WORK
Pressed for Time (Work)
Wajcman's 2015 landmark — Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism — that systematically documented the temporal paradox of efficiency across a century of household and workplace technology and provided the analytical framework this volume applies to AI.
Pressed for Time was the book that established Wajcman as the leading contemporary theorist of technology and temporality. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015, it synthesized three decades of empirical research into a single argument: the widespread feeling of time pressure in digital societies cannot be explained by actual increases in demands on time (time-use studies consistently show stable or declining hours of paid work) but by the relationship between technology and temporal expectation. The book became a foundational text in the sociology of digital capitalism and the primary reference for subsequent analysis of how AI tools might affect time.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central empirical move was to compare time-use diary data across decades of technological change and consistently find that the introduction of time-saving technologies did not reduce the hours spent on the tasks they accelerated. The washing machine