Can AI help foster time affluence in business schools?

With time poverty an increasing issue for many business school staff, how can we reclaim time affluence in a sector built on time scarcity? Dr Alison Lawman and Dr Christina Phillips ask if AI the magic time buster.

Time poverty

At a time when financial challenges dominate discourse in the higher education sector, academics are quietly grappling with a different but equally pressing issue: time poverty. This is particularly salient in Business Schools, where quarterly business cycles clash with the longer, more fluid timelines of academic research and discovery.

The concept of time poverty dates back nearly 50 years to Clair Vickery, who defined it as the experience of competing demands on limited time. More recently, it has evolved to include our ability to engage in activities that enhance wellbeing, arguably the crux of the problem. For many academics, the perception of insufficient time to meet the demands of their role is overwhelming.

Time poverty has come under growing scrutiny due to its organisational and individual impacts. Despite this, there remains no consensus on how to define or measure it. Terms like time constraints, time scarcity, time poverty, and even time famine are used interchangeably, obscuring important nuances.

While the challenge of having too much to do in too little time is not new, it is the psychological - and at times physical - impact that warrants attention. The sense of pressure is not just about tasks, but about conflicting expectations: what must be done, what should be done, and what one feels ought to be done to a standard that satisfies personal and institutional values.

This mismatch between external expectations and internal standards often leads to overextension. Faculty are frequently expected to deliver high student survey scores, produce research, contribute to institutional strategy, and participate in public engagement. Time allocation models, tend to assume equal effort across these responsibilities. They rarely account for the invisible labour of preparing additional sessions, supporting resit students, mentoring those with complex needs, or navigating the growing burden of academic administration.

Externally facing activities, those that raise both academic and institutional profiles, are similarly under-recognised. These include writing for public platforms, contributing to national working groups, or running outreach initiatives. While encouraged, they are rarely reflected in time models, leading to workloads that quietly exceed what is accounted for.

Academics are increasingly pulled in multiple directions, often without the opportunity to reset between tasks. This fragmentation leads to what researchers describe as "attention residue" -where one’s focus remains tethered to the previous task, undermining performance in the current one. The result is a state of being constantly busy but rarely present.

Assessing time poverty

The emotional and physical effects are real. Studies have linked time pressure to stress symptoms, including fatigue, headaches, and burnout. Emotional exhaustion is widespread. In one UK study, half of the respondents reported symptoms of depression, and two-thirds were considering leaving academia. Some research evidence even suggests that time poverty affects our focus on the future and knowledge sharing, both key attributes in academia.

We need to think more structurally about the roots of this issue. One area of focus is how workload models are developed and applied. While they aim for fairness, they often overlook qualitative aspects of academic work, like the time it takes to do a task well, or the emotional labour involved in teaching and pastoral care. Observational time studies could provide valuable insight, but must be designed to avoid burdening already stretched staff. Capturing all aspects of academic work is essential to fully inform load planning.

Perceptions of time poverty are not uniform. Research suggests that personality, neurodivergence, gender, and caregiving responsibilities all affect how individuals experience time demands. Knowledge workers, in particular, face unique pressures due to the tension between scheduled tasks and the creative, unstructured time needed for deep thinking.

This is especially relevant in academia. As Ylijoki and Mäntylä observed, academics navigate different types of time: scheduled, contract, personal, and timeless. The last, timeless time, is essential for high-quality research and writing. Yet, Faculty often find themselves "stealing time" from evenings and weekends to protect it. Unfortunately, this is still the case some two decades after this research first highlighted the issue.

In the world of knowledge work, timeless time is fragile. It is threatened by constant deadlines, performance tracking, and the expectation of availability. As O’Carroll writes, the creative process requires fuzzy, intangible time, but this doesn’t sit easily within structured institutional norms where workers have both temporal autonomy and scheduled tasks.

Reclaiming time affluence

So how can we reclaim time affluence in a sector built on time scarcity?

Leadership plays a key role. Ashley Whillans advocates for time-aware leadership: making time a visible resource, rewarding its effective use, and modelling healthier boundaries. In academia, this could mean recognising deep thinking as legitimate work, not a luxury. Berg and Seeber’s The Slow Professor adds to this by calling for cultural shifts that value reflection, collegiality, and the ability to engage fully with one’s discipline. We need to schedule timeless time without needing to steal personal time. Acknowledging this phenomenon as a problem requiring solutions is an important first step. There is evidence that happier, time-aware academics make better teachers with better outcomes. When we are able to achieve ‘flow’ in our work we can better enthuse others and facilitate improved learning and synthesis of knowledge for our students.

We can build on this with practical interventions: encouraging academic reading groups, protecting non-teaching days for research, and making time-use an explicit part of conversations about workload. Rather than wellbeing sessions that place the onus on individuals, we need collaborative approaches that address structures and expectations.

Is AI the magic time buster?

This brings us to AI. Much has been made of its potential to increase academic productivity. But experience shows it’s more about augmentation than acceleration. AI can speed up some tasks, like generating draft questions or summarising texts, but using it well requires time, judgment, and careful oversight to ensure the output can be trusted.

In teaching, AI tools can help with content generation or standard items like multiple-choice questions. But they raise concerns around quality, integrity, and pedagogy. Students must still be taught to question sources and engage critically; something that takes time and deliberate practice.

In research, AI can support the legwork, synthesising literature, formatting references, but not the insight. Creative thought, synthesis, and meaningful contribution, the human attributes that AI can’t replace, require timeless time. What AI can do is help free time from repetitive tasks, if we invest in learning how to use it well, something that in itself adds to the time burden!

With the use of AI, there is perhaps the danger of echoing some of the poorer academic practices, particularly within publishing, such as overproduction or researching to publish without a motivating curiosity. It has advantages but certainly is not a silver bullet.

Ultimately, we need to resist the idea that faster is always better. Time affluence: having the space to think, connect, and create, is a shared responsibility. It's something we build through thoughtful leadership, supportive structures, and a culture that recognises the value of deep work. If we want to reclaim academic time, we have to stop measuring success only by output and start asking whether we are making time for the work that matters most.

References

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Goodin, R.E. et al. (2005) ‘The time-pressure illusion: Discretionary time vs. free time’, Social Indicators Research, 73(1), pp. 43–70. doi:10.1007/s11205-004-4642-9.

Maggie Berg and Seeber, B.K. (2016) The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Available at: World Of Books (Accessed: 20 May 2025).

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Whillans, A. (2021) ‘the Start of Time Smart Leadership’, Leader to Leader, 2021(99), pp. 64–69. doi:10.1002/ltl.20548.

Ylijoki, O.H. and Mäntylä, H. (2003) ‘Conflicting Time Perspectives in Academic Work’, Time & Society, 12(1), pp. 55–78. doi:10.1177/0961463X03012001364.

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Li, Z., Li, N. and Sun, X. (2025) ‘Time poverty inhibits employees’ knowledge sharing by suppressing their future orientation’, Knowledge Management Research and Practice, 00(00), pp. 1–15. doi:10.1080/14778238.2025.2488883.