In his seminal paper on solution of the infiltration equation, Philip (1957) proposed a gravity time, t_grav, to estimate practical convergence time of his infinite time series expansion, TSE. The parameter t_grav refers to a point in time where infiltration is dominated equally by capillarity and gravity derived from the first two (dominant) terms of the TSE expansion. Evidence that higher order TSE terms describe the infiltration process better for longer times. Since the conceptual definition of t_grav is valid regardless of the infiltration model used, we opted to reformulate t_grav using the analytic approximation proposed by Parlange et al. (1982) valid for all times. In addition to the roles of soil sorptivity (S) and saturated (K_s) and initial (K_i) hydraulic conductivities, we explored effects of a soil specific shape parameter β on the behavior of t_grav. We show that the reformulated t_grav (notably t_grav= F(β) S^2/(K_s - K_i)^2 where F(β) is a β-dependent function) is about 3 times larger than the classical t_grav given by t_{grav, Philip}= S^2/(K_s - K_i)^2. The differences between original t_{grav, Philip} and the revised t_grav increase for fine textured soils. Results show that the proposed t_grav is a better indicator for convergence time than t_{grav, Philip}. For attainment of the steady-state infiltration, both time parameters are suitable for coarse-textured soils, but not for fine-textured soils for which t_grav is too conservative and t_{grav, Philip} too short. Using t_grav will improve predictions of the soil hydraulic parameters (particularly K_s) from infiltration data as compared to t_{grav, Philip}.