Member-only story
The Thing You Most Want to Save Time on Is a Thing You Shouldn’t Be Doing at All
Two questions to eliminate dread and replace it with joy
In 1902, Remington advertised its breakthrough appliance — the first commercial typewriter — with the following slogan: “To save time is to lengthen life.”
It’s a powerful phrase, and for years, Richard Polt thought it was true. Polt is a typewriter collector, but he’s also a professor of philosophy. Eventually, he came to the following realization: “The more time you save, the more time you waste, because you’re doing things that are only a means to an end.”
I don’t like email. For years, I’ve layered hack upon hack to minimize the time I spend in my inbox. I’ve disabled all email notifications. I’ve set up filters so certain emails never show up as unread messages. I’ve created snippets I can copy and paste. I even made a rule to never check email before 11 AM, and I try to batch-process it whenever possible — and yet, I still spend time in my inbox every day. I waste less time, but I’m still stuck doing something I don’t enjoy, because none of my measures got to the heart of the matter:
Minimizing and eliminating are not the same thing. No matter how much you reduce the time you spend on a certain aspect of your life, minimizing alone…
