Two Things Can Be True
Inspiration for today’s blog post:
Seth Godin’s Akimbo Episode Moore’s Law
Samantha Shain’s blog post on jevons’ paradox
Social Justice organizations are working towards missions that have absolutely no time to wait. We are trying to end poverty, close the education gap, bring peace, feed people, house people, eradicate domestic violence, heal the earth. We need to solve these problems right now for this current generation, and we also need the time to enact systemic change across every aspect of modern life and society. There is no “silver bullet” to aim at our missions, and each organization much focus intensely on their work and not stray from their mission (mission-creep). Time spent on administrative aspects of the work is fraught with shame and guilt over not being the physical acts of changing the world. Time, time, time. How do we get more of it, how do we use it better, how do we save it, how do we spend it, how do we measure it, how do we live in it?
Technology is often called upon and expected to do something magical with time. And there is no denying that it does do something with time. Technology takes time to build, maintain, improve, fix, and use. Technology gives time in automating processes and calculations that human bodies and brains take much longer to do. Technology giveth time and technology taketh away time. Two things can be true. But let’s not ponder any more about what Technology “does” with time, since Technology doesn’t really “do” anything - humans “do” things using technology.
So what do we expect to happen to time when humans use technology? By default, we expect time to be saved. It is among the most common of marketing tactics to sell technology to a nonprofit - that it will save precious time that can instead be used changing the world. This would imply that technology will work without us engaging, in the background, in perpetuity, so that we the humans can be doing something else with our time - not using technology. While there may be small examples of this happening, on a larger scale what happens when our technology gets better and does more for us is that it also takes more time and attention from us. One of the most beautiful ways that people express love or positive relationship with their technology is to actually ask - to demand even - for it to be better than it currently is, which takes time to build, maintain, monitor, and improve - and also in turn takes time to learn and use these improvements. We can pass around the “who” and the “what” and the “how much” within our organization (or externally by hiring contractors and consultants), but the spending of time remains.
This is not a warning of despair - this is a truth-telling of hope! Because the experience curve holds true in using technology - the more we use it for our ideas and our processes, the more efficient we become at scale. The more efficiently we use technology in its role for our missions, the more efficiently we work towards our missions. We may not use less time in our technology, but the time will be used more efficiently, meaning we get better at how we are working towards our missions. This expedites our path towards our missions, shortening the overall time needed to achieve our missions. Of course, these simple equations cannot account for the myriad of variables - world events, socio-economic fluctuations, government changes - that add more time between us and achieving our missions. But if our organizational culture is to use our technology efficiently, then we will be prepared to use our time in technology to respond to these variables, and the more we use our technology for these variables, the more efficient we will become, and the more time we will subtract from the path towards our missions.
Humans spend time with technology, humans save time with technology. Two things can be true. Spending or saving time with technology, we are becoming more efficient. This efficiency is positive, because our missions can’t wait another second for us to achieve them.
And now for my favorite quote about time from J. Cole: “They say time is money but really it's not. If we ever go broke girl, then time is all we got. And you can't make that back, no you can't make that back.”
