Economics
![Jenny Odell - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B07P822NRG.jpg)
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
We are living on the wrong clock, and it is destroying us. The New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing offers us different ways to experience time in this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book.
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 what if you don't have time to spend?
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.
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 what if you don't have time to spend?
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.
Editorial Reviews
"At this pivotal historical moment, when so many of us are struggling with burnout, anxiety about the future, and a gnawing dissatisfaction that things don't have to be like this, in strides Jenny Odell with the exact book that we needed. Odell masterfully dissects the origins of our many destructive beliefs around work, leisure, and self-improvement, while also offering a way for us to be free of them. Saving Time is an exposé of our past, an antidote to our present, and a manifesto for the future. It is rigorous, compassionate, profound, and hopeful. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life."-Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
"I experience Jenny Odell's work as the rarest kind of intervention: It alters you immediately, and then it lasts. She is alive to the bleakest aspects of contemporary existence-the brute-force instrumentalization of our time, our planet, our humanity-and yet finds a way to transubstantiate grief into vision . . . Saving Time is an inimitable gift."-Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
"Odell has gifted us a way to move through this intertidal moment by reclaiming our more intuitive, felt experience of the passage of time. She puts words to our shared disorientation and models a way to navigate a present dominated by its uncertain future. It's a beautiful, clarifying, and surprisingly reassuring literary triumph."-Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock
"Saving Time is about what it means to be on the clock, personally, politically, and existentially. Odell's writing glows. Reading this book is like being in the company of a particularly thoughtful friend: Odell shows you the truths of the structures you inhabit and then, warmly, attempts to protect you from your own nihilism."-Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped
"This important book is a revealing exploration of the forces that keep us locked in a shallow, commodified, and adversarial relationship with time. But it is also a portal to a far richer alternative. To read it is to slip through the bars of our modern temporal prison and experience how freedom might feel."-Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mor...
"I experience Jenny Odell's work as the rarest kind of intervention: It alters you immediately, and then it lasts. She is alive to the bleakest aspects of contemporary existence-the brute-force instrumentalization of our time, our planet, our humanity-and yet finds a way to transubstantiate grief into vision . . . Saving Time is an inimitable gift."-Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
"Odell has gifted us a way to move through this intertidal moment by reclaiming our more intuitive, felt experience of the passage of time. She puts words to our shared disorientation and models a way to navigate a present dominated by its uncertain future. It's a beautiful, clarifying, and surprisingly reassuring literary triumph."-Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock
"Saving Time is about what it means to be on the clock, personally, politically, and existentially. Odell's writing glows. Reading this book is like being in the company of a particularly thoughtful friend: Odell shows you the truths of the structures you inhabit and then, warmly, attempts to protect you from your own nihilism."-Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped
"This important book is a revealing exploration of the forces that keep us locked in a shallow, commodified, and adversarial relationship with time. But it is also a portal to a far richer alternative. To read it is to slip through the bars of our modern temporal prison and experience how freedom might feel."-Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mor...
Readers Top Reviews
Maren M. Kyle
Odell does it again. This is not a quick, light read but neither is it an inaccessible academic tome. I enjoyed the framing of the text as a journey around different "biomes" of the bay area which adds a less dense and needed respite from the well-researched and fact and quote heavy meat of the book. If all of us were moving through our lives with the soft and careful attention of Jenny Odell, the world would be a better place. I received a digital Advanced Reader's Copy of this book for review purposes from the publisher.
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
Whose Time, Whose Money?
The Port of Oakland
Time to me is about life-span and the ageing of individuals against the background of the history of our world, the universe, eternity. -Dominique, a schoolteacher interviewed in Barbara Adam's Timewatch
Moments are the elements of profit. -A nineteenth-century British factory master, quoted in Karl Marx, Capital
We've emerged westward from the Seventh Street tunnel into the Port of Oakland, in a sun-blasted sedan I have had since high school. The clock in this car went dark at some undetermined point long ago, but my phone tells us it's seven a.m., eight minutes after the sunrise.
Ahead is a wide cement expanse punctuated by palm trees and pieces of things: trucks without containers; containers without trucks; chassis, tires, boxes, pallets. All of them lumped together, sometimes stacked, partitioned in ways not immediately legible to us. A landscape of work. As the BART train tracks and their chain-link fence disappear underground, soon to pass beneath the San Francisco Bay, they reveal a different kind of train, double-stacked with containers in serendipitous color combinations: white and gray, hot pink and navy blue, bright red and dark, dusty red. There are a few indications of human bodily concerns: a picnic table painted red, a portable toilet, an empty food stand, and a vinyl ad for chiropractic services.
We pull into Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, which is separated from the SSA Marine terminal by a see-through fence. Just on the other side, the stacks are six containers high, giving the impression of an endless city made of corrugated metal. Farther ahead are the dinosaur-like figures: blue-green straddle carriers and white shipping cranes, some of them sixteen stories tall. A massive ship sits underneath them, having arrived from Shenzhen. But, for now, the equipment is sleeping; the workers are just clocking in.
In July 1998, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) decided to make its researchers start clocking in and out of the lab. They could not have known the backlash this would inspire, not only at the institute but also across the world. Hundreds of scientists wrote in support of the INFN physicists' complaints, saying that the move was needlessly bureaucratic, insulting, and out of step with how the researchers actually worked. "Good science can't be measured by the clock," wrote the former director of the American Institute of Physics. A physics professor from Rochester University surmised that "the US garment industry must be advising the INFN on how to improve productivity." And the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in with cutting sarcasm: "Maybe they will chain you to your desks and benches next, so you do not go out after you come in, or better yet, install brain monitors to make sure you are thinking physics and not other thoughts while you are at your desks."
In a compilation of the letters written in response to the new policy, only a few express ambivalence over the scientists' protest. The most straightforward disagreement comes from Tommy Anderberg, a rare contributor with no listed professional affiliation. Instead, he identifies as a taxpayer and one who is angry about this kvetching by public employees:
Your employers, in this case anyone paying taxes in Italy (the real thing, money derived from earnings realized in the private sector, not the piece of accounting fiction being applied to your own, tax-financed paycheck), have every right to demand that you be at your place of employment at the times stipulated by your contract.
If you don't like your terms of employment, quit.
In fact, I have a great suggestion if you want real freedom. Do what I did: start your own business. Then you'll be able to call your own shots and work when, where and with whatever you feel like.
At its heart, this disagreement-between the working scientists on the one hand and the INFN and Tommy Anderberg on the other-isn't just about what work is and how it should be measured. It's also about what an employer buys when they pay you money. For Anderberg, it's a package deal including not only work but also life minutes, bodily presence, and humiliation.
As attested to by the scientists' wry jokes about factories and being "chained to a desk" (an image that comes up in several of the letters), the concept of clocking in and out comes from an industrial model of work. Probably one of the best illustrations of this model is the beginning of Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film, Modern Ti...
Whose Time, Whose Money?
The Port of Oakland
Time to me is about life-span and the ageing of individuals against the background of the history of our world, the universe, eternity. -Dominique, a schoolteacher interviewed in Barbara Adam's Timewatch
Moments are the elements of profit. -A nineteenth-century British factory master, quoted in Karl Marx, Capital
We've emerged westward from the Seventh Street tunnel into the Port of Oakland, in a sun-blasted sedan I have had since high school. The clock in this car went dark at some undetermined point long ago, but my phone tells us it's seven a.m., eight minutes after the sunrise.
Ahead is a wide cement expanse punctuated by palm trees and pieces of things: trucks without containers; containers without trucks; chassis, tires, boxes, pallets. All of them lumped together, sometimes stacked, partitioned in ways not immediately legible to us. A landscape of work. As the BART train tracks and their chain-link fence disappear underground, soon to pass beneath the San Francisco Bay, they reveal a different kind of train, double-stacked with containers in serendipitous color combinations: white and gray, hot pink and navy blue, bright red and dark, dusty red. There are a few indications of human bodily concerns: a picnic table painted red, a portable toilet, an empty food stand, and a vinyl ad for chiropractic services.
We pull into Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, which is separated from the SSA Marine terminal by a see-through fence. Just on the other side, the stacks are six containers high, giving the impression of an endless city made of corrugated metal. Farther ahead are the dinosaur-like figures: blue-green straddle carriers and white shipping cranes, some of them sixteen stories tall. A massive ship sits underneath them, having arrived from Shenzhen. But, for now, the equipment is sleeping; the workers are just clocking in.
In July 1998, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) decided to make its researchers start clocking in and out of the lab. They could not have known the backlash this would inspire, not only at the institute but also across the world. Hundreds of scientists wrote in support of the INFN physicists' complaints, saying that the move was needlessly bureaucratic, insulting, and out of step with how the researchers actually worked. "Good science can't be measured by the clock," wrote the former director of the American Institute of Physics. A physics professor from Rochester University surmised that "the US garment industry must be advising the INFN on how to improve productivity." And the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in with cutting sarcasm: "Maybe they will chain you to your desks and benches next, so you do not go out after you come in, or better yet, install brain monitors to make sure you are thinking physics and not other thoughts while you are at your desks."
In a compilation of the letters written in response to the new policy, only a few express ambivalence over the scientists' protest. The most straightforward disagreement comes from Tommy Anderberg, a rare contributor with no listed professional affiliation. Instead, he identifies as a taxpayer and one who is angry about this kvetching by public employees:
Your employers, in this case anyone paying taxes in Italy (the real thing, money derived from earnings realized in the private sector, not the piece of accounting fiction being applied to your own, tax-financed paycheck), have every right to demand that you be at your place of employment at the times stipulated by your contract.
If you don't like your terms of employment, quit.
In fact, I have a great suggestion if you want real freedom. Do what I did: start your own business. Then you'll be able to call your own shots and work when, where and with whatever you feel like.
At its heart, this disagreement-between the working scientists on the one hand and the INFN and Tommy Anderberg on the other-isn't just about what work is and how it should be measured. It's also about what an employer buys when they pay you money. For Anderberg, it's a package deal including not only work but also life minutes, bodily presence, and humiliation.
As attested to by the scientists' wry jokes about factories and being "chained to a desk" (an image that comes up in several of the letters), the concept of clocking in and out comes from an industrial model of work. Probably one of the best illustrations of this model is the beginning of Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film, Modern Ti...
