Time is our most precious resource, and yet, we squander it daily. This is not just about efficiency or a better return on taxpayer dollars — it’s about our humanity. How we value and leverage time reflects how we prioritize ourselves as a society or organization. The cost of wasted time is one we can no longer afford.
We live in an age defined by the exponential acceleration of knowledge and demands on our time. In 2020, 64.2 zettabytes of data were generated globally. That figure is expected to more than double within four years. This is not just a technological shift — it is a revolution. In the past, an entire fleet might have generated the same amount of quality surveillance data in a year that a single drone now collects in an hour.
The Exponential Age is not merely knocking on our door — it is knocking us to our knees. It has fundamentally altered our relationship with time. The pace of change requires us to move our traditional calendar-based mindset to a stopwatch mentality. The supply of time remains fixed, and every minute wasted is a minute lost forever.
Time wasted also impacts our humanity, sense of anxiety, pride in our work, and well-being. There are not enough minutes in the day, so our decision paradigm becomes more stressful. We are confronted with a type of “betrayal conundrum” — the tension between knowing how we should spend time accomplishing the mission we believe in — on the one hand, and how we are required to spend it, on the other. This tension has caused a split in my own sense of self and identity. It puts me in an unwinnable situation. I know what the priority is, but I am also required to spend my time on things I know are less important, leaving me feeling guilty, frustrated, and disillusioned. As the chief information officer of the primary scientific research and development center for the Department of the Air Force & Space Force, I experience the time-toil dichotomy daily — and so do many others.
Many of my customers are scientists and researchers. They know their most valuable moments are doing research. Each new “request for information,” new tracking system introduced, form to fill, extra clicks, and data entered forces them to spend their time on something that isn’t what we hired them for. They have an incredible job of future-proofing our national security. They believe passionately in the mission and that anything else is a distraction. They are right.
The Enemy Within: Toil
Toil is more than a nuisance. As I wrote about in the Texas National Security Review, toil is sabotage. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services developed a field guide for undermining enemy productivity. Many of its recommended tactics, such as insisting on unnecessary meetings and creating endless forms, have ironically become the norm for many modern workplaces, particularly within the U.S. government. Gratuitous bureaucracy has defined American institutions, sapping their efficiency and the morale of the people who operate them.
Indeed, the toil problem is especially acute in government. Millions of public servants work tirelessly, driven by conviction in the purpose and importance of the mission. However, belief in the mission is not enough to overcome the obstacle of unnecessary bureaucracy. Toil drains purpose faster than the mission can replenish it. In one instance, a military service asked me to examine its culture and define what made it less innovative than big tech company cultures. Toil impacts the most innovative people the most, so I specifically interviewed members who had chosen to leave the force to understand the reason for their decision. The service members reported their sense of purpose had plummeted — from nine out of 10 when they started in the force to two out of 10 when they chose to leave. The culprit was not a lack of motivation or skill — it was toil.
The servicemembers wanted to innovate, to try new coding approaches and new AI tools, but were blocked by bureaucracy. They wanted to move quickly but were bogged down by the process. They wanted to focus on the mission but were distracted by endless administrative tasks. As with me, the time-toil dichotomy created a gap in how they saw themselves. With a purpose-driven workforce, spending time on pointless tasks chips away at their sense of self. They don’t respect the toil-driven tasks like filling out forms for system access when they must use a card to log into a system that already identifies them, and spending time doing it instead of what they know matters erodes their sense of self, their leadership, and their mission.
The Cost of Leadership Failures
Leaders often unwittingly contribute to the problem. I know this because it has been my signature at the bottom of a memo directing a toil-driven task, my meetings, and my processes that have contributed to buttressing the unnecessary bureaucracy in organizations in which I have served. Early in my career, when my work, opinions, and approaches were formalized into the processes in our organization, it made me feel important. After all, making the rules is a form of validation and power over others. But as I started to participate in “toil tours” — hands-on experiences where I had to navigate the steps and requirements of the processes on my own without help — I started to wilt — and understand: While a single form, a five-minute meeting, or an extra checklist might seem inconsequential to a senior leader, these small demands accumulate into a crushing weight for teams already stretched thin.
As leaders rise in rank, we become increasingly insulated from the daily grind of our teams. We no longer experience the full burden of the policies and processes we create or allow to continue. This disconnection enables inefficiencies to proliferate, turning workplaces into time-toil traps. This isn’t about demonizing a current process, system, or approach — most elements of sabotage originate for a reason — but it is also perfectly valid to ask, “Does this still need to be done at all, or in this way?”
In the Department of Defense, what if we required “impact math?” In other words, leaders had to know, and supervisors had to sign off and approve any new toil added, or were required to take an element of toil away.
I put a challenge out today: Calculate the toil!
Take all the things we require someone to do, all the time, all the lists, the forms, the trainings, and then stack them against the actual value of the risk they mitigate.
There will always be someone who does something wrong, who messes up, but the auto-response to have to train hundreds, thousands, even millions of people on that one thing — because one person messed up — might not be worth it.
A Culture of Risk Aversion
Toil is often a symptom of a deeper issue: an organizational aversion to taking risk. When trust is replaced with paperwork, the mission and its people suffer. In an era of constant change, leaders put their people in an unwinnable position, demanding they move fast while simultaneously burying them in layer upon layer of departmental approvals and redundant processes.
Over a recent weekend, I calculated where I spent my time at work. Between emails, meetings, training requirements, and administrative tasks, my weekly workload exceeded 60 hours before I even began to focus on strategic priorities, which is the actual expertise I was hired for. This isn’t unique to me. It’s the reality for countless professionals, many of whom are burning out under the burden of tasks that do nothing to advance the mission. If you don’t believe me, then do the math on your own workload. Then, ask the toil question: “Why do we do this?”
If the answer to your question is that a current, time-intensive task resulted from an incident that happened a decade ago, the likelihood that risk mitigation is still relevantly optimized, considering today’s technology and mission, is very low. You might still think it is worth doing or even legally required, but it might very well be done in one click on a pop-up versus eight clicks and two separate forms.
Then, ask yourself the critical questions:
“Would we do this in war?”
“Would we do this when every second counts?”
If the answer is no, then there is a strong likelihood that the task, process, requirement, or activity is toil, or is at least ripe to be reconsidered.
When I left the private sector and returned to the government, I had to complete four different four-day manager and other training courses. Shockingly, this accounted for almost 7 percent of my year. Most of my time was taken up by dense PowerPoint slides being read aloud virtually by a presenter, which was wasteful and ineffective.
Leaders should stop asking, “Has this person been trained in a particular skill?” That is a play-it-safe and one-size-fits-all approach to knowledge. Instead, they should ask: “What knowledge can they exercise?” Personally, I do not excel at retaining information presented in large group settings. What you really want someone to be able to do is recognize sensitive circumstances and issues when they arise and know where and who to go to for help. If leadership accounted for the possibility that new hires might already exhibit the knowledge, skills, and attributes needed, it could reduce a four-day training course to a two-hour module. You could then use an AI chatbot or curated tool to make the larger knowledge set easily accessible to those who need additional help or resources.
The Way Forward
Solving the time-toil problem requires a shift in mindset. Leaders should prioritize empathy for their teams and respect for their time. Efficiency is not about adding more tools or processes. It’s about eliminating what no longer serves the mission. At the Air Force Research Laboratory, we introduced a “kill bonus” to reward employees for identifying processes or tasks that could be eliminated. I look at everything with a “minus two” mentality, meaning how can I take two steps out of this? This approach acknowledges a simple truth: Stopping unnecessary work is as valuable — if not more so — than starting new initiatives.
The government celebrates those who navigate the bureaucracy to launch new programs, but it rarely recognizes the heroism of those who dismantle outdated systems. Yet, in an age where time is as critical as any advanced weapon or capability, the ability and courage to eliminate waste is nothing short of a strategic necessity.
A Call to Action
The irony of toil is that it tends to disappear in a crisis. When faced with an emergency, all the unnecessary steps and processes are swept aside. This begs the question: If they are not essential in a moment of crisis, why are they considered essential at all?
National security is not just about defeating external adversaries. It is about confronting internal inefficiencies head-on. Every minute wasted on unnecessary tasks is a minute stolen from the mission. We should treat time with the same urgency and care as we would any critical resource.
The Exponential Age demands leaders who trust their teams, streamline their organizations, and ruthlessly protect time. The future of our national security depends on it.
Alexis Bonnell is the chief information officer and director of the Digital Capabilities Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory and a proud public servant. The views expressed in this essay are those of the author and not those of the Air Force Research Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government, but she’s doing her best to inspire others to choose solutions and be brave enough to tackle the toil and get minutes back on mission.
Image: Airman 1st Class Whitney Gillespie via DVIDs.
Jesus Christ is King
