Saving Time Has a Limit

I was reading an article earlier today - of which I have no memory to its subject, nor a link to the original :( - where the author mentioned something to the effect of "it saves me X time per day, which adds up to Y time per year". Generally speaking, I love finding ways to more efficiently do things. I use a password manager to save time looking up passwords. I've learned hotkeys and shortcuts for things I do a lot in various programs. And like all good computer geeks, I've written scripts to automate things.

I also love the non-chronistic benefits of automating things. The less thought you need to put into one task, the more mental energy you have for others. This is especially relevant for things like that are total drudgery like combining 50 CSV files together.

But there is one specific thing about the time-saved argument that bothers me: when the time saved isn't usable time.

By this I mean that the time ends up being negligible when put in context. Let's say that you spend 21 seconds per day putting your shoes on. You buy futuristic self-lacing shoes that drops that time to 1 second. 20 seconds saved times 365 days is 7300 seconds-per-year saved. Put in more useful terms, it's about two hours. Two hours is plenty of time to watch an episode or two of a show, or to read a few chapters of a book. That is, also, apparently, just over the world record speedrun for FFXIV's Palace of the Dead as of two months ago. Point is: you can do stuff in 2 hours. But you can't do much with those 20 seconds per day.

That's hardly enough time to open an app to read a book. It might be enough time to open TikTok and watch a video. It certainly isn't enough time to finish Palace of the Dead. It's much more likely that the time you saved is absorbed into the ephemeral time spent waiting for a meeting or resting between other actions. Think of it like accelerating quickly when the street light turns green when you know the next light 100 feet away is already yellow. You are just burning gas for no reason.

Even if you do manage your time down to the millisecond to be as efficient in your day as possible, the time counter "resets" as soon as you go to bed for the night. Sure, you could slowly shift your schedule by twenty seconds each night for a year but... that's just an edge case that I highly doubt anyone would do just to save 2 hours per year. If you are a person that does that, please email me because you seem like a very interesting individual who can teach me a lot about productivity.

I know this entire post is just me picking nits about a phrase. Yet, the idea of saving negligible time for time's sake never seemed like a good argument.