The first time I read about Before the Cof­fee Gets Cold, I was sit­ting in a café not unlike the one in the book — qui­et, a lit­tle nar­row, the kind of place where time seems to gath­er rather than pass. Out­side, the city was still in its morn­ing hur­ry, but inside there was only the soft hum of the espres­so machine and the faint clat­ter of cups.

In Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s nov­el, a small Tokyo back-alley café offers more than sim­ply excel­lent cof­fee; it offers its cus­tomers a sin­gle, improb­a­ble gift: the chance to trav­el back in time. There are rules, of course — but the most impor­tant is this: you must return before your cup of cof­fee goes cold.

It’s an idea so sim­ple it feels like it must already have exist­ed some­where in us. The lim­it isn’t mag­i­cal, it’s human. Warmth doesn’t last for­ev­er. Atten­tion, patience, con­nec­tion — none of them do. Read­ing it, I realised how much of my own life revolves around man­ag­ing time instead of liv­ing inside it.

I run projects, teams, process­es. My days move in units of thir­ty or six­ty min­utes, mea­sured by meet­ings and mile­stones. It’s work I care about deeply. And yet, some­where between agen­das and per­for­mance reviews, I began to miss the kind of time that steams in your hands. So I made a small adjust­ment: one day a week, I stopped lead­ing teams and start­ed mak­ing coffee.

The first shift felt odd­ly dis­ori­ent­ing. There’s a rhythm to café work that doesn’t tol­er­ate over­think­ing. Milk either scalds or it doesn’t. You steam it, pour it, serve it. Peo­ple come and go. There’s no strat­e­gy meet­ing to explain why.

At the begin­ning, my pro­fes­sion­al instincts got in the way. I caught myself eval­u­at­ing work­flows, spot­ting inef­fi­cien­cies, men­tal­ly map­ping out process improve­ments. Then I noticed the absur­di­ty of it — the futil­i­ty of opti­mis­ing a moment that is already enough. Mak­ing cof­fee is, by design, a closed loop. The task ends when the cup lands on the counter.

That sim­plic­i­ty is hum­bling. In my oth­er job, I spend much of my ener­gy on abstrac­tion: plan­ning, struc­tur­ing, pre­dict­ing. In the café, every­thing is imme­di­ate. Your mis­takes are vis­i­ble; your suc­cess­es, ephemer­al. A cus­tomer takes a sip, nods, and that’s it — the moment dis­solves. But some­times they look up and smile — not the polite kind, but the qui­et, sat­is­fied smile that says some­thing has land­ed just right. It lasts only a sec­ond, but it’s enough. In that small cycle, there’s a strange and sat­is­fy­ing completeness.

It’s not submission; it’s presence

»Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of grav­i­ty. Emo­tions also seem to act accord­ing to grav­i­ty. When in the pres­ence of some­one with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrust­ed your feel­ings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flow­ing out.«

I haven’t stum­bled into this by acci­dent. It isn’t escape — it’s inten­tion. Part of that inten­tion comes from a long-stand­ing love of cof­fee itself. I’ve spent years exper­i­ment­ing with beans, grind sizes, and espres­so machines at home — the qui­et rit­u­als of a hob­by barista. Step­ping behind the counter felt like the nat­ur­al next step: to turn curios­i­ty into craft. I hoped the café would teach me some­thing about time, and it does. It shows me how to stay inside the frame of the present, to inhab­it work rather than man­age it. Every cup demands a kind of atten­tion that can’t be mul­ti­tasked. You mea­sure grind size by feel, milk tex­ture by sound. You learn to read peo­ple in glances rather than emails.

And then, there’s the ser­vice itself. »Serv­ing« is a word most peo­ple tend to avoid in lead­er­ship — it some­how sounds hier­ar­chi­cal, out­dat­ed. But in the café, serv­ing is the entire point. It’s not sub­mis­sion; it’s pres­ence. You offer some­thing made with care, and in that small exchange you’re remind­ed what work can mean when it’s not medi­at­ed by metrics.

I’ve noticed how lit­tle it takes for con­nec­tion to appear. A brief exchange, a famil­iar order, a small moment of recog­ni­tion that says, «You got it right.« It’s ordi­nary, almost invis­i­ble — and yet it car­ries the same under­stand­ing that keeps teams and projects alive.

Behind the counter, empa­thy isn’t a val­ue you talk about; it’s some­thing you prac­tice. You learn to antic­i­pate needs, to read small cues, to make tiny adjust­ments that change someone’s day. The same prin­ci­ples apply in lead­er­ship, only slow­er and often with less clarity.

Slow­ly, this place becomes a qui­et mir­ror for my oth­er world. Man­ag­ing peo­ple is not so dif­fer­ent from mak­ing cof­fee: you set the tem­per­a­ture, con­trol the pres­sure, keep things flow­ing with­out burn­ing out. The metaphor isn’t per­fect, but it holds. Lead­er­ship, too, is about heat and patience. Too much of either, and work turns bitter.

What sur­pris­es me most is how porous the bound­ary between both jobs can become. On Mon­days, when I return to the office, I notice that I lis­ten more. I leave more space in meet­ings. I pay atten­tion to tim­ing — not just dead­lines, but the rhythm of con­ver­sa­tion, the point when someone’s ener­gy cools.

Time, I begin to see, has tex­ture. It stretch­es and con­tracts accord­ing to pres­ence. The café con­dens­es it into min­utes; the agency expands it into months. Both are real, but only one demands that I notice its passing.

The past is what makes the present, but the present is what makes the future

In Kawaguchi’s book, those who trav­el back in time can’t change the future. They return to the same present, though slight­ly altered by what they’ve felt. That’s what the café does for me. I don’t escape my job; I return to it, just a lit­tle more awake.

The nov­el­ist writes, »The past is what makes the present. But the present is what makes the future.« I used to read that as a com­ment on nos­tal­gia — a warn­ing not to linger too long in what’s gone. But now it feels more like an instruc­tion: to treat the present as the place where every­thing actu­al­ly happens.

Lead­er­ship, like cof­fee, cools if left unat­tend­ed. It los­es warmth in process, empa­thy in rep­e­ti­tion. The task isn’t to keep it hot for­ev­er, but to keep return­ing to it — to notice when it’s cool­ing and begin again.

Each Fri­day, when I step behind the counter, I’m remind­ed that work doesn’t have to mean dis­tance. That val­ue can be mea­sured not in scale but in tem­per­a­ture. And that a cup of cof­fee, held just right, might be the most pre­cise form of time man­age­ment there is. By the time the cof­fee gets cold, the moment is gone.

But for a while, time tastes dif­fer­ent — and that, per­haps, is enough.