As interaction designers, we design how people spend their time. Judging by the amount of distracted multi-tasking, stress from information overload, and struggle for work-life balance, we're doing a pretty bad job of keeping people in control of their time.
One reason that we suck at designing how people spend their time is that our core ways of representing how people interact with technology, such as user journey maps and flow models, fail to represent how people multi-task. We ignore the context of how people spend their time outside of our user journey and flows.
By ignoring the possibility that people have anything better to do than engage with our products and services, we often distract people instead of focusing their time on the people and interests that matter to them most.
As interaction designers, we need to recognize that our medium is time, and we need to become masters of our medium. We have the power and responsibility to redesign how people spend their time.