Technology gave us more time. We spent it on emails.
Imagine it’s 1987.
You walk in the door after work and that’s it. The day is done. No Slack messages. No email. No text chains lighting up your phone. You’re unreachable. And that was normal.
Now? You’re not even safe on vacation. Alerts follow you like shadows. Meetings bleed into evenings. According to Microsoft data, meetings after 8pm are up 16% from last year. And employees now send or receive more than 50 messages outside of business hours. Every. Day.
We built all this tech to make us more efficient. Faster. Smarter. But we didn’t get time back. We got more work.
We CHOSE more work.
The illusion of saved time
Every app promises to save us time. Automate this. Summarize that. Let AI take care of it. But the second we claw back five minutes, we fill it with five new things to do.
We don’t reinvest that time into recovery. Or creativity. Or connection. We reinvest it into more work.
Efficiency should create freedom. But when your tools accelerate the pace of everything, freedom vanishes. You’re just running faster on the same treadmill.
The modern work trap
We’re always reachable. Always on. Always “just checking something.”
The tools meant to protect our time now fracture it. You’re interrupted every 1.75 minutes during the workday. That’s 275 interruptions in eight hours. No one does deep work in that chaos. No one thinks clearly when they’re constantly context-switching.
The boundaries are gone. Work seeps into dinner. Slack pings interrupt bedtime stories. And you wonder why you feel fried all the time.
The cost of perpetual motion
Mental health? In the gutter.
Sleep? Shallow.
Presence? You can barely finish a sentence before looking at a notification.
We have the attention span of gnats. We’re overloaded. The nervous system isn’t built for constant stimulation. And yet that’s the system we’ve built around it.
A better use of efficiency
You want real productivity? Use AI to claw back time. Then don’t spend it on more emails.
Spend it on being human.
Call your mom. Step outside. Close the laptop. Let the automation buy you back 15 minutes… and don’t squander it.
The tools won’t save us. They’ll only offer space.
We have to choose how to fill it.
The next Deep Research project you tell ChatGPT to run, ask yourself… “what am I going to spend that found time on?”.
Want some help figuring out how to buy back your time in your business? Let’s chat.
