Clocks and Flowers and Daylight Saving
Roadmaps and other lies about Time.
In between plans to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama (but not, for some reason, Puerto Rico), Donald Trump has declared war on Daylight Saving Time. This will probably be the most popular policy position of his presidency1, because changing our clocks twice a year is one of those things that makes less sense the more you think about it.
DST is an attempt to marry two conceptions of time, what the Ancient Greeks called Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is technological clock time, while Kairos is when the sun rises and the flowers open. The rise of the railroads largely shifted our society from Kairos to Chronos, replacing all those sun-calibrated local city times with just four corporate-mandated time zones, disconnected from local conditions.
Coming out of WWI, the US government decided that it just had to do something about Americans not waking up early enough. Americans wake up about 5 hours before noon and go to bed about 10 hours after noon, an asymmetry that led to wasted daylight hours and coal. These days, we would send in the behavioral economists to convince people of the virtues of waking up early. In 1918, the height of patronizing Taylorism, they went with the technocratic solution that actually worked2: just lie to everyone about what time it is.3 If people are waking up at 7am, and the government wants them awake at 6amā¦ just tell them itās already 7am at 6am. Voila.
That Awkward Handoff
Kairos still drives our daily work while Chronos still drives the systems we operate in. That tension permeates corporate life, particularly around any sort of planning.
Kairos (noun): A time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action;
the opportune and decisive moment.
Finance & Accounting, for example, show the two different ways of dealing with money across time4. Accounting uses Kairos, holding expenses and revenues in accounts indefinitely until just the right time when a matching activity occurs and cashflow is recognized. Finance uses Chronos, picking a specific date and time and collapsing all cash flows to that arbitrary moment. The two philosophies come together for quarterly financial reports, when bookkeepers try to appease investors by massaging the free-flowing, just-in-time reality of their business into neat tables of numbers that are published on a set cadence.
And at the same time, Product Managers go into quarterly planning facing the same problem in creating the business strategy that goes hand-in-hand with the financials. Translating from Kairos to Chronos is hard but absolutely has to happen somewhere between engineering and the investors. Boards and exec teams want roadmaps of set dates for cash and shipping, even though the Engineering work is done when itās done, the Products only have fit once customers like them, and the Research will only work when itās figured out.
The Tech team, steeped in Kairos reality, usually rebels against this imposition, because Tech team usually have a hazy idea at best that their salaries are entirely Chronos-funded. So itās on the Product team to impedance match between below and above. This is hard, and LinkedIn is awash with templates for ānow / next / laterā roadmaps for PMs still going through the ābargainingā phase of grief. These all ignore the simple fact that ālaterā is not an acceptable answer from an investor who wants to know when they can expect a return. Translating between the two worlds is part of the job, and pawning your job off onto your executives isnāt a winning strategy.
On the other hand, a preternatural instinct for how long things will take and how likely they are to succeed is one of the most valuable skills in business - and itās a skill that is particularly learnable by actually trying. Whether itās through explicit techniques like bottoms-up pointing or comparing to similar past projects, or just gut instinct developed over the course of a career, the ability to bring together Kairos and Chronos gets much better with practice.
In 2025, letās resolve to suck it up, put dates on things, and learn to minimize being wrong.
Once someone convinces him that he meant to abolish STANDARD time, which should be easy because Trump doesnāt find his very manhood threatened by owning up to small and inconsequential mistakes.
This only works if no block of constituents aligns itself to natural time. In Israel, religiously observant Jews and Muslims are against DST because they rely on everyone else waking up late to fit their sunrise prayers in before work.
The kids call this āgaslighting.ā
The gold standard of dealing with money across time is, of course, founders who cash out instead of taking their business down an unethical path, funded by LBOs that can only be paid back if that unethical path is taken, who then commiserate with the employees left behind about how shady the new management is.