Saving Time
Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture
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- 9٫99 US$
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the notion that ‘time is money.’ . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical way of seeing.”—Esquire
“One of the most important books I’ve read in my life.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit
In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But how can we reclaim our time?
In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
This dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological cues, and geological timescales—that can bring within reach a more humane, responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding; the stretchy quality of waiting and desire; the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory; the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy; the time it takes to heal from injuries. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.
Saving Time tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it, imagining a world not centered on work, the office clock, or the profit motive. If we can “save” time by imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside these things, time might also save us.
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Odell follows up How to Do Nothing with an electric call to reject the quantitative view of time in favor of a more expansive, less linear understanding that fosters interpersonal connection and social and ecological justice. Arguing that "an overemphasis on fungible time upholds an impoverished view of what time and labor are," Odell finds the historical origins of this perspective in the Protestant work ethic and scientific time management principles promoted at the turn of the 20th century, which have evolved into technologies intended to speed up and surveil workers. She criticizes market-based and individualist solutions to the shared problem of limited time, arguing that collective, policy-based approaches are needed to target structural injustices that fuel burnout and disempowerment. Instead of "hoarding" time, Odell advises, one should "garden" it by creating relationships of mutual aid and understanding and fostering meaningful connections and experiences. Heady sections on "recover the contingencies of the past and the present" are interleaved with lyrical observations about natural and man-made environments in San Francisco's Bay Area. Throughout, Odell encourages readers to resist "declinism," which forecloses action by taking a terrible future for granted, and fully inhabit the present as the moment between past and future where change can happen. This is a moving and provocative game changer.
