Kairosolution

The Kairos Principle – Special Edition 2026

Dear Impossible Readers,

Welcome to the 2026 New Year’s resolutions! Why? Well, because we have learned from my Anti-Kairos post that we do not like change, and therefore we continue to make new New Year’s resolutions each year. And if you do not remember, because you have not read that post, then you should make it your 2026 New Year’s resolution right now and get on with it!

How many times did someone in 2025 tell you, “I am busy”? Better yet, how many times have you told someone else, “I am busy”? I have one simple solution. If it has a date, if it costs you time, if it even remotely smells like time? It must be in your calendar. Yes. Unless you have a job where everything happens on the fly and at random, you should own your calendar. In fact, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was proven to be incorrect in 2025. Now, I am not a quantum physicist, but that sounds impossible. Yet, science has proven that it is possible, even in one of the most difficult subjects. Where does this leave us?

I am an agenda hedonist. And no, I do not live in my calendar. Being an agenda hedonist allows me to manage my free time. The more you plan for things that eat up your time, the more time you free up for other activities. After having many conversations with “the one who shall not be named here”, someone who has no sense of time, it made me realise something. I have been explaining it all wrong. You cannot explain time to someone who does not understand time.

Instead, I decided to use money as a metaphor. After all, time is money. I know many disagree because, unlike money, you cannot save time, but for most people, both time and money are finite. A lot of times, your pay is fixed. You can manage and budget time in similar ways to money. And yes, everything you would earn above that, extra, as a bonus, would not suit this comparison, but normally, you budget within your fixed income, including your savings. Your savings here are your free time.

Yes, yes, I can read your mind, telling me “I do not have time for this”. If emergency room doctors thought like you, we would not have emergency rooms in hospitals but many more morgues. If air traffic controllers thought like this, planes would start to drop out of the sky. ER doctors and air traffic controllers use triages to manage things that are unpredictable. Customer and IT service representatives use tickets with escalation rules to manage their numbers. If you define yourself as extremely busy, it means you need to build a resilient structure to manage your time.

First things first, the meetings you have every day should never ever be budgeted as “rent” or “mortgage”. If you do this, then you would end up homeless or paying interest instead of your principal. Your meetings should be your shopping list for the week. This means you are flexible to decide which items are important and what needs to be added last minute, and which ones can be removed from the list. Start with the basics, the stuff you will always need, like vegetables and fruits. If your shopping list feels like a holiday shopping list, then you know you have been too generous. And when it feels like you have been shopping at Prada or Versace? Well, that means you have been using credit, and that is expensive. Why? Because now you have to pay back every month, meaning, you now need to catch up with work, A LOT.

So, what should be categorised as “rent” or “mortgage”? Your core responsibilities, including deadlines, deliverables, and strategic work, should be categorised as non-negotiable. They keep you employed and trusted. Time is your payslip. Spend it like you mean it. Pay your rent or principal first, avoid living on interest, save for growth, and shop meetings wisely. If you would not bankrupt your finances, do not bankrupt your time either.

Happy New Year,
Yours Possibly

An ER doctor on triaging your “crazy busy” life – Darria Long (TED)