What if the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough time, but that urgency has become our default?
We live in a world designed to save time.
Messages arrive instantly.
Information is available in seconds.
Tasks can be automated.
Work can happen from almost anywhere.
We have become extraordinarily good at making things faster. And yet, many of us experience increasing time pressure.
We move quickly from one thing to another.
We respond because something has arrived, not necessarily because it requires an immediate response.
Priorities compete.
Availability becomes expected.
And gradually, urgency can stop being something reserved for what is genuinely urgent.
It becomes the background condition of everyday life and work.
The New Time Culture™ begins with a question:
What is permanent time pressure doing to the way we think, decide, communicate and live?
We have learned how to save time.
Now we need to learn how to protect its quality.
For decades, innovation has helped us reduce the time required to do things.
This has created extraordinary possibilities.
But saving logistical time does not automatically create mental space.
The minutes we save can quickly be filled with more information, more requests, more decisions and more expectations of responsiveness.
So perhaps the next challenge is not simply:
How can we save more time?
Or:
How can we manage our time better?
But:
How do we protect the quality of our thinking when time pressure is everywhere?
This is the territory of The New Time Culture™.
Urgency is not the problem.
Urgency is essential.
Some situations genuinely require immediate action.
A crisis.
A critical client situation.
A safety issue.
A deadline with real consequences.
The problem begins when the response appropriate for an emergency becomes an everyday way of operating.
An email arrives. Respond.
A message appears. Check.
Someone says ASAP. Accelerate.
Another priority is added. Make room.
When this happens repeatedly, the distinction between urgent and important, between immediate and necessary, can begin to disappear.
The New Time Culture™ does not seek to eliminate urgency.
It seeks to return urgency to its proper role.
This is not a Slow Culture.
That distinction matters.
The New Time Culture™ did not emerge from the belief that slower is always better.
In fact, it emerged partly from questioning that belief.
There are moments when moving quickly is intelligent.
There are moments when moving slowly is inefficient.
And there are moments when ten seconds of thinking can prevent ten hours of unnecessary work.
The alternative to permanent acceleration is not permanent slowness. It is choice.
A New Time Culture™ is a culture that knows how
to change speed.
Sometimes the right pace is immediate.
Sometimes it is today.
Sometimes we need ten minutes to clarify.
Sometimes we need more information.
Sometimes we need to sleep on a decision.
And sometimes something that feels urgent simply isn’t.
The question is not:
Should we go faster or slower?
The question is:
What pace does this situation actually require?
Five shifts towards a New Time Culture
The New Time Culture™ proposes a shift in some of the assumptions that shape contemporary work and life.
These shifts are not about creating an ideal world without pressure.
They are about becoming more intelligent inside the pressure that already exists.
From speed by default → to speed by choice
Speed remains available, but we stop treating it as automatically superior.
From reacting → to clarifying
Before responding, we become better at understanding what is actually being asked and what the situation requires.
From permanent availability → to deliberate availability
Being reachable becomes something we can define rather than an unquestioned expectation.
From everything is urgent → to distinguishing urgency
We recover the ability to separate genuine urgency from perceived, inherited or habitual urgency.
From saving time → to protecting thinking time
Efficiency remains important, but so does the quality of the attention and judgment with which we use the time we save.
Why this matters at work
Time pressure does not remain on the calendar.
It enters organizations through behaviour.
Through messages. Meetings. Deadlines. Expectations. Priorities. Leadership.
And the way one person’s urgency becomes another person’s interruption.
When urgency becomes habitual, it can influence:
- decision quality;
- prioritization;
- attention and concentration;
- communication;
- collaboration;
- creativity and problem-solving;
- strategic thinking;
- sand the ability to disconnect from work.
This is why The New Time Culture™ is not simply a conversation about wellbeing.
TIt is also a conversation about how well we think and work.
Why this matters beyond wor
The culture of urgency does not disappear when we close our laptops.
It can shape the way we eat, travel, communicate, wait, rest and spend time with other people.
We can find ourselves accelerating even when nothing requires us to.
Checking without deciding to check.
Thinking about the next thing while living the current one.
Feeling that waiting is wasted time.
Or experiencing rest as something that first has to be earned.
The New Time Culture™ therefore asks questions about organizations, but also about the culture we are collectively creating.
What kind of experience of time are our technologies, habits and expectations producing?
And which of those expectations do we actually want to keep?
Where The New Time Culture came from
In 2026, Sandrine Kom was selected by Four Seasons Hotel Firenze to My own inquiry into time began years ago through Slow Life.
Slowing down initially gave me a way to question a culture fascinated by speed, productivity and constant activity.
But eventually the question evolved.
I became less interested in slowness itself and more interested in our ability to choose our pace.
Then, in 2023, I began practicing a weekly Digital Detox of approximately 30 hours.
What started as an experiment in disconnection became a long-term laboratory for observing attention, mental space, waiting, availability and our experience of time.
Those observations led to a much larger question about the culture of speed and permanent responsiveness in which we live.
Today, I am developing that inquiry through my forthcoming book, The New Time Culture, ongoing research and conversations with CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs and senior leaders across countries and industries.
From culture to practice
Recognizing that urgency has become too automatic is one thing.
Responding differently when pressure is actually present is another.
That is why I developed the I Have Time™ Method.
The Method translates the principles of a New
Time Culture into practical capacities:
Awareness → Clarity → Collaboration → Sustainability
It helps individuals, teams and organizations create enough space between pressure and response to recognize what is happening, clarify what matters and choose how quickly the situation actually requires them to act.
The New Time Culture™ describes the shift.
A New Time Culture does not promise more time.
It proposes something different.
A greater ability to recognize what deserves urgency.
To protect the quality of our thinking.
To question speed when speed is not helping.
To accelerate when it is.
And to recover something that permanent urgency quietly takes away:
the ability to choose our pace.
We don’t need a slow culture.
We need a culture that knows how to change speed.