What Do We Do with Our Time?
Everybody is asking this question right now. In different ways, in different rooms, but it is the same question.
Economists are asking it. David Shapiro just launched a book called: 'Labor Zero' a post-labor economic treatise. It explores what happens when the relationship between work and time fundamentally shifts. Technologists are asking it. Parents are asking it. People sitting quietly at their desks wondering if this is really how they want to spend the next thirty years are asking it.
What do we do with our time?
It is a good question. But I think there is a prior question underneath it that almost nobody is asking. Which is: what time are we talking about, exactly?
Because when most people say "my time," they mean their hours. Their schedule. The window between waking up and going to sleep, divided into blocks, allocated to tasks, measured in the units that the clock has trained us to think in. That is the time we are always trying to figure out what to do with.
But that is one scale of time. A very useful one. Also a very small one.
There is another scale that does not get discussed much, even though it is the one we actually live inside of. The year. The full revolution. The slow arc that carries everything, every season, every project, every relationship, every phase of a life, along with it. Not in discrete blocks. In a continuous movement that has been happening since before anyone was here to notice.
When someone asks what do we do with our time, and the only time they can see is the hour, the answers will tend to be hourly. Optimize. Schedule. Protect. Spend wisely. These are fine answers. They are also answers to a very small question.
When the year becomes visible, the question gets larger. What am I doing with this year? Where am I in it? What season of my life does this correspond to? Am I rushing because the hour feels urgent, or can I feel the longer arc and let that inform how I move through the day?
This is not abstract. It is practical in a way that is hard to explain until you have lived with it.
I have spent fifteen years building a timepiece that shows the year. One hand. One revolution. No screen, no updates, no charging. It just turns. About one degree a day. Slowly enough that you will never see it move. Clearly enough that over days and weeks, the change is unmistakable.
People see what they want to see in it. Some see a way to slow down. Some see a conversation piece. Some see a mindfulness tool. That is fine. What I see is a practical instrument for a question that is only going to get more common.
The world is not ending and starting over. It is adapting. The way we work is adapting. The way we think about productivity and purpose and meaning is adapting. These shifts do not arrive all at once. They are fluid. They are already happening, unevenly, in different lives at different speeds.
But the instruments on the wall have not adapted at all. The clock still shows the hour. Only the hour. The same scale it has shown for centuries. And as more people ask what they should do with their time, that instrument will keep giving them the same frame. A small one. An urgent one. One that makes every day feel like the whole story.
The question everyone is asking deserves a wider frame. Not instead of the clock. Alongside it. A different scale of time, visible in the room, giving the question some air.
What do we do with our time?
It depends on how much of it we can see.
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