models. What’s emerging instead is a recognition that rest, pacing and autonomy are not luxuries but essential design principles for sustainable work.

What this reveals 

Across these eras, time shifted from flexible and cyclical (kairos) to a single, standardised framework (chronos). Pre-industrial societies navigated multiple types of time, but the first industrial revolution imposed clock discipline. The second globalised this order, embedding Western chronos norms into trade, governance and the very infrastructure of daily life. The third entrenched acceleration: technologies that promised freedom instead produced burnout, as efficiency gains were recycled back into busyness. The fourth revealed both the saturation and fragility of this model. Digital intensification produced fatigue overload, yet experiments like the four-day week and right to disconnect laws now point to cracks in chronos dominance.

Taken together, this history shows that while humans have always understood the value of both chronos and kairos, our systems were deliberately designed to prioritise chronos. That design explains today’s struggles with busyness, burnout and boundaryless work. It also highlights an opportunity. If time has been engineered to serve industrial and digital production, it can be deliberately redesigned to restore human wellbeing, resilience and dignity.

IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES FOR TODAY

The Time Trap

Our relationship with time isn’t a personal failure. It’s the living legacy of four industrial revolutions. The relentless quantitative pulse of chronos that drives our calendars, deadlines and salaries feels inevitable because it has been meticulously engineered for centuries.

We often say the systems are broken. But history shows they are working exactly as designed. From the moment factory owners installed clocks to discipline labour, the core design logic has been standardisation, measurement, and monetisation of human output. That’s why today’s defaults feel so natural. To question the eight-hour day, or the expectation of instant responsiveness, is to question the operating system itself.

The challenge is not finding more time. It’s recognising and redesigning the inherited logic that makes us feel like we’re always running out of it.

What’s still active?

The shift from kairos to chronos left us with deep, often invisible defaults:

  • We internalise factory-floor metrics, believing worth is proportional to visible effort or ‘hours logged’.

  • We treat innovation as a process of constant, rapid iteration (a chronos race) rather than a kairos practice of pause and reflection.

  • We design tools like email and Slack for 24/7 responsiveness, making ‘always on’ the default state.

  • We tie labour value to duration (‘time is money’), hiding the hidden costs of burnout and disengagement.

  • We use the language of busyness to signal competence, reinforcing a century-old equation of precision and effectiveness.

Where do the frictions live?

Friction emerges when modern values clash with inherited defaults. These contradictions are treated as human failure, when they’re really design signals:

  • We champion wellbeing and agency, but measure value through chronos-bound KPIs and screen-time logs.

  • We say we want creativity, but allocate resources in rigid quarterly chronos cycles that punish non-linear kairos insight.

  • We encourage digital wellbeing and disconnection, but our tools are engineered for surveillance and constant availability.

  • We claim to value outcomes, but compensation still centres on labour duration and cost-per-hour.

  • We speak of intentionality and presence, yet still reward the fullest calendar or fastest response.

How can we reclaim Kairos?

Redesign doesn’t start with a revolution. It begins with small, practical experiments that decouple action from inherited defaults. Here are some I’ve implemented, inspired by Cal Newport’s work:

  • The Done List Ritual: End the day by writing what was completed (kairos metric), not just what remains (chronos metric).

  • The Intentional Gap: Block unstructured time for reflection and synthesis.

  • Set Response Windows: Replace constant availability with predictable rhythms (e.g., “I check my email at 10am and 3pm”)

  • Cost the Opportunity: Ask of every meeting, ‘What’s the value created versus the collective salary cost?’ pairing chronos cost with kairos opportunity cost.

  • The Pace-Setting Question: Begin projects not with ‘When’s the deadline?’ but ‘What’s the right pace for this to be done well?’

Redefining the language

The most impactful level of redesign is semantics. Words like productivity, impact, and value spread chronos assumptions into every conversation. To change systems, we must redefine them:

  • Productivity becomes the disciplined cultivation of kairos moments.

  • Impact aligns personal pace (kairos) with collective commitments (chronos).

  • Value becomes the measurable health of human, social, and ecological systems.

By naming the old defaults, we loosen their hold. Redefining these pervasive chronos terms allows us to begin embedding new design principles that prioritise resilience and dignity over busyness and depletion.

CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR TOMORROW

Designing Work Beyond The Clock

Our current frictions are signals that the old chronos system is struggling. They suggest we are entering the perfect kairos moment to rethink our relationship with time. In the future, we can have a model where kairos becomes a key design principle rather than an exception.

Through Paradigm Makers’ 5 Essential Elements, here is what the new paradigm could look like:

People: From measurable output to purpose-driven stewardship

Instead of measuring self-worth by hours logged, systems reward stewardship. The new paradigm intentionally cultivates skills and contributions aligned with emerging needs. Built-in hurdles reserve time for growth, shifting the measure from screen-time to systemic impact.

Innovation: From rapid iteration to intentional fallow time

Chronos pressures punish deep thinking. The new paradigm normalises fallow time, or periods of pause where synthesis and non-linear insight can surface. The measure of success shifts from speed to the durability and quality of creative breakthroughs.

Technology: From attention extraction to attention restoration

Technology that once freed labour now consumes attention. The new paradigm would flip the logic: tools that learn our rhythms, protect flow, and design for meaningful interruption. Instead of maximising chronos availability, technology can elevate kairos readiness by asking, ‘Are we mentally present, or depleted?’

Economics: From time-for-money to outcome-for-value

Chronos economics ties pay to hours. Kairos economics ties value to transparent, systemic outcomes like resilience, health and learning for people and planet. Compensation models reframe profit as long-term system wellbeing. Finance itself becomes a design tool for human and environmental sustainability.

Norms: From busyness as status to intentional rest

Status has long been measured in full calendars. Future norms can elevate intentional rest as a mark of leadership. Fallow periods and unscheduled wins signal presence rather than absence. Culturally, we shift from urgency as virtue to resilience as capacity.

The factory clock defined life for centuries. But history shows time was designed, and can be redesigned. A future paradigm brings chronos and kairos back into alignment, one intentional choice and one new design principle at a time.

DESIGN WHAT COMES NEXT

We Are Standing In A Kairos Moment

For centuries, chronos was engineered into the infrastructure of life: factories, offices, screens, calendars. Today, cracks are visible. Busyness produces burnout. Efficiency creates fragility. The signals are clear: the old operating system is failing.

Kairos is not extinct. It is a design principle we can reclaim. Where chronos measures output, kairos measures alignment: the right action at the right time. Our task isn’t to abandon chronos altogether, but to rebalance. To embed kairos alongside chronos so that human wellbeing, creativity and resilience are no longer incidental, but systemic.

The redesign begins small. Structure reflection into the week. Protect empty space as seriously as deadlines. Build tools that restore attention instead of extracting it. Reward leaders who pace with clarity, not urgency. Reclaim language so that kairos becomes as commonplace as chronos.

Every reader can experiment here. Ask one kairos question, change one chronos metric, or shift one design norm within your influence. Paradigms don’t change through theory alone; they evolve through practice.

Here are five reflection questions to get you started:

  1. What might change if performance measured systemic health, not hours logged?

  2. Where could I protect intentional emptiness so ideas have time to arrive?

  3. What boundary can my tools signal to mark focus as non-negotiable?

  4. If value meant resilience, not revenue, what hidden debts would I stop incurring?

  5. What is one kairos experiment I can start this week?

If any of this sparked your own kairos moment, I’d love to hear your reflections.

Thanks for making it to the end!

Until next time,

Jess

P.S. One kairos moment I had while writing this edition: Should this newsletter become our place to decide on the design principles for the new paradigm we want to build? Let me know your thoughts… (or any other topic you’d like me to explore)

P.P.S The concept of time didn’t evolve in isolation, if you enjoyed this edition, you might also like:

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