In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that by 2030, people would only be working 15 hours a week. Decades later, office computers promised to eliminate administrative work. Email was supposed to speed up communication. Each innovation genuinely made certain tasks faster, but instead of working less, we constantly find new ways to work more.
AI may be the latest chapter in a story that’s been repeating for nearly a century. It’s already delivering measurable time savings, allowing us to complete tasks in a fraction of the time they once took. So why do most of us still feel so overwhelmed?
It’s because saving time and getting time back aren’t the same thing. The efficiency boost we get from AI means that we’re constantly moving the goalposts, increasing the expectations we have for ourselves or adding to the workload our boss expects us to complete. The challenge now is to make sure the time AI gives back doesn’t quietly disappear into ‘just one more thing.’
The productivity paradox of AI
AI has already proven that it can make knowledge workers more efficient, and by almost every measure, people are working faster than they did even a few years ago.
But despite those gains, most people don’t feel like they have any more time than they did before. Instead of giving us breathing room, AI reshapes our expectations about how much work can be completed in a day. And thus, the productivity paradox: the better we get at saving time, the harder it becomes to actually keep it for ourselves.
AI really does eliminate work
Glean’s Work AI Institute, a research collaborative that includes experts from many top universities, recently released its inaugural Work AI Index. The survey revealed that nearly all workers (87%) are using AI and feel more productive because of the tool. On average, digital workers save 11 hours a week thanks to AI automation.
But although 75% of workers feel like AI makes them more productive, only 13% feel like automation has significantly improved their company’s performance. There’s a disconnect between productivity and performance. AI is clearly helping people finish their individual tasks faster, but those yields aren’t translating into better company outcomes or even shorter workdays.
The faster we work, the more work we create
So if AI has proven to save us hours every week, where does all that time go?
The hours we reclaim with AI don’t disappear into thin air but get unintentionally reinvested. A report that once took a day now comes with additional revisions, and that email drafted in minutes gives you an opportunity to respond to even more messages. Before long, yesterday’s productivity gain becomes today’s baseline expectation.
Economists call this a rebound effect: when something becomes cheaper or more efficient, people tend to consume more of it. AI has dramatically lowered the ‘cost’ of many knowledge-work tasks, so organizations naturally ask for more output in return. The result is that we aren’t working fewer hours but packing more work into the same amount of time.
There’s also an element of Parkinson’s Law at play. As our capacity expands, our work quickly grows to occupy it. It’s not that AI didn’t save us time; we have proof that it did. The problem is that becoming more efficient isn’t giving us more free time.
The difference between saving time and getting time back
AI is really good at helping us save time, but saving time and actually getting time back aren’t the same thing. If you finish a task in 20 minutes when it used to take an hour, you have extra capacity, but that doesn’t guarantee you’ll have 40 more minutes to yourself. Unless you intentionally protect that time, it will be eaten up by another email or unnecessary scrolling through the company Slack channels. Working faster only improves your work-life balance if you actually hold on to some of the time you saved.
How to protect the time AI gives back
If you want to actually use AI to improve your work-life balance, you have to be intentional about what happens to the time you’re reclaiming.
In The Great Time-Saving Lie, Dr. Anna Katharina Schaffner argues that getting the full benefit of time-saving technologies like generative AI requires a shift in mindset. Instead of using every efficiency gain to produce more, she suggests we should structure our work weeks “around the quality of our care and attention, not the quantity of our activity or the speed of our output.”
It’s up to us to recognize that the purpose of working faster is to create space for the life that matters most. Here’s how to make sure the time AI gives back stays yours.
Start identifying where AI is saving you time
The first step is the most obvious but easy to overlook: figure out exactly where AI is helping you work faster.
This probably won’t look like a noticeable chunk of time but rather a few minutes here and there. Those small pockets of time are easy to miss because they blend into the workflow. You still have to write an email, so you don’t realize it took you 5 minutes instead of 20. Your first draft took half as long, but you still took a while to flesh out the full article. It’s nothing obvious, so it can be hard to pinpoint exactly where the time savings are coming from.
Look at the recurring tasks you do every week. Ask yourself things like:
- How long does it take me to write a client email vs how long it took a year ago?
- How much faster can I get from a blank page to the first draft?
- How much time do I spend researching vs. having AI pull sources for me to review?
You probably can’t get exact numbers here, but even a rough estimate helps you see where AI is creating capacity.
Decide where reclaimed time should go before it exists
Most of us wait until we’ve finished a task to decide what to do with the extra time, and because that’s our habit, we default to tasks like opening our inbox, checking Slack, or just scrolling for a few minutes.
Instead, we need to proactively decide what we will do with our extra time. Maybe every hour AI saves could become focus time for a larger creative project. Maybe it means taking your full lunch break, committing to long-overdue professional development, or ending your workday a little earlier. When your reclaimed time has a purpose, it’s less likely to disappear into whatever demands your attention next.
Resist the urge to raise your own expectations
Sometimes the person most likely to consume your reclaimed time is yourself.
When we become more efficient, we start to expect more of ourselves. If AI helps you finish a presentation in half the time, it can be tempting to start another one. You commit to more because you have more time, and before long you’ve quietly doubled your own workload.
Being efficient doesn’t mean you have to constantly increase your output. Why not focus on doing the same work with less stress, more focus, or enough energy left over to enjoy your evening?
Learn to leave time intentionally unused
On that note, a lot of us have been conditioned to see downtime or rest as proof we’re not doing enough. (Fellow eldest sisters, please raise your hand.) We instinctively fill every open moment with another task because it’s good to be productive, and productivity must mean constant activity.
But not every minute needs to be optimized or even used for something ‘productive’. Dr. Shaffner asks us to consider what time well spent looks like. She wrote that, “if the answer is to live more—to be more in being mode, to feel more, to attend to people and things with more care—then our whole definition of progress must shift,” encouraging readers to be “maverick revolutionaries who dare to cash in their saved time and use it for pleasure rather than productivity.”
Sometimes the best way to use the time AI gives back is simply to keep it.
Conclusion
A good chunk of our technological advances have promised us more time. AI may be the closest we’ve come to making that promise a reality, but only if we’re intentional about how we use the pockets of time that are returned to us.
Start taking back the time that the use of AI has provided you. Use it as space to think more creatively, work in a less harried manner, or spend time with the people that matter most. Technology can do a lot to save you time, but you’re the only person who can make sure you keep it for something even better.
