I asked myself a simple question this week: where does my time actually go? I figured the answer would be work versus family. It wasn’t. It’s four buckets I fill on purpose, and a fifth one I’d never named that gets whatever the other four leave behind.
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.
- The five buckets
- Where the freed hours land
- Relationships and health fill up
- Passion or addiction
- Maybe tech isn’t a bucket
The five buckets
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. Habits don’t go here. Habits are the machinery that gets me to the mat. If I file magic under habits, “maker of smiles and wonder” turns into a maintenance task.
Health. Physical, emotional, cognitive. I’ve written up the dimensions. For this post they’re one bucket.
Relationships. Family and friends. It gets its own bucket instead of hiding under identity. 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. 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.
The “non-enjoyment” part comes from Arthur Brooks. Pleasure is the hit: alone, chemical, and gone when it’s over. Enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. A beer alone on the couch and a beer at a table with friends. Same beer. This bucket is the first one. How to turn the first into the second is in my notes on his book.
The hours below are made up, not measured. Take hours out of tech and watch where they land.
Take hours out of tech
Sixteen waking hours, made up to show the shape. Move the slider, then switch between an hour with no plan and an hour with one.
The dashed tick is a ceiling. Relationships stops at whatever time the other people actually have. Health stops at enough. Planned hours that run past a ceiling do not disappear, they land in consumption. Hours with no plan mostly go there directly. Numbers are made up, not measured.
Where the freed hours land
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. When I shrink tech, relationships and identity usually stay where they were. Consumption grows.
The reason is activation energy. Consumption starts itself. The phone is already in my hand and no decision is required. Enjoyment needs a person, which needs a text, a calendar, and somebody else’s yes. It also needs a moment worth remembering, which needs a bit of a plan.
So freeing up time does nothing on its own. An hour I haven’t planned goes to the default, and the default is level 0 of the idle loop: phone in hand, nothing decided. If I want an hour to go to my family, I have to decide that before the hour shows up.
Relationships and health fill up
Say I do plan it. Two of the three good buckets can’t take much.
Relationships is rate limited by other people. I can decide to give my family ten more hours. They have to be free for those hours, and they have to want them. They set that ceiling, not me. Past it, I’m just hovering.
Health saturates. There’s a reasonable amount of sleep and movement, and after that the curve goes flat. The second hour at the gym doesn’t buy twice the health. 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.
Passion or addiction
I already had a framework for this and didn’t notice. In Escape Artists I sort activities with two questions: am I compelled, and is the rest of my life worse for it? Compelled and worse is addiction. Compelled and not worse is passion. Not compelled is a hobby.
Tech is where my compulsion lives. My life is better for it, so it counts as passion. It still has an opportunity cost. Consumption is where my addiction lives, with TikTok at the top: I’m compelled to do it and I don’t actually want to.
So “shrink tech” is the wrong instruction twice over. It cuts the passion instead of the addiction, and it hands the recovered hours to the phone.
There’s a second cost I underrate, the monoculture trap. When I overfeed one passion, the others wither. Identity doesn’t wait for me to come back. It decays. And when the one passion I’ve been feeding has a bad month, the others aren’t in shape to carry me.
Maybe tech isn’t a bucket
I may have drawn this wrong. Tech might not be a bucket. It might be an identity, the same kind of noun as magician or dad, one that got very good at feeding itself. Roles are how I’ve always written my eulogy, and the eulogy is what this post is supposed to serve. If that’s right, the question changes from how I allocate my time to which of my roles is eating the others. Calling tech a neutral bucket is the more comfortable version, and that’s why I don’t trust it.