In the future, perhaps all too soon, time will slow down.
Certainly that is not what most of us experience now. Time seems to be speeding up: Our computers run faster, our clocks are more accurate (diminishing the luxury of lateness), and our cell phones make communication immediate and ubiquitous. Yet all these ingenious “laborsaving” devices have only made us labor more. Time, said by poets to resemble a flowing stream, feels increasingly like an igloo: a hard, shrinking exoskeleton that simultaneously shapes our lives as it crushes them.
An entire time-management industry rushes to save us: bestselling books, software packages, and other “productivity solutions” designed to improve the conversion of our time units into dollar units and vice versa, plus tax and shipping. But they’ve got the equation all wrong. Productivity is the amount of work done in a given amount of time: P = W/t.
