Efficiency was supposed to give us time, and Keynes expected a fifteen-hour week. For a while it worked; and then we got busy again. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen described how the wealthy signalled status by not having to work. Today, research suggests, busyness has become the signal instead; a good part of the time we did gain seems to have gone into passive entertainment, not into the pastimes we had in mind. I think of this when I watch the people walking past our house at breakfast: a growing number absorbed in a phone, only a few who seem to actually be in the moment and fully aware of their surroundings, and a gardening crew that moves through our neighborhood in a very different pace. At a student summer job, I had finished a task assigned to me before the first coffee break. I wasn't supposed to finish until after lunch; the regular crew had a pace, and without knowing it I had broken a social contract. Efficiency and productivity were valued in a very different way. This piece is about the pace of things, busyness as a status symbol, and the time we gained but never quite spent. It’s not an argument for moving slower, or for stopping improvement. It is a question about what we call progress when we only measure the pace we keep, and about the work few value until it stops.