There is a word, kairos, that the Greeks set against chronos. Chronos is what the clock counts; kairos is what the moment asks. Most of startup culture mistakes the first for the second.
Two words for time.
I have not shipped anything in three weeks. I have never been more productive. This is not a paradox I am particularly proud of — it took me most of a decade to stumble into it, and I suspect I will lose it again before the year is out. But while I have it, I want to write it down, because the thing I have lost is not speed. It is an idea about speed that was false the whole time.
We measure velocity, set quarters, stand up daily — all chronos, all counting. The machinery is immaculate. I have built it myself, twice, in companies I ran. The problem is that the machinery is indifferent to what it moves. It will just as happily grind out the wrong thing on a tight cadence as the right thing on a loose one. In fact it prefers the wrong thing, because the wrong thing is legible: it has a scope, a ticket, a definition-of-done.
Kairos, by contrast, is illegible. You cannot put it on a board. It does not produce a burn-down chart. It is the moment at which the thing you are making asks to be made in a different way, and the question is whether you are quiet enough to hear it. Chronos hears nothing. Chronos is a metronome.
The cost of chronos.
What I noticed, in the weeks before I stopped, was that I was shipping patches to the wrong thing. The app I was building was technically correct. Every ticket closed cleanly. Every PR merged. And yet each week the shape of the thing was drifting further from what I had set out to make. I was hitting all the chronos targets and missing the kairos one entirely.
The machinery is indifferent to what it moves. It will just as happily grind out the wrong thing on a tight cadence as the right thing on a loose one. — from a note dated 07 · x · MMXXV
This is not an argument against discipline. Discipline is what lets you notice the drift in the first place; without a daily practice you have no baseline against which to measure the wobble. But discipline is chronos in service of kairos, not chronos as a substitute for it. The standup is there so that, once a week, you can cancel the standup and go for a walk.
What the monks knew.
The Orthodox have a calendar that is very old and very awkward. Pascha moves. The Feasts of the Theotokos arrive on fixed dates that fall on different days each year. Vespers begins when the sun sets, not at 18:00. None of this is convenient. All of it is deliberate. The liturgical year is designed, deliberately, to resist the tyranny of the week — to teach you that there is a different clock, and it is not yours to set.
I have been reading Maximus the Confessor again, in the way you read him — slowly, with a pencil, three pages at a time. Maximus has a phrase for the soul that mistakes the urgent for the important: he calls it distracted. Distraction, in Maximus, is not a failure of attention. It is a category error. It is treating one kind of time as if it were another.
Most of what passes for productivity, I now suspect, is distraction in this Maximian sense. Not idleness — we are not idle, we are the opposite of idle — but the more subtle failure of bringing chronos to a kairos problem. The right response to a kairos problem is to stop counting and start listening. The wrong response is to ship faster.
A sabbath of shipping.
So for three weeks I have done nothing that would appear on a changelog. I have re-read what I wrote a year ago. I have walked to the chapel at Einsiedeln and sat in the back, where the light comes in from the west at four o'clock. I have talked, at some length, with two people whose opinions I trust and who have no financial interest in the outcome. I have not opened the repo.
When I open it next week — Monday, probably; it is always Monday — I will make a change that would have taken me six months to notice under the old regime. It is not a big change. It is the right change. That is the difference.
This is not a method I can recommend without warning. If you have obligations — investors, employees, a burn rate — then a three-week sabbath of shipping is a luxury you may not have, and I will not pretend that it is always available. But I suspect that many of the people who believe they cannot afford it are, in fact, afraid of it. Because the clock is a comfort. The clock tells you you are doing something. The quiet does not.
Written at Schwyz, between the feasts of Thekla and Luke the Evangelist. Set in Cormorant. Not optimized for sharing.