Agency through action in time
Often it feels we need something called agency to make good use of this historical moment with all of the advanced tools and opportunities.
Agency is complex, not something one can just have. It seems to grow through small, consistent actions, both in the realm of the individual and the realm of the collective. Over the last year at Cadence, we've been exploring what agency means for each person and for our team as a whole.
At first, our actions were simple. We started meeting regularly, talking, and thinking out loud together, working on a set of prototypes. Our rhythm was three meetings a week, each one hour long: some for planning, some for reflecting, and some just for spending time together.
Deciding what to do and looking back at what we had done became a structure for how we worked. It wasn't anything new process-wise, but slowly we started to find our own way with it.
We often talked about time broadly: how it is defined, how it moves, and how it can make us feel. Somehow there was often a tone of unease around the topic. Personally for us, the wish was to feel calm instead of stressed when it came to this central subject.
Modern life is built around time, but not really with it. Most tools we use only show some of time, quite often linked to a list of tasks or meetings or productivity broadly. They are made to plan the future, to synchronize people, but not to help us understand how we live.
It was apparent the culture didn't need another productivity app. What we need as a collective is a way to see and understand how our actions unfold over time, a way to notice patterns and learn from them.
This led us to the first version of Cadence, which showed bars that represented 30-minute blocks of time that could contain information like a note and a mood, scrolling sideways like a river of hours moving forward in a straight line. We liked the idea of changing the expected axis of time from vertical to horizontal. Our first prototype was quite exciting. During the process of realizing our schematic sketches, a shared agency began to appear. Everyone's voice mattered. All three of us helped shape both the product and the way we worked.
We wanted to move away from the world's obsession with productivity and focus instead on balance, for ourselves and for the culture around us. Our goal, or perhaps even our mission, became to build a tool that helps us notice our broader time: to see where it goes, how it feels, and what it means. By paying attention to the present moment and capturing it in the consistent format, we can see patterns in our days, weeks, and months emerge as the record accumilate.
Once these patterns bacome available as a tool of reflection, we can make small changes to shape them - little by little — until our time starts to reflect our vision and values represented in the way life flows.
For us, it's all about balance: learning to orchestrate a life where every part: family, rest, work, care get the time it deserves. For us, it's about a tool that helps us feel more agency over our lives.