Time management and modern life

The most obvious time-savers are the ones on our phones. People pay bills through a banking app instead of queuing, order groceries to the door, and book a motorbike taxi rather than hunting for parking. At home, things like rice cookers with timers and robot vacuums have quietly removed chores that used to eat up an evening. The puzzle is why nobody feels less busy, and I think the answer is that saved time never stays empty. If email lets you reply in two minutes, your manager simply expects ten replies instead of one. The same device that pays your electricity bill also delivers messages from work at eleven at night, so the boundary between working and resting has more or less dissolved. There's also a psychological side: when everything can be done instantly, any delay starts to feel like a failure. To be fair, part of the busyness is our own choice, since plenty of those reclaimed hours go straight into scrolling, and we can hardly blame technology for that. Will people have more free time in the future? In theory yes, because automation will take over a lot of routine work. In practice I'm sceptical. Working hours have barely fallen in decades despite huge gains in productivity. Unless companies and governments deliberately shorten the working week, I suspect we'll just be given more to do in the same number of hours.