What Are We Building? Friday #2: Why Are We All So Busy?
Before we have finished breakfast, our phones can already tell us what kind of day we are supposed to have. Messages, appointments, reminders, documents, and one more thing marked urgent. The strange part is that these devices were supposed to make life easier.
I spent years working around process automation, and now I work in real estate and mortgages. I appreciate what good technology can do. But I keep coming back to a question: if we can do so much more in less time, why does it still feel like nobody has any time?
When faster tools create faster expectations
Think about how much ordinary work has changed. We can sign documents without driving across town, hold a meeting without leaving home, and send information across the world in seconds. These are real improvements. I would not want to give them up.
But when something becomes easy to send, it also becomes easy to request. A task that once took a day may take ten minutes, yet the day can fill with ten more tasks. The saved time does not necessarily become rest, family time, or a chance to think. Sometimes it simply becomes room for another deadline.
We have made communication almost instant. In the process, we have sometimes made instant availability feel normal. I do not believe every faster response is a better response.
There is a serious case for productivity
It would be too easy to turn this into an argument that people should work less and put away their phones. For someone working two jobs, raising children alone, or running a small business with bills to pay, being busy may not be a lifestyle choice. It may be what keeps a household going.
And efficiency genuinely matters. It can reduce paperwork, make services more affordable, help workers serve more people, and free up resources for better medicine, housing, education, and infrastructure. In my own businesses, I would much rather remove repetitive steps than waste a client's or an employee's afternoon.
So the goal should not be to make society less capable. It should be to make sure that greater capability improves people's actual lives.
Who receives the hours we save?
Suppose software cuts a routine job from two hours to twenty minutes. That is a win on a spreadsheet. But what happens next? Does the worker get a little breathing room? Does the customer get a better experience? Does the business lower costs or grow? Does everyone share some of the benefit?
There is no single correct distribution in every situation. Businesses need to remain healthy, customers need service, and employees need dependable livelihoods. But if every minute saved is automatically replaced with another demand, we have not necessarily given anyone more freedom. We have only increased the speed of the system.
AI makes this choice harder to ignore. It may be able to take over pieces of work that once required a great deal of human attention. What it cannot decide for us is whether the benefit should become more output, better service, greater security, more free time, or some combination of those things.
A better question than 'How much can we get done?'
One line in my illustrated book What Are We Building? comes from a child who wants her papa home before she falls asleep. I included it because it describes something an income statement cannot measure. A family may have more conveniences and still miss the people those conveniences were supposed to help.
What if, alongside measuring productivity, we asked how predictable people's time has become? Whether teachers can finish their work and go home. Whether small-business owners can take a day off. Whether families have time to care for children and older relatives. Whether we can make space to care for our rivers, neighborhoods, and communities.
We should also remember that someone else's convenience often depends on labor we do not see. The future we build cannot be measured only by how quickly a service reaches us. It matters what life looks like for the people who make it possible, including people far beyond our own city or country.
I am not arguing for a world where nothing is urgent, nothing grows, and nobody works hard. There are seasons when hard work matters. I am asking whether the systems we keep improving should give people a greater say in what their time is for.
What Are We Building?
In the book, the machines help with the numbers and the heavy lifting, but people still have to decide what matters. That is where I think the adult conversation belongs, too.
The question is not whether we can make life move faster. We already know we can. The harder question is whether we can use that progress to make life feel more human.
Pass the Pencil
If technology gave you five hours back every week, what would you want those hours to become—and who else should get that same chance?
That is the question I am carrying into next Friday.
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