If Technology Allows Us to Fill Every Empty Minute, How Many Empty Minutes Should Remain Empty?

As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, we are discovering new opportunities to reclaim small pockets of time throughout the day:

• Meeting summaries can be converted into audio and listened to on the way to the next appointment.
• Training materials can become podcasts.
• Briefings can be consumed while walking between meetings, traveling, exercising, or waiting for the next call.

These ideas are not inherently bad. The question is whether every moment that can be filled should be.

Let’s consider a thought experiment: Imagine a field representative finishing a client meeting. An AI system generates a summary, combines it with notes for the next customer, and converts the briefing into audio for the drive to the next appointment.

The workflow is technically feasible today. It might even save time. The question is not whether it can be done. The question is whether driving is the right place to reclaim those minutes.

A driver is already navigating traffic, watching for hazards, making route decisions, and mentally processing the previous visit while preparing for the next one. Adding another work stream may improve efficiency in one dimension while reducing cognitive margin in another. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration treats activities that take a driver’s eyes, hands, or mind away from safe driving as distraction.¹

That tradeoff, rather than the technology itself, is the point of this example.

For decades, organizations have worked to remove friction from work by streamlining processes, reducing delays, eliminating unnecessary steps, and improving communication. These efforts created real benefits for both businesses and employees.

Today, technology is helping us remove another form of friction: idle time.

• The drive between clients.
• The walk to the car.
• The few quiet minutes before a meeting.
• The time spent looking out an airport window waiting for a flight.

These moments can now be filled with information, preparation, training, follow-up tasks, and work-related content.

From a productivity perspective, this sounds like progress. From a systems perspective, it raises a few questions:

• Engineers rarely design systems to operate at one hundred percent utilization.
• Manufacturing systems need capacity buffers.
• Supply chains need inventory buffers.
• Computer systems need spare resources.
• Roadways need excess capacity.
• Safety systems need margin.

In engineering, these concepts are often called slack, margin, or reserve capacity. Different disciplines use different terminology, but the idea is the same: systems need room to breathe. Without that room, small disruptions become large problems.

Humans are systems too. What appears to be idle time is often performing work that simply does not appear on a productivity dashboard.

• Reflection.
• Recovery.
• Memory consolidation.
• Creative thinking.
• Emotional regulation.
• Preparation.

The quiet process of making sense of what just happened before moving on to what happens next.

Most of us have experienced this firsthand.

• A solution appears while taking a walk.
• A difficult conversation becomes clearer during the drive home.
• An idea connects itself while staring out a window.

These moments rarely feel productive while they are happening. Their value becomes visible later. Rest does not guarantee a particular insight, but sleep supports attention, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity; sleep deficiency can make those tasks harder.²

Organizations often measure the outcomes when these margins disappear.

• Engagement.
• Burnout.
• Turnover.
• Absenteeism.
• Safety incidents.

Yet we do not always recognize how many small decisions gradually consume the space that helped prevent those outcomes in the first place.

Leaders should pay attention to this trend, not because technology is dangerous, but because people are human. The same tools that help employees work more efficiently can also make it tempting to turn every available moment into work time.

Employees should pay attention as well. Not because they should resist useful tools, but because maintenance is not waste.

The time spent recovering, reflecting, and thinking is often what allows us to perform well in the first place.

Technology has given us an extraordinary new ability.

For perhaps the first time in history, we can fill nearly every empty minute of the day with useful information.

The risk is not that we will waste too much time. The risk is that we will optimize away the very margins that make good judgment, creativity, resilience, and sustained performance possible.

Not every empty minute is a problem to solve. Some are the capacity that keeps the system working.

Footnotes

1. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Distracted Driving. Accessed July 16, 2026. ↩

2. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, How Sleep Affects Your Health. Accessed July 16, 2026. ↩