Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

With his concept of “discretionary time,”66 Goodin makes a similar distinction between the Lindas and the non-Lindas, so to speak. Like discretionary spending, discretionary time is that which, strictly speaking, you don’t have to use for something. You just choose to do so, for whatever reason. This idea allows us to distinguish between someone who truly has no free time and (for example) an ambitious person who voluntarily works long hours according to personal notions of necessity, only to wish she had more time. Goodin finds that some people, especially childless dual-earner couples, harbor a “time pressure illusion.” These are people who, strictly speaking, have lots of free time—it’s just that, according to their discretion, they don’t see it as free.