I once measured my success by how quickly I could clear my push notifications. Because I worked in social media, the baseline expectation was that I was available around the clock. I loved the hustle, and being relied upon made me feel important.
I wrote post captions from the passenger seat of road trips; I moderated comment sections lying on my bedroom pillow; I even answered emails from a hospice waiting room while my mom died from cancer.
I convinced myself that these “quick” check-ins–knocking something small like an email off my to-do list–would lighten my load for when I inevitably returned to my desk. I believed I was digging myself out of a mountain of work before I returned from my time off so I could “get ahead” and not feel so overwhelmed.
Except the overwhelm never seemed to disappear. The faster I cleared work, the faster new work showed up to fill its place. Eventually, my exhaustion stopped feeling like fatigue I could bounce back from with a vacation and started feeling like a total loss of my sense of self.
History taught me that exhaustion the predictable result of being scored on speed, volume, and visibility. Productivity is the whole scoreboard, and it’s a game people are guaranteed to lose to technology.
A Historical Capacity Problem
More than a hundred years ago, 300,000 workers walked off the job in a nationwide strike, rallying behind the slogan, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will.”
In 1913, Ford’s Highland Park plant had an annual turnover rate of 370%. To keep nearly 14,000 positions filled, the company hired more than 50,000 workers over the year. About 10% of his workforce didn’t show up on any given day.
So when Henry Ford introduced the $5 day and an eight-hour shift in 1914, it wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart. Giving workers time back was the only way to stop them from quitting and draining the business.
Then, Ford created the infamous Sociological Department, sending investigators into workers’ homes to audit their spending and drinking habits, household cleanliness, and marital stability before granting them the full $5-a-day wage.
He gave time back and then tried to control what happened during it. Time back was handed out with strings, instead of designed into how the work ran. That distinction makes a huge difference.
Fast forward to today. Despite net productivity growing nearly 3 times faster than pay, workers experience less stability. When layoffs cut headcount without cutting the work, the people left behind absorb it. The spreadsheet shows savings, and your team’s calendar shows the cost. Meanwhile, the safety net of permanent employment has been replaced by gig work, while governments raise the retirement age, moving the finish line of time that’s “ours” further away.
Technology has a Capacity Cost
We don’t lose capacity to turnover on a factory floor anymore. We lose it in our calendars, and what follows us home.
Microsoft found that employees get interrupted every two minutes during core hours, about 275 times a day, by meetings, emails, or chats. Chats sent outside the 9-to-5 rose 15% year over year. Meetings starting after 8 p.m. rose 16%.
Leaders often read that as burnout or disengagement. But it’s a capacity problem. Organizations are spending human attention like it’s unlimited.
Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey found workers spend 41% of their day on work that doesn’t contribute to the value their organization creates.
I call that the Capacity Tax™: what an organization pays for work that doesn’t move the business. Nobody budgets for it, but every team pays it.
In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that technological growth would yield a 15-hour workweek by 2030 (that’s only about three years away). Nearly a century later, modern tech has done the exact opposite.
Technology did not liberate us from labor. It liberated labor from the confines of an office. Now AI is making the same promise.
A recent Harvard Business Review study found that generative AI rarely decreases workloads. Employees worked faster, took on a broader scope of tasks, and stretched work into more hours of the day, often without being asked. The authors warn that the early productivity surge can give way to lower-quality work, turnover, and weaker decisions.
That’s Ford’s premise in reverse. His machines made work so miserable that people left or just didn’t show up. Today’s machines make work so fast that people fill every minute they save, and the recovered time disappears before anyone intentionally decides where it should go.
Congress is Talking About 32 Hours (Again)
In September 2026, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Mark Takano reintroduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. It would lower the overtime threshold from 40 hours to 32, phased over four years, with no cuts to pay or benefits. This is the fourth time the bill has come before Congress since 2021. Critics argue it carries real costs for employers.
It’ll certainly require significant cultural shifts. The most useful question for leaders is this: if your team’s hours dropped 20%, which work would you stop doing?
Many organizations can’t answer that today. They’d cram 40 hours of work into 32, then point to the burnout or disengagement as proof that shorter weeks don’t work.
But it can be done. Medibank successfully ran a 100:80:100 model in 2023: 100% of pay, 80% of the hours, and an expectation of 100% of the productivity.
Whether or not the bill passes, the companies that can handle 32 hours are the ones that already know where their capacity drains exist. If we don’t change how we measure performance, we’ll fill any time we recover with more work. This only works if we treat recovered capacity as a strategic operating opportunity.
What Time Back Means within a Company
When I say organizations need to give people time back, some leaders hear doing the bare minimum and a room full of empty desks.
What it actually means is recovered capacity: hours and attention pulled out of low-value work and put back into the work that moves the business.
The work AI can’t do well needs that capacity most.
Research on the brains Default Mode Network , which activates when we step away from task-focused attention, links it to reflection, memory, and making meaning from experience. In other words, when we aren’t filling every hour with work, our brains get room to do its most important work. You can’t schedule insight and innovation into a calendar that’s interrupted every two minutes.
Start by revealing your Capacity Tax
You can’t recover capacity you can’t see. Meetings, email, and chat are the easiest place to start. Cultural change requires structural policy, and personal change starts with where we draw our own lines. The question is whether you design a way to get time back or keep waiting for the next tool to do it for you.
If you lead a team, look at your team’s last two weeks:
- Meetings. Export the calendar and total the hours spent in recurring meetings. Next to each one, write the decision it exists to drive.
- Email. Count the messages sent or received outside working hours and note who sends them.
- Chat. Ask the team to tally interruptions for one normal day.
If you don’t control the calendar, you can still reveal your own drains. Track one normal week:
- Meetings. Mark every meeting you attended, and whether it actually needed you.
- Email. Count the threads you read or answered outside working hours.
- Chat. Tally how many times a message pulled you off your main work.
What happens off the clock matters too. Notice where domestic, emotional, or mental labor fills your “what you will” hours.
Don’t fix anything yet. The goal is start identifying and quantifying where the capacity drains exist. When every hour of the day is expected to be productive, we lose the ability to feel alive in our own lives. Seeing where the hours go is the first step toward getting them back.
