Delegated Time Work: How Professionals Use Generative AI to Reshape Temporal Experience

This article examines how professionals who use generative AI in their daily work reshape their temporal experience. Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews with experienced AI users and developers in Romania, and building on Flaherty’s concept of “time work”, it introduces the notion of delegated time work: a form of temporal agency in which individuals transfer part of the time-shaping effort to an AI tool while retaining judgment over the temporal structure of activity. The results show clear support for delegated time work in three dimensions of temporal experience: duration, sequence, and allocation. Evidence for frequency, timing, and taking time is limited: delegation succeeds in the dimensions professionals control individually and fails in those governed by shared institutional rhythms. Delegation also generates its own temporal costs through learning and verification overheads, unevenly distributed between developers and users. Drawing on the “time capital” framework of Matei and Preda, the analysis traces three outcomes of the freed time: accumulation as a personal resource, conversion into professional or economic capital, and absorption by rising expectations, leaving workers faster but not freer. In Romania’s dependent market economy, market exposure shapes who keeps the time that AI frees.