Time Well Spent
On reclaiming meaning, momentum, and attention in a world that keeps asking for more.
There’s a strange tension in modern work that no one seems willing to name. On one hand, we are living through the most astonishing explosion of tools, platforms, models, and efficiencies the workplace has ever seen. On the other, people have never felt more tired, more distracted, or more suspicious that their days are slipping away into a blur of tasks that were urgent to someone but meaningful to no one.
And perhaps I’m feeling this shift more acutely because of where I am in my own life. I turned sixty-one this year. That number does something to your perspective. It forces a kind of clarity that younger versions of ourselves don’t yet have the experience—or the urgency—to access. Many of my peers are facing transitions of their own: reinventions, rewrites, forced pauses, abrupt layoffs, career pivots they never expected to make. Some are gracefully dancing into their third act. Some are stumbling into it.
An entire generation of people over fifty-five is quietly navigating a world of work that was not designed with them in mind.
What Time Teaches You, Eventually
Time feels different when you have lived enough of it to understand what is worth spending it on. Meaning becomes non-negotiable. Momentum becomes precious. Attention becomes currency. And the cost of wasting any of them becomes almost physical.
Which brings me back to the tension we keep avoiding because the more I watch the way we work, the more convinced I am that we’ve been asking the wrong question. The issue isn’t whether we have enough time. It’s that we’ve lost the plot on what time is actually for.
We treat time like a container to be filled: meetings stacked upon meetings, calendars paved over like a six-lane highway, days scheduled into obedience. We’ve mistaken motion for progress and responsiveness for leadership. Somewhere along the way, the meaningful hour—the hour where clarity sharpens, decisions land, or creativity takes shape—became the rarest thing in professional life.
In the Age of AI, time itself isn’t scarce anymore. What’s scarce is attention. Judgment. The ability to choose what matters in a world accelerating beyond comprehension. AI isn’t going to take that from us. It’s going to demand more of it.
Because when machine intelligence becomes abundant, human judgment becomes the rarest of resources.
The Normalisation of Noise
I’ve seen this pattern everywhere. Teams drowning in tools but starving for focus. Creatives who can generate a hundred ideas in minutes but struggle to find the one idea that deserves a fight. Leaders whose calendars look like evidence of a life spent reacting instead of directing. And the language we use to describe this—burnout, overwhelm, “not enough hours”—is a polite way of saying we’ve built systems that refuse to honour what humans need to do great work.
The real tragedy isn’t the noise. It’s that we’ve normalised it.
I’ve come to believe that the next decade of work won’t be defined by the companies with the best models, the fastest pipelines, or the most automated workflows. It will be shaped by the individuals and teams who learn to protect their attention with the same intensity they once protected their budgets. Those who design their days with intention. Those who learn to create momentum instead of motion. Those who relearn the discipline of deep thinking in an era built on speed and distraction.
And perhaps most importantly, those who understand that AI is not here to speed us up. It’s here to change the purpose of our time.
About a month ago now, during a training session I was leading for Google, someone asked me a question that caught me off guard:
“What happens to people who don’t have thirty years of experience to guide their judgment? Where do we begin teaching them?”
My answer surprised me in its simplicity: Teach them what good looks like.
Because once you know what good looks like—what clarity feels like, what a meaningful hour produces—you stop letting your day get hijacked by everything that isn’t that.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. About how we reclaim meaning inside the mechanical churn of modern work. About how we build workflows that honour creative energy, not just available hours. About how leaders make decisions in a world moving faster than memory. About how we might design time with the same craftsmanship we apply to strategy, storytelling, or code.
The Shape of an Idea Begins to Form
I think there’s something here. A body of thinking I haven’t articulated fully. A direction that feels like the next chapter of the work I’ve been doing in AI, in leadership, in transitions, and in the shifting terrain of the later-career landscape. My monkey mind keeps coming back to the same question:
What does it mean to spend time well?
I’m writing my way into an answer. Slowly, deliberately, without the rush to publish or the pressure to package it neatly. But the shape of it is emerging: a reframing of time as a strategic asset, a creative resource, and a deeply human responsibility.
If my first book was about how to think about generative AI before you use it, this next one may be about how to live and lead in an era that keeps demanding more of us than time alone can provide.
I don’t know exactly where this project will go yet. But I know where it starts, with a truth that feels more urgent every day:
Our time is not the issue. What we do with our time is.
AI, in all its astonishing speed and strange generosity, has given us something we haven’t had in decades: time to spend. Cycles that used to take days now take minutes. Work that once required teams can be prototyped by one person in an afternoon. Research collapses into seconds. First drafts fall out of the sky. And the miracle, every time, is not just the output but the sudden surplus of time that appears behind it, quietly, like a backdraft.
Some studies suggest that when used intentionally, generative AI can return anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of a workday back to the individual. I suspect it’s even more for those who truly understand how to wield it. But the exact number isn’t the point. What matters is the question that nobody is asking with enough seriousness:
What will we do with the time we get back?
Will we use it to close the task faster, check the box sooner, ship the work, and sprint to the next demand? Or will we treat this returned time as an investment—something to pour into the parts of work that machines cannot touch?
Conversations that build trust.
Debates that sharpen judgment.
Relationships that strengthen teams.
Moments of alignment that prevent months of drift.
Thinking that refuses to be rushed.
The long, slow arcs of creativity that no model can accelerate without diminishing.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
At least, that’s what the Rolling Stones promised. And strangely, for the first time in my working life, it feels like it might actually be true. Not because the days have grown longer or the world slower, but because AI has started to hand back slivers of time we didn’t expect to see again. Minutes, hours, sometimes whole stretches of work that simply evaporate under the weight of a single prompt. It’s an extraordinary shift—one that should feel liberating. And yet, for many of us, myself included, it feels disorienting.
For years, we told ourselves a story about the future of work: that AI would automate the mundane so humans could focus on the meaningful. Well, that future is no longer for the genre of Science Fiction. It’s here. And most of us aren’t ready for it.
We’ve built decades of professional muscle memory around urgency, reactivity, logistics, and performance. When the machine lifts that weight from us, many won’t know what to do with their newly empty hands. This includes me—and it’s a question I’m now exploring.
This is the frontier ahead of us. Not better prompting. Not faster workflows. Not another sprint toward optimisation.
When the machines give us time, how do we make sure we spend it well?
That’s what I want to explore next—not as a productivity expert, but as someone who has lived through reinvention, crisis, acceleration, aging, and the quiet recalibrations that come with all of them. As someone who has watched a generation of workers lose their footing in the churn, and another trying to build a life where meaning doesn’t get buried beneath the metrics.
So yes—the next book is slowly taking shape. As I make progress, I will, as I am prone to do, drop thoughts and fragments here: early sparks, half-formed arguments, the occasional late-night paragraph that won’t leave me alone. Watch this space.
And I must thank those of you who’ve bought my first book, To Question Is to Answer: How to Think Critically and Thrive in the Age of AI. Your notes, your messages, your quiet encouragement, they have reminded me, again and again, that long-form writing isn’t dead. Not even close.
In a world chasing sound bites, swipes, and seven-second stories, there is still a hunger for ideas that take their time… and for readers willing to take their time with them.
