I recently saw a post on Reddit about a person living in the Denver area. They had moved from a mountain time work schedule to an eastern time schedule, and suddenly had a window of free time at the end of every weekday. This new free time left them wondering how to fill it:
If you had 3:30pm-5pm free M-F, what would you use that time for?
I had a change at work and now work EST and now finish my work day at 3:30pm. I cook dinner at 5pm (my fav part of the day). I'll be honest, I've been working overtime aggressively for the past few years so I am not use [sic] to having this free time. I can only clean my home so many times and most friends and my spouse are still working at this time.
So I pose to Reddit, if you had this chunk of time available, how would you use it?
Using your newly found free time
After reading that post and thinking about it for a moment, I replied with the following:
- First, learn how to relax, again. Years of overtime in tech and similar industries can affect how you think about what's important. It's likely that your industry taught you that you need to be "productive" at all times. This is far from the truth. You deserve rest and relaxation. Do nothing for at least one hour a day, for at least two weeks, to help your body and brain unlearn this.
- Second, after you have allowed yourself to relax for a few weeks, go outside more often. Reconnect with nature and the beauty of the mountains, open spaces, parks, water, grass, and birds, in and around Denver. Find your calm and peace in a chaotic world where social media has been designed to be addictive through dopamine hits. Put the electronics down and reconnect with the world around you.
- Third, after learning to relax and connect again, find a hobby. Anything you are interested in, that isn't directly or indirectly related to your income, can be a hobby. Do not try to monetize it. Do not think about whether you are "good" at it or not. Be present in whatever the hobby is, for the sake of doing something you like to do, and no other reason.
- Fourth, after you have learned to care for yourself, care for other people. Now that you know how to take care of your own needs and mental health, look for ways to help other people. There is so much suffering in this city, state, and country. Find a way that you can help alleviate some of the pain. Do something small to help someone who is marginalized by our society. Remember that you're not trying to sprint a marathon, and you do not need to fix anything big. Help someone in need, in some small way, do it consistently, and do it in a way that is sustainable for you, long term.
That reply was a generalization for anyone finding they have more time in their day, whether that time comes from something simple like a shift in schedules, or from something truly revolutionary like productivity gains from AI tooling and agentic coding.
We don't always get the time back
For some people, getting time back in their day is a legitimate goal. With the popularity of working across time zones, the advent of AI tooling, and other modern workplace improvements, there are people that can work fewer hours in a day. AI tooling, for example, can make someone more efficient and allow them breathing room, and time to slow down and experience life outside of work related responsibilities.
As software developers and engineers, though, most of us still owe our employers or clients a forty-hour workweek. For us, AI tooling doesn't reduce the workday hours. Instead, it gives us the possibility of increased productivity during those hours.
Unfortunately, I've seen too many people (myself included) in software development take this breathing room and immediately spend it on more work. We try to use every second of the day to do more, under the illusion of productivity, instead of taking the time to understand what productivity truly is.
Activity is not the same thing as productivity
We've been taught through our society and work culture that our value is measured by our output. When a new tool makes us faster, then, we don't see the breathing room it opens up as something that should lead to improvements in our work. Instead, we see a gap to fill with more activity - which is far too often misunderstood as productivity.
A developer who fills every spare minute with another ticket, another commit, another pull request is producing a lot of activity. Whether they are being productive—shipping the right thing, understanding the system, catching the problem before it becomes a fire—is a different question entirely. AI tooling is offering productivity increases. But, it's also accelerating the confusion between productivity and activity.
The pitch of these tools was that they would improve our work and make us more productive. So, while a coding agent is off building something, a developer reaches for another task to work. The activity goes up. But thinking, processing, and understanding of what's being built doesn't always increase with activity.
"More human, not more efficient"
A coworker, Kyle Adams, had recently been reading an encyclical on AI, from—of all people—the Pope. One line that stood out to Kyle was how "AI should make life more human, not more efficient."
Kyle connected that to Wendell Berry's criteria for evaluating technology, specifically Berry's ninth criteria (paraphrased here, by Kyle):
It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
He also noticed that a common theme running through the encyclical was the focus on collaboration with other humans over isolation.
More human, not more efficient is a different test than the one we usually apply to a tool. The usual test is how much faster something made us. The harder, better test is whether it made our lives more human. A workflow that ships a feature in half the time and leaves you isolated, drained, and disconnected has failed the second test, no matter what it did for the first one.
Build tooling that protects your thinking
The practical move is to be deliberate about what the breathing room is for. When you build out an AI workflow, the question to ask up front is what the new headroom in your workday is for. The question to ask is not "how many more tickets can I take on?” It should be something more like, "What part of this work am I now able to do better?"
A few commitments that have helped me hold the line during the workday:
- Use the time the agent is working to actually think. Read the code. Read the spec. Ask yourself whether what you are about to build is the right thing. The agent does not need a human watching the build bar. It needs a human who knows what they are building, and why.
- Resist the reflex to start a second task while the agent is finishing the first. Two parallel half-attended tasks is not twice the productivity. It's twice the activity with a real danger of half the understanding for each.
- Build workflows that make your work less exhausting, not "faster". A workflow that ships twice as fast but leaves you twice as drained at the end of the day is not a win. It is the same trap with a faster timer.
- Share what works with your team, and share how you protect the thinking time inside the workflow, too. Telling teammates how you built it without telling them how you use it teaches only half the lesson.
Use AI tooling to improve your life, not just your productivity
AI tooling, agentic coding, and the entirety of the present moment in our industry don’t have to be a story about getting more done. It can be a story about improving our work in the hours we have promised, and protecting everything outside of those hours so it can be ours, again.
We were sold the idea that these tools would make life more human. That part can still be true. But it turns out that the work of making it true is the difficult part of all this: improving the hours we already work, and protecting the hours we do not.
River Lynn Bailey is a Senior Software Consultant at Test Double, and has experience in building agentic workflows and plugins for solo and small team environments.
