Are brands actually saving us time, giving us time, opening up our time, or are they time bandits, quietly taking away moments that once mattered, moments we’ve now forgotten? Now we have time savers filling our time.
The room is crowded, and eyes are everywhere, yet she needs to speak to him and make it look professional and purposeful, leaving no hint of a romantic tie.
So she simply pauses by him and puts on her gloves.
Problem solved.
Every woman wears gloves, and you cannot risk falling or bumping into someone while you’re putting them on, so the pause is natural. Not eye-catching. Not rumor starting. Just a woman putting on her gloves, speaking to the man she happened to stop beside.
We’ve grown in our technology capabilities . Computers let us do more, faster. AI is now taking the dry bits, the dull parts of the job off our plates, giving us more time for the other things we need to do.
We have created so many tools and tricks that save us time, but maybe we don’t need time savers. Maybe we need time fillers.
The cell phone, or mobile phone for all the purists, is a huge step forward in convenience. It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t own one.
When you walk to your table at a restaurant, you can see, on the tables you pass, the cell phones of everyone at that table, sitting next to the fish fork, ready to be used for a quick call, text, or maybe even a bit of information.
We’re never out of touch.
But what about when phone calls were special? When we made dates to call on the phone? When we’d pick up the receiver, dial a number, and sit in our favorite chair or at the kitchen table, and the phone call would be the thing.
We weren’t fitting it in while we worked out at the gym. There was no sitting on the bus making a phone call, or strolling through the frozen food aisle with the phone to our ear.
The call was the thing.
And the thing had a place and a time, and it got all of our attention.
Now it’s just one more thing we fold into the routine. Another line item added to the list when people ask how we’re doing, and our reply has become, “Busy.”
And weren’t phone booths fun?
Standing in a phone booth, dimes on the tray in front of you, the world outside rushing by. Traffic moving both with tires and feet. And there you are, in a small sanctuary, making a call to someone.
Phone booths were great. I mean, certainly Superman liked them.
We have tons of time savers, and yet we’re still busy. We have so many modern conveniences, and yet we’re moving further and further away from humanity.
And we’re being sold these conveniences day in and day out.
Products that swear things will be easier. Brands that scream you’ll get more done and save time. And with all that saved time, you can work more, find more things you need to save time to do.
A vicious cycle it is, it is, I say, and I wonder, as my fingers wander over the keys, are brands that feed us into a technology cycle actually doing us any good?
Are all the time savers really allowing us more free time? Are they actually saving us time, or are they taking time away from us in subtle ways we no longer notice?
Do we still have moments where we can pause to put on gloves, duck into a phone booth, make a date to talk on the phone, and do nothing else?
Are brands actually saving us time, giving us time, opening up our time, or are they time bandits, quietly taking away moments that once mattered, moments we’ve now forgotten? Now we have time savers filling our time. Brands must provide the latest, the greatest, the best. They must offer items and services that enrich our lives. But how does a brand decide what makes life better, and what simply makes life pass faster?
When things had a place
What all of those moments had in common wasn’t nostalgia. It was location.
The gloves had a purpose, but they also had a setting. You didn’t put them on just anywhere. You put them on when you were about to go somewhere, when you were standing, when you were in between one thing and the next.
Phone calls had places, too. The chair. The kitchen table. The hallway with the long cord stretched just far enough that you could turn your back and feel like the conversation was private.
Phone booths were nothing but place. A tiny one, sure, but unmistakable. You stepped into it, and the world knew what you were doing. Or maybe it didn’t know who you were calling, but it knew you were doing one thing, and only one thing.
There was no multitasking inside a phone booth. No pretending you were also doing something else. You were there. Coins on the tray. Door shut. Call in progress.
Even boredom had a shape back then. Waiting was waiting. Riding the bus meant riding the bus. Standing in line meant standing in line. You could look around. You could think. You could notice the way someone tapped their foot or hummed without realizing it.
Time didn’t feel fuller. It felt slower. And slower wasn’t a problem. Slower gave moments edges.
Now, almost nothing has a place.
Phone calls happen everywhere now; this means they also happen nowhere in particular. Work follows us into the grocery store. Texts arrive in the middle of conversations. News shows up while we’re brushing our teeth.
Everything’s possible all the time, which means nothing asks for our full attention anymore.
It’s not that we’re distracted. It’s that the boundaries are gone.
And when boundaries fly away, life moments don’t feel like moments anymore. Real moments. Times when all else stops, and that portion of time, that moment is the focus. Now, they've become background.
Convenience didn’t save time. It thinned it.
Convenience sounds generous. It sounds like help.
Who wouldn’t want something faster, easier, closer at hand? Who wouldn’t want to shave a few minutes off a task, smooth out a rough edge, make life a little less effortful?
And at first, that’s exactly what it does. The problem isn’t convenience itself. It’s what happens after convenience removes the last bit of resistance. When phone calls could only happen in certain places, they asked something of us. They asked us to stop, to sit, to commit. They claimed a slice of time and said, this is what we’re doing now.
When calls can happen anywhere, they don’t ask anymore. They just slide in. Between errands. Between sets at the gym. Between bites of dinner. They don’t interrupt life. They dissolve into it. And when everything dissolves, nothing stands out.
Saved time doesn’t show up as free time. It shows up as availability. Capacity. And how to add in one more thing without instantly feeling the weight of it. So we do.
We fill the gaps and stack the moments. We answer calls while walking, scrolling, waiting, half-listening, half elsewhere. We’re efficient, yes. But we’re also thinner. Spread across more surfaces than we can really inhabit. Time hasn’t expanded. It’s fragmented.
And here’s the quiet part we don’t say out loud very often. Most of the tools we use today aren’t designed to give time back. They’re designed to make time usable. Monetizable. Optimized. Which means the goal isn’t rest. The goal is flow. No hard stops. No empty spaces. No moments where nothing happens and something might be noticed. That’s not an accident. That’s design. And design always reflects a value, whether it admits it or not.
Someone decided this was better
None of this happened by accident. But it also didn’t happen because someone woke up one morning and decided to make life feel thinner. It happened because people made reasonable decisions, one after another. Make it faster. Make it easier. Remove the friction. Reduce the steps. Let it work anywhere.
All of those are defensible goals. In isolation, they even feel generous. Inside a brand, those choices usually show up as problem-solving. Customers don’t want to wait. Users don’t want to stop. People don’t like effort. So the work becomes removing anything that slows them down.
But here’s the thing we rarely talk about. Friction isn’t just inconvenience. Sometimes it’s a boundary. Sometimes it’s the thing that says, this moment matters enough to stand on its own. When brands remove friction, they’re not just speeding things up. They’re deciding which moments no longer deserve their own space. And that’s a design decision. Not a neutral one. A human one. Someone chose that a phone call should happen anywhere, that work should fit into every crack of the day, that waiting was a problem to solve instead of a condition to live with.
Those someones work in brands.
Not villains. Not caricatures. Smart people doing their jobs well. People chasing adoption, satisfaction, growth, and usefulness. People responding to markets and metrics, and expectations that reward more usage, more engagement, and more time inside the system. So the system grows.
And quietly, politely, it asks for more of our time. Not all at once. Just a little here. A little there. A glance. A tap. A quick response. A notification we didn’t ask for, but now feel slightly rude ignoring. This is where time savers become time fillers.
The minutes that were “saved” don’t turn into rest. They turn into space that can be occupied. By another feature. Another task. Another thing we’re now able to do because we never fully stopped doing the last one. And once time becomes something to be filled, emptiness starts to feel inefficient. Silence starts to feel awkward. Pauses start to look like problems.
Brands don’t say that out loud. They don’t have to. The design does the talking.
Maybe better isn’t faster
If you work in a brand, especially one that builds tools, platforms, or systems, you’re usually rewarded for making things smoother. Fewer steps. Less waiting. More seamless handoffs. Those are the wins that show up in decks and dashboards because they’re easy to measure and easy to defend. They feel like progress.
But what if better isn’t faster? What if better is clearer, or calmer, or more intentional? What if the real work isn’t eliminating every pause, but deciding which pauses are worth protecting?
Because not all friction is failure, sometimes friction is what gives a moment its shape. A beginning, a middle, an end. A phone call that asks you to sit down. A process that can’t be rushed. A boundary that quietly says this happens here, not everywhere.
Those kinds of moments don’t scale neatly. They don’t optimize well. They don’t always win tests or outperform alternatives. But they do something else. They give people back a sense of presence. They let a moment stand alone instead of dissolving into the blur of everything else.
That’s the uncomfortable part for brands. Designing for presence sometimes means designing against maximum usage. It means choosing not to fill every gap, not to chase every available minute, or turn every saved second into another opportunity to engage. That kind of decision rarely feels urgent. It doesn’t arrive as a crisis. But over time, it shapes the texture of people’s days.
And texture matters.
Because when life loses its texture, people don’t always know what’s wrong. They just know they’re tired. Busy. Distracted. A little less here than they want to be. Brands didn’t create that feeling on their own. But they’re involved in maintaining it. Which means they’re also capable of changing it.
The takeaway
The moments we miss weren’t grand, and they didn’t announce themselves. They were small pauses that gave shape to the day—putting on gloves. Stepping into a phone booth. Sitting down to make a call because the call itself asked for that kind of attention.
Those moments didn’t save time. They marked it. They told you when something began and when it was allowed to end.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that faster was better, that anywhere was an improvement over somewhere, and that empty space was a problem to solve. We did it with good intentions and clever tools, with designs that made life feel easier in the short term.
And in doing so, we smoothed out the edges that helped moments feel like moments.
At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about that tradeoff. Not just what brands say, or how they look, but what they quietly encourage people to do, notice, and value. Because brands don’t just sell products or platforms, the people who work inside them shape the texture of everyday life, often without realizing it.
Every choice to remove friction is also a choice about how people live inside the moments that remain. Every promise of efficiency carries an opinion about what matters and what can be skipped.
So maybe the question isn’t how much time we can save. Maybe it’s how much time we’re willing to give back to being fully somewhere, doing one thing, without apology. There are still chances for that. Small, ordinary ones. The kind you could miss if you weren’t looking.
You just have to decide they’re worth keeping.
