Tense is the speaker's (author's) sense of time. Tense is a grammatical quality of verbs.

In Greek, we are dealing with two quite different features of the verb when we speak of tense. One feature is the time of the action of the verb; the other is the type or kind of the action of the verb--in other words: the when and the how.

When we are speaking about the time (when the action happens), we usually reserve the word tense for this.
When we are speaking about the type (how the action happens), we call this the aspect.

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The time of the action is not exactly the same as the tense of the action. Tense describes the time of the action in relationship to time of the writing or speaking about the action. In other words, tense is the speaker's or writer's sense of time.

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Tense has nothing to do with the reader's time.