By Gabriel Soto
We were promised that technology would free us. Faster computers, smarter software, collaborative platforms — each innovation arrived with the assurance that work would become lighter, quicker, and less consuming. And in a narrow sense, this is true. What once took hours can be done in minutes. Yet few of us feel liberated. Instead, the more we automate, the more our schedules fill. We are living inside the productivity paradox: working smarter but feeling busier than ever.
Efficiency as Expansion
In economics, this is called the Jevons Paradox — when efficiency gains don’t reduce demand but increase it. A 19th-century example: more efficient coal engines led not to less coal use but to more, because they made new industries possible. The same logic applies today. Email makes communication instant, so we send exponentially more of it. AI helps draft reports, so the expectation shifts from producing one draft to producing three. Each efficiency gain raises the baseline of what counts as “enough.”
The Elasticity of Availability
Remote work was supposed to restore balance. Instead, it stretched the workday. A project that once required a meeting now becomes a 24/7 Slack thread. Smartphones blur the line between office and home, and “flexible hours” quietly morph into constant hours. Data backs this up: surveys show employees working longer total hours post-pandemic, even as commuting time vanished. Availability has become elastic, expanding to fit every new tool we adopt.
More Output, Same Leisure
So where does all that extra time go? Mostly into more output. Firms, rationally, capture productivity gains as growth rather than downtime. If a task that took ten hours now takes five, the worker is not rewarded with an early exit but assigned another five hours’ worth of deliverables. Leisure time, historically, has barely budged. In the U.S., the average workweek has hovered stubbornly around forty hours for decades, despite enormous leaps in technology. The lesson is clear: efficiency does not automatically translate into freedom.
Rethinking Productivity’s Goal
This is not to say technology is futile. It makes work safer, more flexible, and in many cases more creative. But the paradox reminds us that efficiency is not an end in itself. Without deliberate choices — cultural, managerial, even political — the default outcome will always be “more.” To turn smarter work into less work, societies must decide that leisure is valuable, not just productivity. Shorter workweeks, enforced downtime, or new cultural norms around availability are the only real levers.
A Different Metric of Success
We might imagine measuring success not in GDP per hour worked, but in hours reclaimed for life. True progress would be when tools make not just more output possible, but more freedom. Until then, the productivity paradox will persist: our machines grow ever faster, while we continue to run in place.
