AI was supposed to save us time. That was the promise: less manual work, fewer emails, fewer drafts, less time wasted on small tasks that consume the day. Finally, we would be able to work less, think more, be more creative and maybe even, forgive the strange phrase, rest.
But it is worth remembering: this is not the first time technology has promised we would work less. Email was also supposed to save us time. Instead of letters, faxes and messages that never arrived, we got a remarkable tool that lets us send a message to anyone in the world in three seconds.
And it did save time. But then something strange happened. The time we saved was not used to rest instead of waiting by the fax machine or going to the post office to collect mail. We started sending more messages, expecting faster replies and being more available. A tool designed to improve communication became a place where people spend half their lives inside an endless inbox.
The smartphone was also supposed to free us. Everything in your pocket: maps, calendar, bank, camera, messages, work. What a life. And it did make us more efficient. It also made us permanently available.
The AI era
Now comes AI with the same old promise in a new form: this time we will really save time. For a long time, the biggest fear was that AI would replace us. Then came the idea that it would not replace us, but people who use AI would replace those who do not. That may be true. But perhaps the more immediate story is different: AI will not replace us tomorrow morning. It will simply raise the bar for what is expected of us by tomorrow afternoon.
A friend told me something that made me laugh and then feel slightly uneasy: “I am now training AI at work to do my job.” That sentence captures the entire moment. On one hand, it is wonderful: a tool that helps turn personal knowledge into systems, reduce manual work, replicate skills and work smarter. On the other hand, what exactly is happening here? Am I teaching the tool to do what I do so I can do less, or so that from tomorrow I will be expected to do three times as much?
But emerging data suggests the promise is not so simple. A report by the State of the Workplace 2026 from ActivTrak, an American company that analyzes digital work patterns in organizations, examined actual work activity of more than 163,000 employees across 1,111 organizations over more than 443 million working hours. The picture that emerged is almost the opposite of the promise: after adopting AI tools, people did not spend less time communicating, they spent more. Email time more than doubled, chat and messaging time jumped by nearly 2.5 times, and focused daily work time dropped by 23 minutes for AI users. It also found that continuous focus periods at work now average just 13 minutes and 7 seconds.
13 minutes
That is roughly the time it takes to make coffee, open a document, remember why we opened it and then receive a message: “Can you also look at this?”
Here lies the paradox. AI can indeed help us do things faster. But that does not mean we work less. If a report once took 10 days and now takes two thanks to AI, what happens to the eight days that were freed up? In a perfect world, we would be told: great, take eight days to think, rest, be with your children, go to the sea, read a book or simply stare at the ceiling like human beings who need a moment.
But in the real world of work, that is usually not what happens. More often, we are told: great, now produce four more reports.
The paradox of productivity
We talk about “saving time,” but in practice the time saved does not always return to us. Often it returns to the system. It becomes more output, more demands, more standards, more tasks, more “while you are at it, can you also prepare a slide deck, an executive summary, a LinkedIn post, a client version and an English translation?”
In other words, technology does not necessarily reduce work. It increases expectations. It does not always replace the human. Sometimes it simply teaches everyone to expect more from them.
And to be honest, I am not writing this from the outside. I am using AI to write this article. It helped me shorten the time, correct errors, refine phrasing and remove unnecessary examples. A few years ago, this would have taken me twice as long. And that is truly amazing.
But here is the question: because I finished faster, am I now going to rest? Probably not. I will likely move on to the next thing, answer more messages, prepare another lecture, squeeze something else into a day that was already full.
And that is exactly the point. AI is not lying when it promises to save us time. It really does. The question is not whether time is saved. The question is where it goes afterward.
What is it even worth getting done?
There is almost a law of modern work: when we focus only on productivity, how to do more, faster and more efficiently, we almost always get more work, not more rest. Productivity asks: how much can we get done? But effectiveness asks a different question entirely: what is actually worth doing?
Productivity asks how we finish it faster. Effectiveness asks whether it should be done at all. Productivity celebrates deleting 20 tasks from a list. Effectiveness quietly asks: why were those 20 tasks there in the first place?
This is the difference that can save us in the AI era. If we use AI only to accelerate what we already do, we will get faster lives, not necessarily better ones. We will get more outputs, more versions, more emails, more meetings. We will get denser workdays with no breathing room, minds with no time to process, humans who become more efficient and more exhausted.
And there is another issue: AI does not only shorten tasks. It also shortens the small gaps between them. Once, searching for a file took a moment. Formatting a document took a moment. Rewriting something took a moment. Waiting for a reply took a moment. Transferring something from one format to another took a moment. We did not call it rest, but the brain did get a gear shift.
Now even those moments are disappearing. On one hand, it is amazing. On the other hand, if every freed second immediately turns into more work, we do not become freer. We become more machine-like.
There is a solution
So what is the solution? Not to stop using AI. These are extraordinary tools and they will only improve. The question is not whether to use them, but for what.
The solution is to stop measuring success only by “how much time did I save?” and start asking: what am I doing with the time I saved? Does it become more work or recovery time? Does it get absorbed into more tasks or allow me to think better? Does it expand my to-do list or help me remove things that are not truly important?
We all need to think carefully not only about how to adopt AI but also about how to protect ourselves from the acceleration it creates. Not everything that can be done faster should become the new standard. Not every freed-up minute needs to be filled. And not every tool that increases output actually improves quality of life.
We will need to learn to use AI not only to get more done but to choose better. Because AI can help us write faster, summarize faster, plan faster and respond faster. But it cannot decide for us that our lives are not meant to be an endless race for more and more and more.
That is still something we have to solve ourselves.
And the important question of the coming years is not only whether AI will save us time. It is: when AI saves us time, who gets it?
Judith Katz is an author, coach and lecturer specializing in positive psychology and practical, research-based psychology. She hosts the podcast “Thinking Well” and is the author of Thinking Well: Dare to Live the Life That Fits You.