Why a Colombian appointment in eight days actually means next week

When David Kadavy first made plans with people in Medellín, he kept running into the same confusing phrase. Ask a Colombian to meet you a week from today, and they'll tell you it's en ocho dias, in eight days. To a clock-time thinker, a week away is seven days later. To someone raised on event-time, today is a day too, and everything between now and the appointment, including both ends, gets counted.

Kadavy calls the two habits clock-time and event-time, borrowing the terms from social psychologist Robert Levine. Clock-time is useful when you need something to be efficient and predictable, like catching a flight. Event-time is useful when you're trying to think well, because insights arrive suddenly and can't be scheduled to the minute. He noticed that every time he lived in Medellín, there came a moment, usually around the three-week mark, when some minor disaster, a cancelled concert, an endless line, a broken ticket kiosk, finally broke his clock-time patience, and something shifted. He calls it the temporal switch, the point where you stop fighting a slower pace and start working with it.

That same logic, Kadavy argues, applies to much smaller and larger stretches of time than a single afternoon. He built his schedule around noticing which parts of the day, week, and year gave him the most creative energy, then arranged his hardest work to land inside those windows. His creative energy peaks early in the week and drops toward Friday, so Monday mornings became his most valuable slot, and financial paperwork got pushed to Friday afternoon, when his best thinking was already spent anyway. He credits Steve Jobs's habit of holding long Monday morning strategy meetings at Apple as an example of the same instinct, using fresh weekly energy for the biggest-picture thinking.

He also points to research comparing residents of two towns at the same latitude but on opposite sides of a time zone line. In the town where the sun set an hour earlier, residents went to bed earlier, slept about an hour more, and earned measurably more, an effect the researchers compared to an extra year of education. Predictable daylight, it turns out, isn't a minor comfort. It's part of why he found it easier to build a stable weekly rhythm in Medellín, where sunrise and sunset barely shift all year, than he ever had living through Chicago's wild seasonal swings.

Spend a couple of weeks simply noticing, without trying to fix anything yet, which days you feel sharp and which days you're dragging. Once you see the pattern, protect your best day for your single most important piece of thinking, and stop letting routine meetings or errands claim it out of habit. Push the paperwork, invoicing, and small logistics to whichever slot in your week is already your weakest, since your creative energy is spent there anyway. For work that depends on a real idea rather than a deadline, loosen your grip on the clock entirely, giving it the time it actually needs instead of forcing it into a fixed hour that may or may not match your energy.