Here's a puzzle. The less time everything takes to do, the less of it I seem to have. Since everything's getting quicker, I fear I'll soon have no time left at all.

Here's a puzzle. The less time everything takes to do, the less of it I seem to have. Since everything's getting quicker, I fear I'll soon have no time left at all.

All sorts of things are speeding up. Yesterday, the long-awaited west coast train line works were completed, knocking half an hour off the trip between Glasgow and London.

A few days before, Virgin announced that they were introducing super-fast broadband at 50 megabits per second (Mbps), more than twice as fast as the current maximum. To put that in context, you'll soon be able to send more information across the internet in one second than I could store on my first computer.

If things take less time to do than they used to, we should be left with more of it. Instead, "time poverty" has become one of the defining terms of our age. Why? One clue is suggested by a book written by the economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865, called The Coal Question. Jevons described a paradox that would come to bear his name: as technology increases the efficiency with which a resource can be used, total consumption of that resource often increases nonetheless . To give an example of supreme contemporary importance, increased energy efficiency actually tends to lead to more energy being used.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but the main explanation is quite straightforward. Increased efficiency makes it cheaper to use a resource, and more productive to do so. For example, when batteries were expensive and didn't last long, you didn't use them unless you had to. Now that they're cheap and long-lasting, all sorts of things are powered by them, which means we use more battery power overall than we otherwise would.

Something like Jevons's paradox also applies to the resource of time. Time-saving devices open up opportunities for us to do things that weren't previously possible. As a result, there are more opportunities to fill time productively, and we understandably take advantage of more of them.

For instance, when journeys are long, it doesn't make sense to travel unless you really have to. When they become shorter, we travel more, and so end up feeling busier.

Think about the way in which the natural gaps in our days are now filled by instant messaging, e-mails and mobile phones. Always-on IT means we are never off: even in coffee breaks, people get out their mobiles and send texts.

It is this capacity for us to cram more in to each hour that makes us feel time-poor, even if we do not in fact have any less spare time than we used to. A century ago, the average working week was 50 hours. Apart from a temporary reverse in the 1980s, the trend has been downwards ever since, with 37 hours the current average for full-time workers. The feeling that we have less time is therefore something of an illusion. We simply spend time more intensely, and so end up feeling spent.

But it arguably goes deeper than just being exhausted by a 24/7 society.

In 1994, Jean Baudrillard wrote something that, typically, sounded absurdly pretentious at the time, but rather prescient now: "The acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges - economic, political and sexual - has propelled us to escape velocity', with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history."

Strip away the Gallic verbosity and you are left with the idea that we now move so swiftly from one thing to another that we have lost the thread that binds it together and fixes it to reality. You can't construct a coherent life narrative out of text messages and YouTube clips alone. The accelerating world has given us a life with many more episodes, but much less plot.

The thief of time is therefore not procrastination, but its opposite. A world in which we never have to wait is one in which we are constantly being sucked into the present, with nothing left to link us with the past or future. The accelerating world multiplies moments but divides the lifetimes within which they take place. As a result, it feels as though we have less time, even as we have apparently gained it.