People like Michael Fortino are probably necessary, but it is necessary for him to be so depressing? Probably. He lives in Pittsburgh (which has suffered enough) and runs a consulting firm specializing in “priority time-management training,” a new form of efficiency studies. His slogan should be, “You shall know the truth and it shall make you neurotic.”

He says he has determined that over a lifetime the average American spends seven years in the bathroom, six years eating, five years waiting in lines, four years cleaning house, three years in meetings one year searching for things, eight months opening junk mail, six months sitting at red lights.

Even if not all those numbers describe your life, they are nevertheless cumulatively depressing. They underscore the fact that life is cumulative and we do in fact measure out our lives in coffee spoons of small activities.

Think of something, anything you do for the minor pleasure of it. When you calculate its cumulative cost in time, the pleasure will evaporate. At least it will if you are, as Americans tend to be, determined to streamline your life for enhanced efficiency.

You say that for about 175 days a year you devote 15 minutes a day to reading baseball box scores? You wastrel. Try enjoying the sports pages tomorrow knowing that over 50 years your diversion devours 2,187 hours, or nearly 55 weeks of eight-hour working days.

Let it be said of Fortino that he is as American as mass-produced apple pies and his profession has a facinating pedigree. Its founding father was Fredrick Taylor, pioneer of the “science of shoveling” and other applications of scientific management.

As historian Daniel Boorstin writes, it was not until clocks and watches became common that it became possible to analyze work in small units of time. Mass production made such analysis profitable: Assmebly lines can move only as fast as the slowest task can be performed.

This was one of those perceptions that, years later, look banal. But at the time it was one a blazing insight. It blazed from Taylor, one of those creatively obsessed persons whose mania for efficiency led him to wear loafers in an era of high-button shoes, therby saving Lord knows (and Taylor knew) how many minutes a year.

The exertion of becoming valedictorian of his Exeter class produced him a physical breakdown, for which the doctor prescribed manual labor. Taylor became a machinist and then a revolutionist, reshaping the concept of work.

His method was to break every factory operation down to its elementary components of workers’ movements and then find the most efficient way to perform each. After three years of studying shovels and shovelers at a steel mill, 140 men were doing work previously done by 600 and were being paid 60 percent higher wages.

“Scientific management” became famous in 1910 when Louis Brandeis, representing shippers, convinced the Interstate Commerce Commission to deny some railroads a rate increase because more efficient management of the railroads would produce sufficient profits. The human cost of the passion for efficiency was the reduction of workers from craftsmen to interchangeable parts in a relentless process of the sort Charles Chaplin satirized in “Modern Times.” But this human cost led to a new science.

A long, close study of six women assembling telephones at a Western Electric plant showed that no matter what variable varied, from the organization of the work to the sleep the women got the night before, their productivity improved. Suddenly it dawned on the researchers: Research itself—the show of concern for the workers—was enhancing efficiency. As Boorstin says, the “science of human relations” was born. The quest for efficiency led to a more humane workplace.

Fortino, like Taylor, has a humane vision: efficiency producing time for conversation. Time is money, but the efficiency story has an anti-materialist moral: Use money to buy time, not things. Fortino’s cool numbers radiate a chilling intimation of our morality. Time is the only thing that no one can ever have enough of.