In the digital age, time is precious. Many technological innovations, from faster broadband to instant messaging, promise to make our lives easier and more efficient, saving time for the good stuff. Yet many of us feel more harried than ever. We vacillate between blaming technology for our time pressure and turning to it for the solution.

Our fixation with optimising time recalls The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose eponymous hero arrives on Earth to find a merchant selling sophisticated pills intended to quench one’s thirst: take one each week and the need to drink disappears. “Why are you selling those?” the little prince asks. “Because it saves a lot of time,” replies the merchant. “Experts have worked it all out. You save 53 minutes a week.” “If I had 53 minutes to spend,” says the prince, “I would walk very slowly towards a spring of fresh water.”

Clearly, the desire to save time isn’t new. A long-standing theme in social theory has been the sense that the pace of everyday life is accelerating. As early as 1900, in The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel describes how the speed of the modern metropolis gives rise to a new temporality. For him, the acceleration of city life is intricately bound up with the velocity of the circulation of money. His analysis of modern time-consciousness, as one involving immediacy, simultaneity and presentism, speaks directly to our own sense of living at a rapid pace.

In Social Acceleration, Hartmut Rosa shows how constant connectivity – in a culture that prioritises hyper-productivity, speed and efficiency – does not save time. Just as creating more roads produces more traffic, so answering emails generates endless email traffic. The Silicon Valley gurus who designed these technologies then, without irony, seek temporal refuge by embracing mindfulness, via a new range of marketable apps. Or they go off the grid for the weekend: their Californian libertarian dreams now turnturn the wheels of today’s turbo capitalism.

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants reveals how the campaign to capture and monetise our attention has shaped advertising. There is no precedent for how much time we now spend staring at screens, whether at work, leisure or for everything in between. Wu is right to focus on design: the expertise of the world’s best psychologists is being harnessed to keep us online. No wonder we find these platforms addictive – they are meant to be.

Over the last decade, even economists have recognised that downtime is a significant measure of life satisfaction and wellbeing. As the political philosopher Julie Rose argues in Free Time, discretionary spare time is a basic resource – an all-purpose means to pursue one’s conception of the good, whatever it may be. And if the ability to choose how you allocate your time lies at the core of a positive notion of freedom, then it follows that a just society must guarantee all citizens their fair share of free time.

Rather than read the plethora of self-help guides to time management, it is perhaps more advantageous to understand the pressure to maximise time. Saving time should not be venerated as an end in itself, nor taken as the divine doctrine of technological progress. Instead, as we learn from the little prince, the question should not always be how do we save time, but what do we want to save time for?

• Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism by Judy Wajcman is published by Chicago.