Even in abundance, least-resistance instinct is strictly beneficial when applied to things you need to do, as opposed to things you want to do.

Time is always scarce.

For short term wins you pay with long term losses.

That doesn't need to be zero sum game.

That's not true in general.

In general time management isn't trivial. There's risk management, security, technical debt, incremental degradation, debuggability and who knows what else, we only recently began to understand these things.

True. Still, the idea that short-term gains = long-term losses does not generalize, because it depends on the shape of the reward landscape. In the common, simple case, the short-term wins are steps leading straight to long-term wins. I'd go as far as to say, it's so common that we don't notice or talk about it much.

We also never gain any time from productivity. When sewing machines were invented and the time to make a garment went down 100x, you didn’t work 15 minutes a day.

Instead, those people are actually now much poorer and work much more. What was a respectable job is grunt work, and they’re sweat shop warm bodies.

The gains of their productivity was, predictably, siphoned upwards.