Time

Time is money, but it is also time.

Try as they might, corporations have not managed to make their employees work more than 24 hours a day. Time remains, despite all attempts to cajole or bribe or put it on payroll, a fairly immutable law of reality and one of the most precious resources in Megacorpolis. The more time you have, the more stuff you can do, and the more stuff you can do, the more money you can make!
Despite how valuable it is, there are few ways to really acquire more of it. At best, the value of each unit of time can be increased by increasing efficiency or mandating shorter and shorter bathroom breaks. Worse, time remains irreversible and lacks any sort of roll-back feature. Sloppy programming if you ask the Corps. It just goes on, never to return, in a horribly inefficient manner. Nor can it be invested, cast any sort of dividends, or anything really.

What is time?

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future.
It is also what we're running out of for this next delivery.

Time is a deadline looming near. Time is a contest between corporations, to see who can beat the other to release the next product or killer app. Time is, well, time. Seconds, minutes, hours, and days Planck units. All tick by with no regard for the planning meticulously laid out by project managers. If it were an employee, it'd be laid off. Time helps the public forget about corporate mishaps, failed products, or build excitement for the next (product or mishap). It is required for stocks to go up or down, for explosives to go off, and for all manner of other things the Corps would like to see happen.
Despite its many benefits, having too much of it can be detrimental to your health - both physical and financial. Project teams with more time than tasks are at increased risk for conditions such as:

• Being Laid Off
• Reorganization
• Task Overcompensation
• Reduced access to interns

Furthermore, the more free time managers, project leads, and CEOs have, the higher their likelihood of making drastic changes to projects or corporate structures just to pass the time and feel productive. Such measures, almost inevitably, prove to be a waste of time.
For employees, time is either their worst enemy (when they are stuck at work, watching the seconds tick by) or their best friend. Calling it "free" time might be a stretch since Megacorpolis has a way to extract money for every minute you spend in it, though. It's a... "time"... for hobbies, for rest and recovery, for that sense of impending dread as it inexorably draws you closer to doing it all over and over again the next day.

by Midjourney

by Midjourney

by Midjourney

It's often believed by the workforce that the megacorps want to take all their time away and would seal them in the office for eternity if they could. Not true! They already could do that if they wanted to, for one thing, but 'free time' is an essential consumer good. People require at least some measure of it to go out and buy products and services, the lifeblood of every corporation. A fine balance must be struck between giving consumers enough free time from work to go out there and buy buy buy and not so much that the schedule for the next release is in jeopardy.

Making The Most Of It

Time management is the organization of tasks or events by first estimating how much time a task requires and when it must be completed and adjusting events that would interfere with its completion so it is done in the appropriate amount of time. Calendars and day planners are common examples of time management tools.

— Corpopedia

Since more time can't be created (yet), corporations have instead focused their efforts on making the most out of every second they have. This generally means reducing how much of it goes to waste by frivolous, non-profit-generating activities and increasing how much productivity each unit of time can generate. In a paradox that no corporate entity seems to have predicted, implementing these on a daily basis often takes more time than they save.
Employees and consumers also look to maximize their free time, away from whatever daily misery they call their job. Time-saving and time management are big business in Megacorpolis, proving once again that time is, in fact, money.

by Midjourney

Corporate Time-Optimizing Measures

Be the Master of Minutes, Be the Victor of Ventures!

— TimeCo Inc

24/7 Work Rotations

Megacorpolis is a city that never sleeps because doing so is a waste of valuable production time. By rotating workers after every shift, there's never any downtime. Offices buzz with life at all hours of the day, and consumers are thus available for stores and services at every hour, too!

Performance Enhancing Cybernetics

The flesh is weak; that much is true. Many corporations will subtly or not so subtly encourage employees to acquire cybernetics that will help them do their work to a greater degree of efficiency. Some even demand it and will helpfully garnish wages to pay for the cybernetics in question.

Productivity Monitoring

Bio-monitoring implants or external sensors track the physical and emotional state of employees. Some models are designed to provide encouragement through gentle electrical shocks or injections of stimulants when a performance indicative value drops too low.

Predictive Productivity Algorithm

These bad boys are office or even company-wise algorithm that monitors everything and everyone to learn about work patterns. These sorts of algorithms try to determine what task teams or individuals might excel in, what their optimal work periods are, and even matchmake team members.

These sort of tracking measures also keep an eye on how an employee spends time they ought to be spending on work and will automatically warn them if they spend too long talking, thinking, going to the bathroom, eating, or looking at something.

Stimulants

Drugs! They're not just for athletes anymore. A whole new world of more-or-less effective psychotropic or nootropic drugs can help employees perform far above their norm. The most common is Java. Worrying about long-term consequences is for losers who're not passionate enough about the modern workplace.

Sleep Reduction Treatment

Equally popular among corporations who want people to work more and people who want to do more things when they aren't working, SRT helps people sleep less but recover just as well.
For long-term consequences, see Stimulants.

Meetings

The first, second, and fifth step of any time-saving management technique is to have meetings about how best to save time. Invite everyone, no matter how tangential their involvement. This often leads to Reorganizations, the nuclear option of time management.

Creating Time

Nothing is impossible. Impossible just means we haven't tried hard enough yet.

— TimeCo Inc

Despite all of that (certainly not because of them), there never seems like there's enough time. Every day in Megacorpolis, there's a deadline missed or delivery delayed. To fix this sad state of affairs, several Megacorps have developed their own branches of temporal research and development. The most successful player in the field is TimeCo Inc, originally formed not for time travel but to combat the memetic infohazard known as Mondays. With their success in that field, they're now branching out into fields of time dilation and manipulation to see what they can do to make every second last longer. So far, they've produced tremendous results... In terms of eye-catching, news-generating publicity stunts. So far, no time machine.
They also run the Ever-Monday Research Facility, so you know they're going to be just great.