Interview with the Author

Why Write About Time?

The question that comes up most frequently is: why time? Of all possible subjects, why build a framework around something so abstract and so thoroughly explored by philosophers, physicists, and poets?

The answer is that time is not abstract in practice. It is the most concrete thing in daily experience. Every decision you make involves a temporal component - when to act, how long to wait, whether to accelerate or slow down. Yet most frameworks for decision-making treat time as a background variable, something you optimize but do not fundamentally question.

The impulse to write Tempo came from noticing this gap. There was rich theoretical work on time in physics and philosophy, and there was practical work on time management and productivity. But there was very little connecting the deep understanding of time to the practical challenge of making decisions in it.

The Writing Process

The book took shape over roughly two years, though the ideas had been developing for much longer. The initial drafts were much more academic - heavy on references, careful about citations, structured like a scholarly argument.

Those drafts were terrible.

They were terrible not because the ideas were wrong but because the form contradicted the content. A book about the felt experience of time should not read like a journal article. It should have its own tempo. It should demonstrate the temporal awareness it advocates.

The rewriting process involved stripping away the academic apparatus and replacing it with direct observation. Instead of citing studies about time perception, describe what it feels like when an hour vanishes. Instead of building formal arguments, walk the reader through the reasoning at a pace that allows the ideas to settle.

This was harder than it sounds. Academic writing provides a safety net. References establish credibility. Formal structure creates the appearance of rigor. Removing that net meant relying on the strength of the observations themselves.

The Boyd Influence

The strongest intellectual influence on the book is John Boyd's work, particularly the OODA loop and the concept of operating inside an opponent's decision cycle. Boyd was a military strategist, but his ideas have remarkable generality.

What Boyd understood that many strategists miss is that speed is not just about efficiency. It is about creating a specific kind of advantage - the ability to act in a tempo that your environment or opponent cannot match. This is not always faster. Sometimes it means being deliberately slower, refusing to be rushed into a decision cycle that serves someone else's interests.

The tempo framework extends Boyd's insight by broadening the notion of temporal advantage beyond competitive contexts. You do not need an opponent to benefit from temporal awareness. You just need to be navigating a complex situation with multiple timescales and multiple rhythms.

What Surprised the Author

Several things about the writing process were genuinely surprising. The most important was discovering how many distinct senses of time coexist in daily experience without being noticed.

Clock time is one sense - the linear, measurable, shareable coordinate system. But there is also body time (the circadian and ultradian rhythms that shape energy and attention), social time (the shared tempos of groups and cultures), narrative time (the time structures we use to make sense of sequences), and psychological time (the subjective experience of duration, which varies enormously with context).

These different senses of time interact constantly and often conflict. Clock time says it is 2 PM. Body time says it is the post-lunch dip. Social time says the meeting is running long. Narrative time says the project is in its middle act. Psychological time says the last hour both flew and dragged, depending on which parts you focus on.

Mapping these interactions was the most rewarding part of the writing process. It revealed a landscape that is far richer and more structured than the simple timeline model that most people carry around.

Common Misreadings

The most common misreading of Tempo is that it advocates for some particular relationship to time - specifically, for slowing down. This is understandable given the cultural moment. Books about time tend to be either productivity manuals (speed up!) or mindfulness guides (slow down!).

Tempo is neither. It advocates for temporal awareness - the ability to perceive and respond to the actual tempo of a situation rather than imposing a preferred tempo on it. Sometimes that means slowing down. Sometimes it means speeding up. Sometimes it means changing rhythm rather than changing speed.

The analogy to music is deliberate. A musician does not play at one tempo. A musician reads the music, the room, the other players, and adjusts constantly. The goal is not a particular speed but a particular quality of temporal responsiveness.

Looking Forward

The ideas in Tempo are starting points, not conclusions. The framework points toward questions that deserve much deeper exploration. How do organizations develop temporal intelligence? How does temporal awareness interact with expertise in different domains? What are the developmental stages of temporal sensitivity?

These questions remain open. The essays on this site represent ongoing explorations of them. Each piece takes a different angle on the central question: what does it mean to take time seriously as a dimension of human experience and decision-making?

The invitation is to explore alongside. Use the framework where it helps, push back where it does not, and develop your own temporal vocabulary for the patterns you notice in your own experience.