A Heads-Up on Tail-Ends.

See this graph? It’s about to mess with your head. And you’re going to love it. Eventually.

Ready? Here goes…

What this graph represents is a fundamental notion that not all time is created equal. The ancient Greeks knew this. They had two different words for time.

Chronos Vs. Kairos

There was Chronos, which was the idea that time is quantitative and linear, point A To Point B. And then they had Kairos, which was the idea that there were certain moments in time that had higher importance. They were more textured and nuanced than other moments.

The graph indicates that there are windows during the course of your life that matter more for specific relationships, for specific people in your world. And that recognizing when you’re in one of those Kairos time windows is crucial for taking advantage of it and capitalizing on those specific moments.

Righteous! So, what’s the problem here?

The Tail-End

Take family, for instance. It's the green line on the graph. The premise is that the majority of time that you spend with your family, and defined as such, is essentially experienced during childhood years. Statistics that have emerged through relevant studies show that you’re through with approximately 95% of the time you have with your parents by the time you’re 18 years old! As I write this, I’m very aware that I’m about halfway through my family time with my firstborn.

I feel this is true even if you don’t physically leave home when you’re 18. This chart is based on data obtained through surveying American subjects. But even with other cultural nuances factored in, the effect the data has on people worldwide is fairly standard. It tends to hit most people like a bag of bricks! I mean, I lived with my folks until much later in life, but in retrospect, I have to agree that the quantity of time I spent after that threshold is nowhere near as intense as the earlier years. My headspace at that threshold back then can be described quite nicely by these two lines from a poem written by John Masefield called ‘Roadways’: Most roads lead men homewards, My road leads me forth.

It’s a similar story with siblings. By the time everyone leaves home to go explore life and the world, it leaves you with about 15% of your total hangout time left.

The same often goes for old friends. If they’re high school and college ones, you’d be hanging out with the same mugs all week. And then again on weekends. Fast forward to a decade after that and you’d be lucky if you find all of them in the same room at the same time even 10 days each decade. By the time you have laid the foundations of your own career, you’re probably in your final 7-10% with them.

You’re never going to get that amount of time back with any of them.

This is true about cherished experiences too. Like the number of times you’ll go swimming in the ocean, or on vacations abroad. It’s an absurdly finite number, whether you can isolate it or not.

The main difference between cherished relationships and experiences is that you do have a certain amount of control over the latter in terms of spreading them out evenly through time – how many times one goes to the beach here on, for instance. With relationships however, that already done/still to go ratio doesn’t align very neatly with how far you currently are in life.

And if these finite numbers you’ve just seen don’t freak you out a little bit, you either way ahead of all of us on this curve, or you’re not thinking about it hard enough.

Back to that graph. The reason this sparks an such an emotional reaction when folks see it is because it brings that concept to life. It crushes you to realize that the amount of time you have left with the people you care about most in the world is very decidedly finite – and dwindling. The Tail End!

Chronos Vs. Kairos Redux

See, most people don’t think about this on a daily basis.

It has been observed that time is effectively irrelevant to young people. They just don’t think about it. Like, at all! The thought of time being finite surfaces later in life, and sporadically at that, when experiencing poignant life events like the loss of a loved one, or an epiphany from the blue (like right now, perhaps) – and then it’s back to the BAU apathy. And this continues until very late in life when time is only thing that matters to people. But then, it’s a little too late to do much, isn’t it?

So, what do we do in the face of this?

Reach for the nearest Time Management course, you say? Not so fast.

As a young trainer, I loathed delivering Time Management workshops. Not just because I felt like a bit of a hypocrite, but because I just wasn’t able to connect with the time management concepts being taught on a deeper level. I could never find meaningful personal anecdotes and examples to regale my audience with. I’d stick to the facilitator guide. And ask everyone questions like ‘How would you define time management?’ and then bring up a Merriam-Webster definition of that term on a slide. And build up to spring the star of the show – the 2x2 Urgent/Important Grid-on those hapless, unsuspecting souls. Quelle horreur! If you’re reading this and were ever part of a Time Management workshop I delivered, I hope you found healing and remedial wisdom over the years. Or that you have suppressed that trauma so well, you have no recollection of it whatsoever.

The thing is people don’t lament that there wasn’t enough time, I feel. They lament that that they didn’t do enough/right by whatever they had in their lifescape, often wishing they’d known they were in the tail end. I'm no exception.

My dad and me shared birthdays. I have, on occasions, tried to recall what I did on the last one I shared with him before he passed. And it’s all hazy. All things considered, let’s just say I had a pretty good idea he was no blue-zone contender. But the onset of what took him hadn’t yet begun when our last shared birthday came to pass. There were no neon signs to suggest it was anything other than the usual shared birthday. My best guess is that I must have wished him, given him a quick hug and dashed out to p-a-r-t-y. Coz’ my road led me forth.

Since I chanced upon the concept of tail-ends, I have pondered the question more than once: If I knew then what I know now, (even though I’d still obviously have no clue what lay ahead) - I’d have pegged that I was in the tail end of birthdays shared with him, about 10 to go at the most. Would I have done anything differently that day?

It's absurdly hard to be completely objective about it. Even for me. But I have come to believe that the answer is yes.

The one that gets away is not Chronos. It’s Kairos!

This is also one of the reasons why I could never connect with those Time Management workshops. They’re all about Chronos. All about tools, tips and tricks to channel the passage of time, and wrangle as much as possible out of it.

Kairos is assumed to be the natural by-product/reward for managing Chronos. There’s almost a presumption that the learner already has a firm understanding of their own Kairos windows. You know now that most people don’t.

Also, Chronos bows to no one. Take any time management tool and you’ll find dozens of exceptions, where they just won’t work. Take that 2x2 urgent/important matrix. Conventional wisdom will tell you to analyze and plot your tasks in one of the four quadrants, and then use prescribed execution strategies. But some tasks cannot be easily classified or simplified to fit into a 2x2 matrix. And oversimplification just causes more problems and ironically, more time wastage.

I feel I understood it all backwards. Because if you shift the focus on Kairos, you’ll find the will to work with Chronos. Those workshops never covered the concept of tail ends though. A very necessary perspective. Because the suggestion then would be to first pick a task related to your Kairos window, or tail-end, schedule it in your calendar and stick to that commitment for all it’s worth. Because you understand the gravity of it. And you know the alternative is just not worth it.

You can now reach for the nearest Time Management course, if you like.

Doing Justice to Tail-Ends

So faced with tail-ends, what do we do?

According to experts on this subject, it doesn’t take much.

1)?Leverage the compound effect: Make the tiny investments today in those special relationships. With people who are in your Kairos time windows and the ones who are outside it – in the tail end of your time together. Send that one-line little text when you’re thinking about the person. This has a ripple effect into the future. I do this and people find it delightful. Taking those ten seconds to text, or the ten minutes to call makes the difference between whether you smile when you look back in the future on that specific relationship, or you kick yourself with a wistfulness you just won’t be able to shake off.

2) Priorities matter.?Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—because if you don’t set your priorities, rest assured - they will be set for you.

3) Keep intentionality in the foreground: Quality time matters.?If for example, you know you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious!

I don’t deliver Time Management workshops anymore. And maybe that’s just as well. I haven’t the foggiest on what I’d say to participants in a workshop format. So, mankind can breathe easy.

But in true L&D style, I have a couple of further reading resources for you. As takeways, I’d strongly recommend Oliver Burkeman’s ‘Four Thousand Weeks’ and Sahil Blooms ‘The 5 kinds of Wealth’. That graph you saw earlier – it’ll come alive for you in even more graphic detail.

The wistfulness you most likely feel if you got this far will pass. Trust me. And then I guess it’d be a massive kick to be able to look at the unknown future tumbling towards you and say “Yo, Chronos! Bring.It.On! And Kairos!!! Achtung baby! I’m coming for you!”

Here’s to a great life with legendary tales and tail-ends!