< The Expensive Minute.

Tick.

In January I set myself a goal of 100 PRs in a day, and at the start of October a regular day was still in the high 30s. A few weeks ago I cracked 100, and now 200 is a normal day.

So a minute of my work yields a multiple of what it did at the start of just October. I stopped sizing work in days a while back. The unit I notice now is the minute.

The intuitive conclusion is more leisure. If the same output takes a fraction of the time, shouldn't I be able to take the rest of the day off? People have been saying that about technology for about a century; Keynes figured in 1930 that a fifteen-hour week would do for his grandchildren[1].

It never arrived for them and it hasn't arrived for me. What I feel is the opposite. Because each minute yields so much, a minute that yields nothing feels like a waste. And an increasing one.

A cat reading in an armchair inside a clock face, with the second hand sweeping overhead

It's both kinds of minute. The idle one is the obvious case ("idle" being a term of judgment rather than reality). I went to a movie and found myself tallying the turns I was missing. The other is the minute spent working the old way, doing by hand something a prompt would have started.

I've had a version of this before. In August I wrote that a flat-rate subscription makes an idle hour feel like waste, because the tokens were already paid for. This one is about my own time, and it has shrunk from the hour to the minute.

An economist described the mechanism in 1970. Staffan Linder's argument in The Harried Leisure Class was that as an hour of work produces more, time itself gets more expensive, so the better off people get the more rushed they feel[2]. He was writing about incomes, but swap in PRs and it's a fair description of my 2026 so far.

Other people are describing the same symptom. Nikunj Kothari called his version "token anxiety" back in February: reading a novel had started to feel indulgent, and a movie without a laptop open felt wasteful[3].

I haven't changed anything in response, and I'm not sure what I would change. If 200 a day makes an idle minute feel like this, what does it feel like when the number doubles again?

Tock.

Also read: One Hundred, and Fifty, More Attention, Not Less, Rent Versus Buy, and Twenty Twenty Sprints.

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Footnotes

  1. Keynes's Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren looked a hundred years ahead from 1930 and decided that "three hours a day is quite enough." ↩

  2. Alex Tabarrok has a short summary of the Linder theorem: as the opportunity cost of time rises, the worry about "wasting" hours "grows more acute." ↩

  3. Kothari's essay is Token Anxiety, and a month before it Armin Ronacher was asking the question outright in Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?. ↩