A hundred years ago, doing the washing took the whole day. Heating water, manually scrubbing, wringing clothes out with a mangle. No one needed to go to the gym, it was a full work out! But by the 1960s the invention of the washing machine had cut that down to just an hour or two a week.

So women in the 1960s had way more free time than their grandmothers, right?

Wrong. The washing machine did not reduce the work; it just raised the standards.

A researcher called Ruth Schwartz Cowan looked into this question and found something that we should worry about when we’re thinking about how AI is going to give us our time back. In the 1960s, women spent roughly the same number of hours on housework as women in 1900, sometimes more!

Once you could wash clothes in an hour, then the expectation was that your clothes would be much cleaner and washed more frequently. Once irons were invented, instead of just ironing your best clothes, all your clothes were expected to be ironed. (Please note, I don’t follow this particular rule myself.)

Once you had a washing machine, saying, “I don’t have enough time to wear clean clothes” was no longer an acceptable excuse, and the technology, instead of giving us back time, just ended up allowing us to achieve more in the same time, or sometimes more hours.

I call this the Washing Machine Theory, and once you’ve noticed it, it’s everywhere. A bit like lovesongs after a bad breakup.

It’s not just washing machines. Let’s look at email. It was meant to save us from all the letters, the posting, the envelopes, the memos, the faxes. And yes, it does, but instead of spending an hour or two on correspondence each week, we spend hours each day expected to respond instantly and to be constantly checking our inbox for new messages.

AI can turn one blog post into 15 pieces of social content in 10 to 15 seconds. And that’s great, except now everyone is expected to post 15 times a week instead of once a week.

Don’t get me wrong, these tools are genuinely amazing. I love them. This is not about whether these tools are great; it’s more about how we manage the free time that it gives us and us being mindful of how we use it.

If your answer is, “I fill my free time with more work,” then you haven’t really saved any time at all. You’ve just found a more efficient way of doing more work, often for less reward.

And this is what happened to those women 60 years ago. Nobody sat down and thought, “Oh, let’s get a washing machine and then do double the amount of washing.” It just kind of crept up on us. One raised expectation after another until working harder and having machinery suddenly became necessary.

So what can we do about it? This is where I probably differ from other AI trainers. Most people stop at, “Isn’t this amazing?”and leave you to sort the rest out for yourself. Not me.I want to build a community of people who mindfully use AI to improve the quality of their lives. (I haven’t quite worked out how this works but posts like this are part of the thinking)

AI uses resources. And I feel that it’s our responsibility to make sure that we use those resources in a way that delivers meaningful results and genuinely improves the quality of our lives.

So next time you’re using AI to save time, whether that’s an hour on a report, or 20 minutes on an email, or writing a whole blog post that would have taken you a day or two, do this instead.

Write down how much time you think you saved, and then decide what you’re going to do with it. Maybe you’re going to go for a walk. Maybe you’re going to finish work early. Whatever “Live Better” looks like for you, that’s what I want AI to help you achieve. If you don’t make these decisions, someone else will decide for you, usually without even meaning to.

And the slightly higher expectations will creep in, and before you know it, you’ll be working double hard and saving no time at all.

That’s the whole point of Sorted. Work smarter, live better.

Not work smarter, work harder, do more. The washing machine is the thing that I keep coming back to and I’m inviting you to put your hand up and be part of the washing machine theory movement where we refuse to just work harder because we’ve got better tech.

There is no doubt that AI can save you time. Whether you get to keep it is entirely up to you.