Room to Be Human

What Happened to the Time Technology Saved Us?

Somebody got those hours. It was not the people doing the work. Productivity is up ninety percent since 1979; pay, thirty-three.

Work already follows us home. Attention arrives in pieces. Now artificial intelligence is about to strip an enormous quantity of repetitive labor out of the economy, and the hours it frees will go somewhere—into a higher quota, or back to the people who used to spend them.

Robert Rasmussen has a name for what that costs us: time poverty. Not a shortage of hours—a shortage of hours that belong to you. Room to Be Human is not a productivity system. It makes a harder argument: The pace is built, the beliefs holding it up were installed, and both can be taken apart.

Inside:

• Why time poverty explains what work-life balance never could
• What Norway does differently, and which of it travels
• How an organization runs on trust instead of monitoring, from someone who built one
• How to make the case for those hours before somebody else spends them
• Why the book treats spiritual life as basic infrastructure, not indulgence—and what that means for the callings we never answer

For founders, executives, and managers who set the terms of other people’s days—and for anyone living under terms someone else set.