Who gets the time that tech saves?

Nearly every machine around you (and the one you’re reading this on) was designed to save you time.

We have more technology designed to save time than any generation in history. We can automate our homes, generate a first draft in seconds, order almost anything to our door and reach someone on the other side of the world instantly.

So why does it sometimes still feel like we are running out of time?

We’re heading into the last weekend in August, and if it wasn’t a restful month for you, this may be timely. Also, welcome to The Intersection, and thanks for reading!

Earlier this week I watched a video titled Why You Are Always Busy: The Hidden History of Stolen Time (shoutout to Javon who sent it to me).

The video shares that our constant busyness can’t be explained by poor calendars or a lack of discipline alone. It’s also produced by economic systems that reward speed, output and continuous attention.

While walking down Queen Street West, I watched/listened to the whole thing. If you’ve followed me for a bit, you know that I move between several worlds: Building businesses, advising brands, creating content, teaching, organizing events and working with social impact organizations.

My calendar is full partly because I have chosen a “full life”.
Still, maybe personal choice doesn’t explain the whole pattern.

I’m also guilty of turning almost every pocket of open time into an opportunity to do one more thing. Like many of us, I listen to a podcast while walking, answer an email while waiting in line and make notes for client projects or my future content during “downtime”.

Sometimes that feels energizing, but sometimes I turn leisure time into research.
Or weekend cafe time into a curiosity-driven filming session, like last Sunday:

The Visual Philosopher’s video introduced a few thinkers I had never heard of:

• Staffan Linder argued that as our earning power increases, the opportunity cost of doing nothing rises with it.

• Hartmut Rosa explained how technology can speed up an individual task while society responds by increasing the expected volume of tasks.

• Jonathan Crary examined an always-on economy that keeps pushing into our remaining boundaries, including sleep.

• Josef Pieper offered the alternative of true leisure: time that does not need to recharge us for work, improve us or produce an outcome.

Together, their ideas explain why decades of time-saving technology have not given us more freedom. As individual tasks become faster, expectations and workloads expand to fill the space. (Even leisure gets compressed, optimized or turned into consumption, while sleep and rest are increasingly treated as “obstacles” to productivity).

The more I think about these, it’s not just about personal productivity.

Today, I have to connect it to branding, business and social impact (this is The Intersection after all).

Who receives the “efficiency dividend”?

When technology saves time, who actually receives the savings?

If a new system saves an employee 5 hours each week, a company has a few choices, such as:

1. Return some of that time to the employee

2. Use it to improve the quality of the work

3. Create more capacity for customers

4. Immediately increase the employee’s KPIs or goals

In most organizations, I’d think the last option happens almost automatically.

The tool may be neutral, but the expectation built around it is not.

Today, a task that once took 2-3 hours might now take 20 minutes. That sounds like freedom to some, until the new expectation becomes producing 6 versions in the same window. Sure, the time was technically saved, but the person doing the work never got it back.

I’m starting to see this in content and marketing too. We can create more copy, more graphics and more video than ever before. The amount that an audience can thoughtfully absorb hasn’t expanded at the same rate. More production can easily create more noise, more approvals and more pressure without creating more meaning.

What does efficiency become without intention?
Leaders still have to decide what all that new capacity is for.

Every brand makes a promise about time

Ever since I was taught about Apple’s branding back in high school advertising class, I knew that brands have always sold more than products. They sell convenience, ease, access, freedom and the possibility of getting somewhere faster.

Many companies have removed an unnecessary burden and give people part of their day back. But at their worst, they remove one inconvenience so they can capture the time that follows through notifications, endless feeds, complicated subscriptions or more consumption.

(I kind of felt this while setting up a new project management tool for my team this month; suddenly there were 232 tasks, and all kinds of notifications flooding my inbox).

If a platform saves me 10 minutes and then works hard to keep me searching or scrolling for 30, did it save my time or find a better way to take it?

I’m also thinking about time as part of brand trust.

Clear messaging respects people’s time. So does transparent pricing (please, please make it easier to find your rates), thoughtful onboarding, accessible information and a quick resolution when something goes wrong. A confusing website, an unnecessary sales call, a 7-email follow-up sequence and false urgency all create a cost for the customer, even when no money has changed hands.

Maybe one measure of good marketing is whether it helps people make a clearer decision without demanding more attention than that decision deserves.

There’s an opportunity for brands here. Almost everyone is trying to capture attention, so releasing it can become a meaningful form of respect. How?

Say what you mean. Make the next step clear. Create something useful enough to earn the time it takes to consume. (Then let people get back to their lives or work).

Busyness has become part of the brand

There is also the way we brand ourselves.
I realized this back in my early agency days.

Have you caught yourself answering “How are you?” with “Busy”?
Tempting, but not a feeling, and it kinda dodges the question.

Entrepreneurs and leaders often wear a full calendar as proof of momentum. Online, constant activity can look like demand, ambition and relevance. Sometimes it is. But I’ve learned from some fellow founders that a packed calendar can also reveal a lack of focus, weak systems or difficulty saying no.

In knowledge-based work, empty space has value. I’ve been a huge advocate of walks and disconnecting/traveling regularly… it directly impacts my work:

Brand strategy requires reflection.
Teaching improves when there is time to reconsider what worked.
Creative ideas often arrive after the obvious options have been exhausted.
Leadership requires enough distance from the urgent issue to notice the important one.

If you’re interested, here are a couple of editions connected to this theme:

That space can look unproductive because it doesn’t always create an immediate deliverable. Sometimes judgment develops. If we optimize every hour for visible output, we may get faster at producing work while becoming worse at deciding what deserves to be produced. This is coming from someone with dozens of drafts of reports, recording summaries and drafts of videos…

Time is also a social impact issue

The language of time management can make busyness sound like an individual problem with an individual solution.

Buy the planner, wake up earlier, protect your mornings, delegate more.

Those options are not equally available to everyone.

Time is distributed through income, caregiving, health, disability, transportation, job flexibility and access to support. Statistics Canada reported that ¼ of Canadians experienced high time pressure in 2022, up from just 15% in 1992. Women were more likely to report high time pressure than men, at 26.5% compared with 21.8%, alongside persistent differences in unpaid housework and caregiving.

Time is even an equity issue.

We can see it in the way organizations invite people to participate. A community consultation held during working hours, an unpaid advisory role, a long grant application, an inaccessible registration process or a two-hour volunteer orientation all assume that people have time available to give. The people closest to an issue are often asked to contribute their experience to solve it, while the system places the cost of participation back on them.

Organizations can say they value inclusion while designing everything around institutional convenience. If participation requires flexible work, reliable transportation, childcare and several unpaid hours, the invitation was never equally open.

This applies inside social impact organizations too. The importance of the mission can normalize chronic urgency. Small teams are expected to do more with less, volunteers fill structural gaps, and exhaustion gets framed as commitment. The work matters deeply, but that cannot make permanent depletion a responsible operating model.

Good intentions do not create more hours in the day. Sadly.

BTW, we’ll be discussing this and collaboration at my Summit this fall. If you’re able to join us, the coupon code INTERSECTION gets you a discounted ticket.

Growth should give something back

I’m not making an argument against productivity, technology or ambition.
I use these tools, build businesses and help organizations grow.
I care about making good work more effective.

Sometimes though, I’m asking what the effectiveness is for.

• Could a faster process mean one less meeting?

• Could AI create room for a better conversation instead of another ten pieces of content?

• Could a shorter application make an opportunity accessible to more people?

• Could a business share some of its efficiency gains with the people who created them?

• Could a brand succeed by being more useful and less demanding?

Pieper’s idea of true leisure may be the hardest one because it requires time to have value without becoming an input:
A walk does not need to generate an idea.
A hobby does not need to become a side business.
A conversation does not need to become content.
Rest does not need a return on investment.

The real luxury is having more control over your time.

Brands that respect time can earn deeper trust.
Businesses that decide where efficiency gains should go can build healthier cultures.
Social impact organizations that recognize time as a form of access can design more inclusive participation.

That leaves you (and me) with 3 questions to think about:

1. Where are we genuinely giving people time back?

2. Where have efficiency gains simply raised expectations?

3. What part of our lives are we willing to let produce nothing at all?

That’s kind of a harsh quote to end August on, but here we go:

Thanks so much for reading, as always.