The short answer: Nobody can add sand to the hourglass, but AI can change how much each grain carries. Scheduled morning and evening briefs turned my nightly 30-minute review into a few minutes of reading. The hours you get back only count if you spend them where your heart is.

When I turned 50 this year, I did some quiet math I had put off for a long time. More time lay behind me than in front of me.

That thought stayed with me for days. Then a question followed: What is the most valuable resource I have? Money? Time? Energy?

I went back and forth. Money feels urgent because the bills show up every month. Energy matters because a tired person makes poor decisions. I kept landing on time.

You can't buy more time. With time, you can make more money. You can rest and recharge. Time only moves in one direction. One hour, one minute, one second, once used, is gone from your life for good, like a grain of sand falling through an hourglass. Nobody gets to turn it over.

Oliver Burkeman puts numbers on this in his book Four Thousand Weeks. If you live to 80, you get about four thousand weeks. At 50, I have already spent about 2,600 of mine.

The grains I've already spent

I have spent a lot of sand. Years in the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. Years in healthcare and customer support. A job in collections that ended before I was ready for it to end. Then, at an age when a lot of people are counting down to retirement, I went back to school and finished my master's degree.

I don't regret those years. They gave me transferable skills, and I wouldn't trade back one grain of sand. But when you see more sand at the bottom of the glass than at the top, you start asking harder questions about how the rest of it gets spent.

Can you get more time?

For most of my life, I believed the answer was no. Today my answer is no and yes.

No, because nothing adds sand to the hourglass. We all get the same 24 hours, and none of us knows how many days are left.

Yes, because AI changes how much each grain can carry.

I coach people one-on-one on social media marketing, and that work keeps a lot of irons in the fire. Every night at 9 PM, I used to sit down and piece together the next day by hand. I checked email, checked the calendar, confirmed Zoom links, sent reminder emails, and tried to remember where I left off with one client compared to the next. That review took at least 30 minutes, and some nights it ran for hours. Now Claude runs an evening brief and a morning brief for me on a schedule, and I only need a few minutes to read them.

I personally use Claude, but pick the one that works best for you, and the only way to know is to try a few. Start by telling the AI which ecosystem you live in: your phone, your computer, and your email. Is it iPhone or Android, Mac or Windows, Gmail or Outlook? That tells the AI which of your tools it can connect to. Then begin with scheduled tasks. An evening brief, a morning brief, an email check, and a Slack check are easy first wins. Every minute those tasks save goes back into your creative work, and that is how one hour starts to carry more.

At first, the gain is modest. You are learning the tool, and the tool is learning you. Once you have trained it on your voice, your projects, and the way you think, the gain grows. A review that used to take me at least 30 minutes now takes a few minutes to read. I expect that gap to keep growing as the tools improve and as I get better at using them.

The research points in the same direction, with smaller averages than mine. In an MIT study published in Science, professionals using ChatGPT finished writing tasks about 40% faster, and graders rated their work 18% higher (Noy and Zhang, 2023). At a large software company, customer support agents with an AI assistant resolved 14% more issues per hour, and the newest agents gained 34% (Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, 2023). My gain is bigger because my nightly review is routine work: gathering, sorting, and summarizing. That is where AI does its best work.

The catch

The hour AI gives back is still yours to spend. If I fill it with more busywork, I've only made the treadmill run faster.

The point of saving time is to spend it where your heart is. For me, that means the people I love, the books I've carried around in my head for years, and helping others see a little further down their own road.

Tim Urban wrote an essay called The Tail End that counts how much time we have left with the people we love. For most of us, it is less than we think, and that is where my saved hours belong.

AI can do the heavy lifting. It can't decide what matters. That part is still my job.

One hour this week

Here is what I'd ask you to try. Pick one hour from your week and write down exactly how you spent it. One easy way to catch it is to set an hourly alarm on your phone labeled "What did I just spend this hour on?" Then ask two questions:

  1. Could a tool carry part of this load?
  2. If it did, where would I spend the time I got back?

If you can't answer the second question, start there. Saved time with no purpose drains away just as fast as wasted time.

The sand is still falling for all of us. I can't stop it, but I can decide what each grain carries.

In the Philippines, people say time is gold. I like that better than "time is money." Money can be earned back. Gold is limited, people treasure it, and they pass it down to the ones they love. That is how I want to treat the hours I have left.

What's your "is gold"?

References

Further reading

  • Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021). If you live to 80, you get about four thousand weeks. A book about spending them on what matters instead of trying to get everything done.
  • Tim Urban, The Tail End, Wait But Why (2015). A short essay that counts the time you have left with the people you love. It pairs well with the hourglass.

Claude served as my research assistant and editor.