Take Control of Time
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- July 2, 2025
We have a lot to learn from the ancient Greeks. We may have made amazing advances in technology, and our scientific understanding of the material universe is far greater, but they had far more wisdom than modern man has today.
In my earlier life, I worked as a management consultant in a large engineering company, in a field called “Group Capacity Assessment” or GCA. Our job was to increase the efficiency of the administrative workforce using Organisational and Methodological (O&M) and time studies. This meant timing all the various administrative tasks, setting time standards to achieve the optimal workload balance for staff, and eliminating duplication or unnecessary tasks. It usually meant savings of over twenty per cent on administrative costs.
Chronos and Kairos
Returning to the ancient Greeks, they had a deeper understanding of “time study” and recognised two different types of time. They, like us, had time that could be measured with a timing device that might count seconds, minutes, days or years of the passage of time. This they called “Chronos”, as in our chronometers or stop watches. It was time that could be measured, but they also had another time that couldn’t be measured in the same way, called “Kairos”
This time, Kairos measured the quality of time! At first, this sounds difficult to understand, but when we look closer, we can all relate to the idea of time being a quality rather than a quantity.
My best advice to help you understand this is to think back to a weekend break you may have taken to a different place, perhaps a foreign country you had not been to before. According to Chronos, you were only away for just two days, but you may have felt you had been away for almost a week! You had been experiencing Kairos! This same expansion of time occurs whenever we experience many new and interesting things throughout the day, even doing something mundane like gardening or painting a picture.
The opposite is true when a week passes with the same routine, unrelieved by new or different events. Time now feels like Chronos, and we wonder when the weekend will come! Every hour seems like two or more, and every day seems like forever. Children suffer this type of time when parents tell them to wait till tomorrow for some treat! The child feels that it could be a very, very, long way away! Maybe this isn’t because little children are impatient but rather because they live in the moment throughout their waking hours, and there are almost infinite moments in any day for them!
How Can We Begin to Experience More Kairos than Chronos Time?
Practice being more aware throughout your day. Simple routines like making a cup of tea could be an example: filling the kettle, noticing the sound of the water going into it, and increasing the weight. As it boils, notice the sound and see the steam, putting the tea into the teapot, feel the texture of the teabag, smell the aroma as the hot water hits the tea, and so on until you lift the tea to your lips to drink it. For most of us, that whole process may take less than a minute, and we barely notice any of those stages. The process didn’t take any longer, but we were always fully aware.
Some of our habits of lack of awareness are due to the way our brain works. We have become increasingly left-brain dominant, allowing our right brain to deal with the routine activities of our lives. This is highly desirable when driving a car; it would be unbearable to have to learn how to drive from scratch every time we get into the car!
Curiously, we become almost unconscious when the right brain takes over and may become more conscious when the left brain takes control, but not routinely, as this is when we can ponder what we will be doing tomorrow or how to deal with the latest problem at work! Training our left brain to be quiet to permit us to be more aware is a significant challenge.
William Blake gave us a poetic example;
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
Words: Michael Lingard BSc.(Hons) DO.
Orthopath, Buteyko Educator, Plantrician
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Michael Lingard, a regular contributor to Wellbeing Magazine for the past 18 years. A passionate promoter of real health care and would like to see a paradigm shift in modern medicine; from a disease & pathology based system to a health and ethology based system.
