By SCOTT DEWING
Published: March 2003

YOU CAN SAVE SOMEONE who is drowning or money for a rainy day or your soul from eternal hellfire should you believe in such things. But there’s one thing you cannot save no matter who you are or what you believe in: time. Time cannot be saved upon and spent later. It is, as T.S. Eliot referred to it, “unredeemable”:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

If people lived forever we’d no longer have a need for clocks or calendars. Time is important to us because we are finite beings. This may explain our obsession with saving time. Maybe we believe that by saving time we’re somehow saving ourselves from a death whose time we know is ultimately coming.

Time goes, you say? Ah, no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.

That was from “The Paradox of Time” by a poet named Henry Austin Dobson whose own time came and went between 1840 and 1921.

My own fascination with time seems to coincide with the fact that it is quickly becoming a dwindling resource in my life. As I’ve become more and more pressed for time, I’ve found the need to take the time to slow down, take a deep breath and think seriously about time. This is what led me to reflecting on the concept of “saving time”, which turns out to be a bunch of hooey. And yet, when I reflect upon my daily life (especially my work life) I seem to be operating under the assumption that this hooey is true.

The myth of saving time really struggles to achieve the status of truth when it comes to technology. Every new technological advance promises to make us work smarter, faster and save time. (It is worth noting that some recent technological advances, such as those in cryogenics, are even promising to save us from death itself.) It has been my experience that technology can often have the opposite effect. With the right mixture of poor planning and terrible training, technology can efficiently make people work dumber and slower. I’m sure many of us have witnessed this axiom in all of its Dilbertesque horror in the business world.

For certain, technology is no panacea. And yet, when it comes to “saving time”, our society has taken the technology bait—hook, line and sinker. At first, I tried to talk myself out of believing this was the case. I started by taking stock of the arsenal of technology in my own life: a PDA, a cell phone, a pager, a laptop, email, instant messaging, the Internet, a car, a microwave, a washer/dryer, a dishwasher. All of this technology is designed to make my life more efficient and save me time. So why is it then that I feel I have less and less time?

I asked my friend Criss what he thought about all of this technology and time stuff. “We’ve been given time alright,” he responded to me in an email. “Time spent waiting for our computers to boot, time on our cell phones—in short, empty time spent at the beck and call of technology.” A computer programmer and business owner, Criss spends the majority of his time working on his computer and talking on his cell phone, which probably had something to do with the sarcasm lurking about in his response. The part about being at “the beck and call of technology” got me thinking though.

Technology permeates (some might argue “saturates”) every facet of life. In his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler referred to technology as the “growling engine of change.” Written in 1970, Toffler’s book about the future may seem a bit dated to those of us who are living in that future.

“Recently, the computer has touched off a storm of fresh ideas about man as an interacting part of larger systems,” Toffler wrote. “Virtually every intellectual discipline…has been hit by a wave of imaginative hypotheses triggered by the invention of the computer—and its full impact has not yet struck. And so the innovative cycle, feeding on itself, speeds up.”

Some thirty years later, I immediately identify with the concepts of technology feeding on itself and the pace of life speeding up. I feel as though Toffler’s predicted impact has struck and continues to strike us hard upside our collective head. I’m sure that at some point in history, the genuine thrust behind technological advances was to automate some mundane and time-consuming task—such as scrubbing laundry on a washboard or hauling water from a well—so that there would be more time for just relaxing and spending time with friends and family.

I don’t think that is the case anymore. It seems the more technology we create and have at our disposal, the greater the sense of obligation to pack more and more into our day, which in terms of “saving time” makes it a zero-sum game. Unless we make conscious decisions about the quality of our time as well as the quantity, we tend to use every minute technology has, for lack of a better word, “saved” for us by trying to squeeze just one more task into our day as if that alone were the final and only measure of our success.

Some days, I can’t help but have this image of myself as a mindless hamster going faster and faster on the treadmill wheel of life with technology being the grease that just makes that wheel turn faster. I have this sneaking suspicion that I am not alone in this feeling. As I grow older and time, like any dwindling resource, becomes more and more precious to me, I find that I’m becoming increasingly less interested in chasing after the specter of saving time and more interested in consciously slowing down and saving myself on a regular basis from the technology driven time trap—the one in which we hurry so fast that we show up early for our own funerals.