The New Time Culture
What happens when urgency becomes the way we live?
A forthcoming book by Sandrine Kom
This book began with an email I should never have opened.
I was on holiday in the Pyrenees with my husband and friends. We had reached the top of a mountain when I made the mistake of checking my inbox.
There it was: an email from an important client about a project that needed to be presented quickly.
A few hours later, my husband and friends were still enjoying their holiday.
I was in front of my computer.
And I was furious.
Not with the client. With the fact that work had managed to enter a moment that had absolutely nothing to do with work, and that I had let it.
That experience led me to make a decision:
From now on, Sunday would be mine.
Every Saturday evening, I would switch off my phone and remain disconnected until Monday morning.
I didn’t know it then, but that decision would become the beginning of a much larger inquiry, and eventually, of The New Time Culture.
What I discovered when I disconnected
Since 2023, this weekly Digital Detox has remained part of my life. Every Saturday evening, I disconnect for approximately 30 hours, until Monday morning.
Week after week, I began observing what changed when I was no longer continuously reachable.
My attention changed. Waiting changed. My perception of time changed. I noticed the impulse to check, respond and fill every empty moment. I also began to see how deeply speed and availability had entered everyday life.
Digital Detox was becoming more than a personal practice. It was becoming a laboratory.
And the questions became larger.
Why do we feel that we should always be available? Why does everything seem to require a quick response? When did urgency become so normal? And how do we know when something genuinely requires speed?
These questions became the beginning of The New Time Culture.
A larger inquiry
This is not a book about living slowly.
Speed is necessary. Urgency is sometimes real.
What interests me is what happens when urgency becomes the default – when we respond before asking whether an immediate response is actually necessary, or accelerate simply because something has arrived with the expectation of speed.
The question is no longer simply whether we have enough time. It is what time pressure changes in us: our attention, our decisions, our conversations, the quality of our work and our ability to be fully present when work is over.
And ultimately, whether we are still choosing our pace, or whether the pace around us is choosing it for us.
Conversations about time
As part of the book, I am having international conversations with CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs and senior leaders across countries and industries.
I am interested in something broader than how they manage their time. I want to understand their relationship with time.
How has it changed over the course of their lives and careers? What does time mean to them today? How do they experience speed, waiting, pressure and availability? When do they protect their time, and when do they give it away? Has greater responsibility changed the way they experience it?
I am also interested in how they make decisions when several things seem urgent at once, how they recognize what deserves their immediate attention, and whether experience has changed their ability to choose when to move quickly and when not to.
These conversations are an important part of The New Time Culture. They bring personal experiences, cultural differences and different forms of responsibility into a larger exploration of how we experience time in contemporary life, and what that experience is becoming.
A New Time Culture
The more I explore these questions, the clearer one thing becomes: the alternative to a culture of speed is not simply a culture of slowness.
There are moments to move quickly. There are moments to wait, question, discuss or think again.
What matters is our ability to recognize the difference.
The New Time Culture™ is a proposal for a culture in which urgency is no longer the automatic setting, and in which we become better at choosing the pace a situation requires
The New Time Culture – forthcoming
I am currently writing the New Time Culture and continuing the international conversations, research and observations that are shaping it.
The book began with one Sunday I wanted to reclaim. It has become an inquiry into something much larger: how modern life is shaping our experience of time, and how urgency became such a powerful part of it.
Follow the thinking as it develops…
In my newsletter, I share ideas, questions and observations emerging from the research, conversations and experiences behind the New Time Culture.
It is a way to follow the thinking as the book takes shape, and to be among the first to hear about its next steps.
