With the new round of AI, I spend a lot of time on tech, at work and at home, much of it just talking to AI. Probably too much. But less tech isn’t the fix. An hour I free up and don’t plan becomes consumption. The fix is pointing the hour somewhere better: better tech, or nurturing more identity. That means allocating time for the important things and protecting it aggressively.
Move an hour
Fourteen hours to spend, made up to show the shape: 24, less 8 asleep, less about 2 for meals and transit. Pick a weekday or a weekend, set work and my own tech, and watch where the hours go; Planned is my target. Then push one hour up the screen, from the phone into my own tech into work, or let it slide back. The ? next to each bucket says what goes in it.
24h, less 8 asleep, less about 2 for meals and transit, leaves 14 to spend. Moving a slider never changes the total: hours come from, or go to, the other buckets.
The arrows show where the last move went. Dashed ticks are ceilings: other people's time, and enough health. Past a ceiling, hours spill into consumption. All numbers are made up.
AI-augmented, roughly 70% AI (what this means)
I love AI, and I use it on posts like this one partly to get better at using it. The percent is a rough guess: after rounds of prompting, rewriting and editing, it's very hard to say which words came from whom.
Where the time goes
It’s four buckets I fill on purpose, and a fifth one I’d never named that gets whatever the other four leave behind.
Tech. Work, home projects, the AI tools I build for myself, and deep thinking, which for me means writing posts like this one. Every one of those is me and a screen.
Identity (non-tech). Magic, biking, ballooning, the joy stuff. Here I’m being someone instead of shipping something, which is what a good hobby is for.
Health. Physical, emotional, cognitive, written up here. My habits live here too, the mobility and meditation that keep getting lost. They need doing, and they have a cap.
Relationships. Family and friends. Arthur Brooks says a happy life has four pillars: faith, family, friendship, and work. Two of those are other people.
Consumption (non-enjoyment). Everything else: the scroll, the autoplay, the forty minutes I can’t account for. It’s pleasure without enjoyment, which also needs people and memory. A little is fine. It rarely stays a little. It turns into procrastination, the thing I do instead of the thing I’m avoiding, and that makes me sad.
Why less tech fails
I used to think the fix was obvious: shrink tech. Take five hours back from the screen and they’ll show up somewhere good. They don’t, for three reasons.
Freed hours default to the phone. Consumption starts itself. The phone is already in my hand and no decision is required, so the activation energy is zero. Enjoyment needs a person, which needs a text, a calendar, and somebody else’s yes. And when I feel alone or low, the phone is where I hide, so an hour freed on a bad day goes there first. An hour I haven’t planned lands at level 0 of the idle loop: phone in hand, nothing decided.
The good buckets have ceilings. Relationships is rate limited by other people. My family has to be free for the hours, and want them. Health saturates. The second hour at the gym doesn’t buy twice the health, and often it buys an injury. That leaves identity. It has the most room, and it takes the most energy to start. Nobody is waiting on me to do the trick badly for twenty minutes.
Tech is my passion, not my addiction. In Escape Artists I sort anything I do with two questions: am I compelled, and is the rest of my life worse for it?
- Compelled, and my life is worse: addiction.
- Compelled, and my life is fine: passion.
- Not compelled: a hobby.
Tech is my passion. Consumption is my addiction, with TikTok at the top. “Shrink tech” cuts the passion instead of the addiction, and hands the freed hours to the phone. The real cost of tech is the monoculture trap: overfed, it starves identity.
What works instead
A full allocation, every hour assigned like the Planned view in the chart, is unrealistic. It needs a plan for every freed hour and someone free to take it, and most days I have neither. A few protected blocks aren’t unrealistic. So, two moves.
Protect a few blocks. The important things go on the calendar first, and I defend them aggressively. Those are the hours that won’t happen on their own.
Point the rest of the hour up. The same hour can land in three places:
- The phone: it counts for about nothing.
- My own tech: an upgrade. Same screen, but I’m building instead of scrolling.
- Work: the best case, when the work is what I’d love to do for free. Then I’m aligned, and I have a whole company behind me, so an hour counts for far more than it would on my own.
It slides back just as easily, one tired tab at a time. That’s the push in the chart: the same hour, pointed up.
One last doubt. Tech might not be a bucket at all, but a role, like dad or magician, and one that’s very good at feeding itself. Roles are how I write my eulogy, so the question would become “is one of my roles eating the others?” Calling tech a neutral bucket is the comfortable version, and that’s why I don’t trust it.