You Don’t Have Time to Read This

The case against your calendar

There's one relationship on campus that nobody talks about. It's controlling, codependent, and entirely one-sided. Chances are you've been in this relationship for years, but at HBS you've taken it to the next level. It’s always on your mind. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, every few minutes in between. You've built your entire identity around managing this relationship well, and yet it’s never felt closer to slipping from your grasp. Like any toxic relationship, you tell yourself, over and over again, that everything will be fine if you can just get a little bit more of it.

I'm talking, of course, about your relationship with time.

Consider this an intervention. Your family, friends, and partner have been trying to tell you for years—to no avail. As with any diagnosis, the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Amortizing 645 Days

If the United States is the most time-obsessed place on earth, HBS is its capital. As you settle into your seat during the first few moments of START Week, a massive number flashes across the Klarman screen: 645 days. That's how long you have until graduation. On your first day of class, you're taught the 5 Ps, one of which is "Punctual: we start and end on time.” (Results may vary. Some professors will kick you out of class if you're late. Others have a loose relationship with the end time. A select few manage both. The duality of man!) You're then told that, on average, you'll need at least two hours to prepare for each case. Looking at your schedule, you notice a uniquely HBS affinity for back-to-back 3-case days. 

Net discretionary life expectancy: two to three hours daily, optimistically. Oh, and by the way, you have to meet with your discussion group at 8 AM. And find a job. And exercise. And be a present spouse and parent, if applicable. 

As you depart from Aldrich in a zombie-like fugue and trudge home, a shroud of drowsiness descends upon you. The mentality is hardwired into our physical environment: the SFP elevator doors are programmed to grant you a 0.025-second reaction window before slamming shut on your sides and jolting you awake. The campus vibrates with the quiet aggression of optimization. Every minute matters. You’re wasting one right now. 

You hold out hope. You think to yourself, at least my classmates and I are in it together; we can #jointheresistance. Your algorithm feeds you a Reel about manipulating time and you almost want to believe it. You finally move beyond the superficial pleasantries and set up your first one-on-one lunch – a bona fide bonding experience. And then you spot a casual glance from your newest “friend” in the direction of their wrist. Two or three thinly-veiled glances follow in short succession, and the veil of innocence is pierced when the words "hard stop" echo in your ears. 

After a few rounds, you decide not to take it personally. The choreographed dance of these conversations lets people play the game they came for. Your author keeps the faith in a beautiful, purposeless lunch hang, but many of these conversations start with a goal in mind. They are efficient transactions disguised as friendship auditions. Time is our scarcest resource. The hamster yearns for the wheel. Are you worth my time? Let's set up a 25-minute lunch to find out.

The Cult of Chronos

The Ancient Greeks understood time well enough to split it into two words. Chronos is measured, sequential, and quantitative—the time of calendars and case prep. Kairos, conversely, is qualitative and descriptive of the right time for action (sometimes called "God's time"). It concerns not how much time passes, but whether the moment matters. In other words, every Kairos is a Chronos, but not every Chronos is a Kairos. The mythology really drove the point home. The titan Kronos devoured his own children, terrified that what he created would one day overtake him. But Kronos missed one. There’s always a Zeus. 

HBS is Chronos Central.  Productivity culture has inherited the instinct of consuming our own time before it can consume us. We schedule, optimize, and account for every hour. At the West Point of Capitalism: "Time is money" and busyness reigns supreme. The relentless march of time is ubiquitous across idioms such as, "Don't waste time" and "Time waits for no one." It's no accident that the Spanish word for business—negocio—literally means the denial of leisure. When we're not producing output, we're "killing time." Is time of no worth on its own? Philosopher Josef Pieper argued that real leisure isn't idleness, but rather receptivity, or the capacity to let the world speak to you instead of constantly imposing yourself upon it. By that definition, most of what we call leisure is just a different kind of productivity.

But the moments that have defined the HBS experience, at least for me, are unequivocally Kairos: long, winding, and unexpected conversations, friendships formed in unplanned settings, and scattered moments of spontaneity. One particular memory stands out: Section C's Flag Day during RC Year. What was supposed to last ninety minutes somehow went over five hours. We violated the 5 Ps. Nobody complained. 

Intellectual Foie Gras

How did we get here? Turns out, someone called it over forty years ago. 

In the 80s, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that society was worried about the wrong dystopia. The collective psyche envisioned a bleak future in the shape of Orwell’s 1984, where truth is suppressed by force. Postman pointed to Huxley’s Brave New World instead, describing something more insidious: a world where truth is drowned in irrelevance. Nobody needs to ban books if nobody wants to read them. Nobody needs to surveil your thoughts if you've stopped having them. Orwell feared that what we hate would destroy us. Huxley feared that what we love would.

Postman's verdict was that Huxley got it right, and I think the decades since have only strengthened the case. The danger isn't that your information is restricted; it’s the opposite. Consumer culture floods you with so much information that signal becomes indistinguishable from noise. Drowning in a sea of riches, we have been reduced to passivity and egotism. It's a cruel and clever trick. Like moths to a flame, we give our freedom away willingly.

HBS exemplifies the Huxleyan dystopia. The volume of options, events, treks, clubs, recruiting timelines, and socials is nominally good, but in aggregate these options compete for our attention to such a degree that it becomes easy to lose sight of what's actually important. Nobody is being forced to fill their calendar, but when you combine the environmental conditions with the selection bias of nearly two thousand type-A strivers, you create a self-reinforcing cycle.

Poverty in Abundance

Why do 80% of Americans report feeling "time poor"—this unrelenting feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to get around to them? The American Time Use Survey suggests that Americans actually have more discretionary time today than they did fifty years ago. The average American logs over five hours a day in leisure activities, with more than half going to watching TV. In other words, 80% of Americans are wrong—right? We've never had more free time. We just don't feel that way because our free time has been shredded into what HBS Professor Ashley Whillans calls "time confetti,” composed of tiny, distracted, low-quality slivers scattered between obligations and screens. We're time-rich and meaning-poor. 

I know what you're thinking. Who does this author think he is? Be careful throwing stones from glass houses, and all that. I get it; my country is literally on fire right now. My friends here know that “Mexican time” means I’ll show up when I want to, not when I said I would. But one thing we do get right is sobremesa. There's no English equivalent, but it refers to the time spent lingering at the table after a meal—talking, digesting, letting a conversation unfold at its own pace. No one is optimizing. No one is checking their phone. In Mexico, getting up to leave as soon as a meal is done would be considered rude. Here, eating alone at your desk in eight minutes while answering emails is called efficiency. Sobremesa is the opposite of time confetti. It's time given room to become something.

The Myth of Having it All

HBS is the distilled essence of this uniquely American pathology. Nowhere else will you find a higher density of people who believe, sincerely and to their core, that every minute must be optimized. The program's tendency to feel overwhelming is clearly a feature, not a bug. It's a noble goal: prepare leaders to make decisions with imperfect information, competing priorities, and restrictive constraints. But if the goal is to prepare leaders, shouldn’t we question whether treating every minute as a resource to be optimized is actually good leadership, or just a habit we’ve mistaken for one?

Every semester, founders, CEOs, and leaders of every ilk visit campus. A common question from students goes something along the lines of: "How do you balance everything?" More often than not, the answer—delivered with weary honesty—is: you don't. It can be world-shattering for some students to hear, but it's a bracing corrective to the relentless peddling of the notion that you can and should have it all. Aren't we taught that success is results multiplied by expectations? We might be setting ourselves up to fail. 

But our awakening is short-lived. Our memories, like our attention spans, are fractured. We nod, file it away, and go back to scheduling our next hard stop. Because admitting that optimization is unwinnable would mean confronting the uncomfortable reality that perhaps we've been operating under the wrong premise all along.

This American pathology has its merits. It has powered the ascent of the richest and most ambitious country on earth. But prosperity has its own tab. Loneliness is an official epidemic, with health effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Over half of Americans report feeling lonely. Community participation, religious attendance, and close friendships have all declined for decades. We've built the most productive society in human history, and we're too busy—and too isolated—to enjoy it. At some point, you have to ask whether the price of admission is worth it.

Deferred Maintenance

I struggle with this myself. Prioritizing productivity is always easy to justify. When I’m with my family, it can be tempting to want to slip away and pour myself into some seemingly noble pursuit that, I tell myself, will ultimately benefit them. But relationships are about showing up, and I’ve come to appreciate that deferred maintenance is as catastrophic for people as it is for businesses. Foundations are not laid in a single pour, and no amount of heroics can substitute for the ordinary days you let slide. We keep treating the hard, mundane parts—the ones that actually build something worthwhile—as obstacles to get past rather than the point in and of themselves.

By the time this is published, we'll be about halfway through our last semester as ECs, and then it's back to the real world. As we are put out to pasture, it is worth reminding the RCs of obligatory clichés about how objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. For many of us, this will be the last experience of its kind. When else will we be surrounded by so many people we enjoy, who share our ambitions, and who we already know we won't see enough of in the years ahead?

Coming to HBS confirmed my lifelong suspicion that the true value of an MBA program lies in its people. Not in the transactional, network-building sense, but something more akin to Kant’s categorical imperative. I’d bet (good odds on Polymarket) the moments we’ve spent inhabiting time for its own sake are, in fact, our most cherished memories from this experience. 

Not every hour needs to justify itself. The best ones never do.

Santiago Gil Gallardo (MBA ‘26) is originally from Mexico City. He graduated from Tecnológico de Monterrey with a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Before HBS, he worked in venture capital at IGNIA and investment banking at a boutique firm in Mexico City.