A mother drops her son off at school, joins the ring road and is stuck in traffic for forty minutes. A seventy-year-old man calls to book a cardiology appointment and is told that the earliest available slot is in seven months’ time. A young woman waits at the counter of a government office for a document which, with a simpler system, would take five minutes rather than a whole morning.

These are everyday scenes, which take place every day in every Italian city, and it is from here – not from a theory – that a new concept of politics should emerge. A society is not rich merely because it produces more quickly: it is rich when it allows people to use their time for what makes life worth living. That is why I am proposing a new indicator, ‘Time Restored to Life’: every reform, every public investment, every law should also be assessed by asking a simple question: how many hours of life does it restore to citizens?

We measure GDP, productivity and growth. We measure almost everything that can be expressed as an economic indicator. But we almost never measure the time that the state causes people to lose or gives them back. And yet it is one of the most political questions there is.

The illusion of permanence

The first mistake is to believe that the value of time is the same as its duration. An hour spent with a loved one is not the same as an hour wasted in a waiting room; an afternoon with a child is not the same as an afternoon stuck in traffic. The years we live do matter, of course, but how we live them matters even more: a longer life is not automatically a better life, because duration without quality risks becoming mere existence. It is the quality of time that transforms existence into a story.

The time we have been given back must once again belong to us

Here, the issue also takes on an anthropological dimension. Michel Foucault taught us to look closely at the mechanisms through which societies organise the behaviour of individuals: power does not act merely by imposing prohibitions, but permeates our habits, expectations and the criteria by which we judge ourselves. His reflections on surveillance and self-care leave us with a question that remains relevant today: how much of what we do is truly the result of our own choice, and how much is the result of a system that organises our time, our attention, and even our desires?

In the digital age, this question becomes all the more pressing. We have tools that can save us time, but we live in a society that tends to fill every spare moment with new notifications, demands, consumption and requests. The risk is not merely that of wasting time: it is that of no longer possessing it within ourselves.

This is why a time policy cannot be limited to reducing queues or speeding up procedures. It must restore to the individual the ability to use their time as they see fit, distinguishing between quantitative time (the hours saved), qualitative time (the hours devoted to family, care, relationships and the community) and inner time (the opportunity to pause, reflect and make choices without being constantly driven by external pressures). True freedom does not lie in having infinite possibilities, but in having enough time to choose the ones that matter. Time is the first concrete form of freedom.

This is not an isolated insight. It is the very same principle that Pope Francis places at the heart of *Evangelii Gaudium*, when he writes that time takes precedence over space: this means not becoming obsessed with immediate results, setting processes in motion rather than occupying spaces, and valuing the journey more than the possession of the moment. Translated into policy terms, this is precisely what ‘Restored Quality of Life’ proposes to the State: to opt for long-term processes that restore quality to people’s lives, rather than merely chasing after the management of day-to-day emergencies.

A new indicator: Restored Life Expectancy

Policy is almost always measured in terms of budget figures: allocated resources, infrastructure projects completed, procedures finalised. I propose adding to these the ‘Time Returned to Citizens’: the number of hours that the State returns to citizens each year by reducing waiting times, simplifying procedures, improving mobility, setting maximum time limits for essential services and publishing the results transparently.

This is not some accounting utopia. The Ministry of Health already measures compliance with waiting list times via the national platform: in May 2026, only 11.6 per cent of the population lived in a region where the legally prescribed waiting times were being met. It is a striking figure, but it also demonstrates something fundamental: public time can be measured. The same principle can be extended to public administration, transport, permits and administrative justice: to all services where inefficiency translates into hours taken away from people’s lives. An Italian worker takes, on average, around forty-five minutes to get to work: nearly thirty hours a month spent travelling, the equivalent of four working days. If we can measure the CO₂ produced by a region, we can also measure the time that region takes away from its citizens’ lives.

In practical terms, how would it work? The indicator would need to be constructed by broad service areas (healthcare, transport, bureaucracy, civil justice), cross-referencing the data that public authorities already collect with annual targets set by law and published in a report, region by region, which is comparable over time. We do not need a new ministry: what is needed is the political will to consolidate this data – currently scattered across different bodies – into a single figure that citizens can understand and governments cannot ignore.

And this is where the way we assess public policy changes. An economic balance sheet can improve whilst people’s expectations keep rising: all it takes is to spend more wisely elsewhere, and the result remains positive on paper. A ‘hours-based’ budget, on the other hand, reveals what economic statistics conceal: if waiting lists grow, the ‘Time of Life Restored’ decreases; if a procedure is reduced from three months to three days, something tangible is given back to people. There are no accounting tricks capable of concealing this reality. It is a measure that finally makes visible those who remain invisible today: those who are waiting.

A subsidiary policy of the time

Behind every statistic lie real lives: the separated father juggling shifts that clash with the time he is due to spend with his children; the daughter who uses up her holiday and time off to take a parent to a medical appointment. These are genuine needs that a policy on working hours must learn to recognise.

What is needed here is more subsidiarity, not more bureaucracy. The state must not take the place of the family, the community or the third sector: it must create the conditions for them to fulfil their roles. This means supporting mutual aid networks between families, time banks, neighbourhood associations, parishes and third-sector organisations which, every day, identify needs that the state recognises too late. It means providing genuine flexible working arrangements for those caring for a family member or balancing parenthood with work. After all, ‘Time Reclaimed’ does not merely measure the hours saved whilst queuing: it also measures the opportunity not to have to face life’s most difficult moments alone.

Giving people more time does not mean working less

There is a misconception that needs to be cleared up: a policy on working time is not necessarily a policy against work or productivity. Quite the contrary. In the UK, between 2022 and 2023, over sixty companies trialled a four-day working week for six months whilst maintaining the same level of pay: voluntary resignations fell by 57 per cent, absences due to stress by 65 per cent, and turnover remained stable or increased. Ninety-one per cent of companies continued with the new model even after the trial period. The point is not simply to work less: it is to work better and live better.

Technology can help in this regard: artificial intelligence, automation and digitalisation can free up millions of hours from repetitive tasks and unnecessary procedures. But here we must ask a crucial question: if technology gives us back an hour, who decides what that hour is for? If the time freed up is immediately filled with new tasks, notifications, targets and consumption, we have not restored freedom: we have merely increased the speed of the system. Technology should serve humankind, not turn people into more efficient machines.

A policy of care

To talk about time is to talk about family, birth rates, health, work and community. Caring takes time. Friendship takes time. Even democracy takes time: the time needed to listen, to engage in dialogue and to participate. A society that leaves people with no time ultimately prevents them from looking after one another.

Human beings are not merely producers, consumers or a collection of data: they are people capable of forming relationships, acting selflessly, taking responsibility and showing care. This is why time cannot be regarded solely as an economic variable: it is a human space. It is within time that the most important events of our lives take place: a relationship begins, a child grows up, we look after a parent, we educate someone, we listen, we forgive. None of these actions necessarily contributes to GDP. Yet it is precisely these actions that build a society.

True progress

For too long we have confused progress with speed: doing more things, producing faster, responding more quickly, always being connected. But perhaps true progress is something else entirely: it is having more choice about what is worth spending one’s time on. An advanced society is not one where everything moves faster: it is one where people still have time to pause and appreciate the things they love.

Proposing ‘Restored Life Time’ means changing the question we use to judge politics. Not just: how much does a reform cost? Not just: what does it achieve? But also: how much time does it restore? And, more fundamentally: what does that restored time enable people to become?

Because if time is the raw material of our existence, to take it away needlessly is to take away life. Giving it back means restoring freedom. And a political movement that wishes to regain people’s trust should have the courage to start right here: not with the promise of giving people more things, but with the far more radical promise of giving them back a part of their lives.

Because, ultimately, the crucial question is not simply how long we live. It is: what we have had time to live for.