Saving Time

by Jenny Odell

For example, when in the sixteenth century an Italian Jesuit brought mechanical clocks to China—which had a long tradition of astronomical clocks driven by water, but did not organize life or work around anything more numerically specific than calendar dates—they were not embraced. Even in the eighteenth century, a Chinese reference book called Western clocks “simply intricate oddities, destined for the pleasure of the senses,”22 objects that “fulfil[led] no basic needs.”

Historian Giordano Nanni writes that “the project to incorporate the globe within a matrix of hours, minutes, and seconds demands recognition as one of the most significant manifestations of Europe’s universalizing will.”

But unlike the Ancient Greeks,85 who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits. Thus the paradox: The factory is efficient, but it also produces “the drive toward the consumption of the person’s time up to its outermost, physical limit.” Or, as the workplace adage would have it, “The only reward for working faster is more work.”

The hands, after all, endlessly repeat their circuit around the dial, instead of moving into the future.”

For the most part, Asshole is a standard card-shedding game where you can play only certain cards at certain times. This game, however, has a form of generational memory. The winner of the first round becomes the “president,” and the second-place winner the “vice president,” while whoever lost becomes the “asshole,” and the second after them is the “vice asshole.” Before the subsequent round, everyone has to get up and rearrange themselves accordingly around the president. The asshole is tasked with shuffling and dealing. Once the cards are dealt, the asshole then has to take two of their best cards and trade them with whatever two cards the president wants to get rid of; the vice asshole trades one with the vice president. Voilà! A miniature version of structural inequality.fn4

The real torture of this game is that, when you’re the asshole, no one sees the good cards you had to give up or the bad cards you were stuck with. Therefore, no one knows how much your poor performance had to do with the initial exchange and how much with a lack of skill in playing the cards you were dealt. And because the rules of this game are not negotiable, your only option as the asshole is to try desperately to be strategic. You must be the master of your own cards. If we take this game as a metaphor, we can appreciate how much business there is in teaching people to play their cards right in a culture that systematically blocks avenues toward changing the rules. The resulting rhetoric of self-mastery, refashioned for the age of YouTube and Instagram, finds its apex in a group of people I will henceforth refer to as “productivity bros”

Among productivity bros and many others, the Taylorist obsession with routines has morphed into an unhealthy fixation on morning routines.

competition, sales, social media, chaos, and life itself. The freedom that productivity bros offer, however, is not simply a form of work-life balance within the status quo. Both Ballantyne and Dumas are acolytes of Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, which promises freedom from others—and from the necessity of selling your time at all. The idea is that by constructing passive income streams, you free yourself from the constraints of capitalism by recapitulating it within your very person. Books like Ari Meisel’s The Art of Less Doing promise that “modern methods like the 80/20 rule,33 the three D’s, and multi-platform repurposing let you build a high-powered, traditional-style ‘success factory’ that only requires one employee to run.” Further illustrative of the genre is the site Screw the Nine to Five, whose founders share how they’re “making money from our fleet of over 30 online businesses while living overseas.”34 In comparison to those other forms of “screwing the nine to five”—worker organizing, legislation, and mutual aid—the allure of the productivity gospel is supposed to be that you don’t need anyone but yourself to achieve freedom. The problem is that, according to this plan, more freedom requires ever more (self-)mastery, ever-better playing of your cards. Increasingly unable to control any of her surrounding circumstances, the consumer of this kind of self-help risks turning on herself with displaced intensity, surveilling herself with spreadsheets an...

Although time management often responds to the imagined feeling that one “doesn’t have enough hours in the day,” time pressure is not always or solely the outcome of a quantitative lack of time. A feeling of time pressure can result from constantly having to switch tasks or coordinate with external factors.

“individual experiences of time depend upon where people are positioned within a larger economy of temporal worth.” It’s an important clarification, and it reminds me of a Goodreads review of Kate Northrup’s Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Ambitious Women. In that book, one piece of advice is to sync your work schedule with your menstrual cycle (another zeitgeber) in order to exploit differing energy levels throughout the month. Reader Sarah K. observes that this makes sense only for someone with money or control of her own time. “Say I simplify by hiring a housekeeper,”46 she writes. “What do I do when she is in her new moon phase, which should be dedicated to rest and reflection, and cannot clean your house? Better hope it syncs up with your waxing crescent/‘putting in the work’ phase!”

multiple studies show that women in the workplace are expected to say no to work less frequently than men are. For example, one study showed that both men and women47 expect women to offer help and respond to requests for help; in the study, men would wait to volunteer for favors when there were women in the group, but would raise their hand earlier if the group contained only men.

(Car crash dummies are based on so-called average men.)50 She then told me about how, in a group for women engineers, someone had called out the women who were getting promoted for acting like men. “So now these women who have had to do this in order to get ahead are being criticized,” she said. “And I’m like, I get it? I don’t know. I’ve been on both sides.” I nodded, realizing something out loud. “It’s almost like the car seat, but as a metaphor. It’s like you’re trying to make yourself more man-shaped in order to not die in the car.”

Neither is it an empty, suspiciously pyramid-shaped offering like those of the productivity bros, who appear to make videos for people making videos for people making videos.

In that sense, 168 Hours has the same goal as a lot of self-help: It’s targeted at an individual just trying to play her cards better.

Self-help has generally promised to revolutionize your life, not the social or economic hierarchy—and you can’t really blame anyone for not fulfilling a promise they never made. At the same time, even seemingly practical self-help can read as an invitation to find a niche in a brutal world and wait for the storm to pass you over.

The anthropologist Kevin K. Birth has described clocks and calendars, seemingly inert pieces of technology, as “cognitive tools that think for their users,”55 reproducing “cultural idea...

Just as a gridded schedule reproduces the idea of time as fungible units, advice for “becoming more man-shaped to not die in the car” reproduces the life of the wrong-shaped car. It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question “Who will do the low-wage work?” i...

“But this cultural fixation on time control and one’s ability to modulate time, to manage it better, slow it down and speed it up, is antithetical to the collective sense of time necessary for a political understanding of time.” It’s precisely this political understanding of time that would allow one to look outward, imagining different “structural arrangements of power.” This can’t be done alone, and it usually can’t be done in the short term.

saying that a Spanish journalist shared with me, regarding the phenomenon of burnout: “Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?”

“I think a support system has got to be, like, the number one way to help with our time management,” she said, citing informal networks of in-laws and friends.

Only by acknowledging the real contexts in which experiences of time play out can we arrive at a different notion of “time management”—one that doesn’t simply reproduce a cruel game.

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.

More broadly, the “discretion” of discretionary time can be difficult to assess in a culture whose injunction to “adapt or die” can be fearsomely convincing.

And yet Linda’s burnout has to be about something more than work and straightforward economic security, because even those who should be more than comfortable seem curiously apt to wear themselves down.

In The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han suggests something even more general: that “the drive to maximize production inhabits the social unconscious,”71 producing what he calls “the achievement-subject.” Rather than be disciplined by something or someone external to them, achievement-subjects are “entrepreneurs of themselves,”72 DIY bosses propelled from within. Although it answers to no one (else), an achievement-subject nonetheless “wears down in a rat race it runs against itself”73: “The disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom—that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. Excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation.”

Rosa writes that the capitalist “logic of increase”78 infiltrates cultural notions of the good life, meaning that to stand still in the realm not just of work but also of money, health, knowledge, relationships, or fashions, registers as sliding backward or falling down in the social order. I would add that the language of comparison and competition is amplified by social media—a constant scroll through even just friends’ photos is a never-ending tour through “what could be.” Studies have documented the cruel cycle in which people with low self-esteem use social media for expression and connection, only to expose themselves to “upward social comparison information” that in turn restarts the cycle. Out on the feeds, the finish line never stops moving. You have twenty-four hours a day and must spend them in a better—and better, and better, and better—way!

Busy = good. In a study of “conspicuous busyness,”98 the sociologist Michelle Shir-Wise finds that irrespective of work-life balance, busyness can become a lifelong performance of productivity, where “not presenting oneself as [busy] may be construed as evidence of an inadequate and unworthy self” (or, as Macfadden might have had it, “not a real man nor a complete woman”). We are taught from the beginning that faithfully squeezing the most value out of your twenty-four hours, “steady as time,” is what a good person does; constantly expanding, pursuing opportunities, and getting ahead in every arena of experience is what a good life means. But if work inhabits the social unconscious, it is work according to a historically specific ideal: fast, muscular, unflagging, and white. Recognizing how deeply certain concepts of speed, efficiency, and progress are woven into our culture is yet another way of understanding Brittney Cooper’s argument that “white people own time.”

Where a non-Linda is controlled and surveilled directly by external circumstances, Linda perceives herself to be controlled and surveilled by the cultural “logic of expansion.” If Linda does not participate, she will be judged and have to pay a cost, whether it is social or financial. The difference between the Linda and the precarious person is that the Linda can afford to pay that social cost. The similarity between the Linda and the non-Linda is that her “timer” (the culture of busyness) and the non-Linda’s “timer” (wage labor and structural disadvantage) have common roots. They uphold the same system, one in which time can be only a means for profit and where someone else can appear only as your competition. Therefore, for her sake and everyone else’s, the Linda should consider paying that cost—becoming less man-shaped in order not to fit into the car in which most people, in some way or another, are dying. I’m not suggesting that doing so is in itself any way revolutionary, only that it makes more sense. And it opens the door to an important recognition: not of shared consequences, but of a shared cause.

But if you are truly an achievement-subject who is only wearing yourself down, then I suggest an adjustment of discretion: experimenting with what looks like mediocrity in some parts of your life. Then you might have a moment to wonder why and to whom it seems mediocre. Of course, accepting a life with less of a certain type of ambition is not the same as settling for a life with less meaning. Deciding what can be (supposedly) mediocre entails asking what you want within the limits of your human life, not to mention the fact that it has a limit at all

Another summed up Schrager’s article this way: “Billionaire: ‘Quick, newspaper that I own.105 Write a story about how young people are lazy for realising that they’re just making me even more money while they can barely support themselves, will never own a house, and will need both parents working full time to support a family.’”

Yet another asked, “Why work hard? I don’t own my work.”106

(although, as I’ve mentioned, the boundary is not always clear). A recognition of that relationship—“this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly”—is important for several reasons. Most fundamentally, it opens up the possibility of solidarity, in the genuine sense of sharing a common cause (“this shit”). But it is also a safeguard against the reaction that privileged people sometimes have to their own burnout: fortifying walled gardens of slowness, minimalism, and authenticity. At best, such a reaction makes it easier for people to forsake the world and leave the status quo untouched. At worst, it actually deepens the status quo, creating a scenario in which slowness becomes a product that you buy off the backs of others. Nowhere is the danger of this happening greater than in the realm of leisure.

It’s just that, as the experience economy expands to include commodified notions of things like slowness, community, authenticity, and “nature”—all while income inequality yawns wider and the signs of climate change intensify—I feel the panic of watching possible exits blocked. I keep wanting to do something instead of consume the experience of it. But seeking new ways of being, I find only new ways of spending.

Images and experiences are the leisure time counterpart of time management self-help. The same individual who is encouraged to buy time from others instead of having a mutual support network is also encouraged to consume periodic experiences of slowness instead of acting in ways that might reclaim her time—or help others reclaim theirs. In some senses, this could be considered not just conspicuous consumption, but compensatory consumption,24 where you buy something as a way of coping with a psychological deficit or threat.

For Bergson, time was duration—something creating, developing, and somewhat mysterious, as opposed to abstract and measurable. According to him, all our problems conceiving of the true nature of time stemmed from wanting to imagine discrete moments sitting side by side in space. He further noted that this “space” was not concrete environmental space, but something purely conceptual: Think of that green-on-black grid that sometimes shows up in the virtual nonspace of sci-fi movies, and think of moments in this kind of time as cubes existing in that space. (This conception also provided the grounds for the concept of fungible time I mention in chapters 1 and 2.)

Bergson thought that our predisposition toward thinking of time in these kinds of spatial terms came from our experience manipulating inert matter; we wanted to see time in the same way, as something we could cut up, stack, and move around.fn1

Conceptions of time are deeply related to how and where we see agency, including within ourselves. They matter especially now, when the world calls out not just for action, but also a less human-centric model of who and what is owed respect and justice.

In the introduction to this piece, Perec briefly lists the normal points of interest in Place Saint Sulpice, like the district council building, a police station, and “a church on which Le Vau, Gittard, Oppenord, Servandoni and Chalgrin have all worked.” By virtue of their identifiability, Perec was not interested in these. His intention, he wrote, “was to describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds.” What happens when nothing happens.

Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize34 a city’s daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities).

Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance37 and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how.

To see something in time is to allow that it has a life and to allow that this life entails more than the mechanistic cause-and-effect of a Newtonian world. In this way of thinking, mosses “decide” which rocks to live on, and even rocks have lives.

the co-creation events of our lives do not play out in an external, homogenous time. They are the stuff of time itself. Grasping this fully can be like the moment when you actually have a conversation you’ve rehearsed in your head. Your rehearsal can never be complete because your imagination was missing not only the person you’re talking with, but yourself in each moment—the person changing and responding as the conversation proceeds. When you remember this, the future can cease to look like an abstract horizon toward which your abstract ego plods in its lonely container of a body. Instead, “it,” that irrepressible force that drives this moment into the next, is a thing that is speaking back to you always

Indigenous practices, as much as any other, can speed and suspend—both on the minute level of individual plants and on the scale of entire landscapes and communities. Up until colonization, native tribes in many places used fire to maintain forests and prairies in a certain proportion and condition. In many parts of what is now California, the years after a burn8 would bring increased seed production, tall shoots attracting deer and elk, and plants in a bushy state ideal for basketry, rope, and traps. The flames from periodic burns under oak trees attracted and killed parasitic moths, who lived in the trees’ canopy and jeopardized the food the trees provided. People, plants, animals, fire, land, and culture existed in a shifting co-evolutionary pattern that varied across California and many other places in the world.

Because the area hadn’t been burned, the hazel (a serotinous plant, meaning that it is fire-adapted) was currently producing branches that would be useless for Yurok basket making. On top of that, other unburned brush was encroaching on the hazel, to the extent that animals would not be able to eat the nuts off it and the plant would eventually stop producing. Last, she pointed to a young Douglas fir tree, an ambassador of the forest. “This fir tree is starting to encroach on what is supposed to be an oak woodland savannah,”

“Our landscapes were the way that they were when non-native people arrived because of human intervention …. Native people, they purposefully made it that way to keep things in balance. It’s just like if you have a big yard and you don’t do anything to it. What’s that yard going to look like in five years, in six years, in 10 years? Well, our yard is the forest and we took care of it just the way people take care of their fenced in yards.”

Initial bans on burning—by the Spanish in the eighteenth century12 and the incipient state of California in the nineteenth13—were exercises of colonial power against indigenous tribes, tied up with other laws enabling subjugation, forced labor, and family separation.fn1 Although some frontierspeople learned15 from indigenous tribes and continued burning, the budding U.S. Forest Service16 was promoting a program of fire suppression by the early twentieth century. They saw forests as the nation’s storage shed for wood during a time of exploding economic growth. In this view, land became a mute receptacle of commodities. Fire, along with unregulated logging, appeared only as a threat to those commodities.

“the history of our race may be said to be the history of warfare upon the tree world,”18 trees were not just economically but also culturally valuable, providing a measure of aesthetic attraction that would keep young people from moving to the city. Politically, this meant promoting the idea that all fire19 was dangerous, preventing the publication of studies that suggested otherwise, and dismissively referring to rural burning practices as “Paiute forestry.” 20 The debate over periodic burns versus total suppression was sealed during World War II, when the Forest Service put out propaganda linking fire prevention to the war effort.

UNNECESSARY.”40 This hardheaded mentality arises from the same attitude that insists on total fire suppression. In their study of fire regimes in California and Greece, a group of Greek geographers describe a mindset that could just as easily be applied to boulders, floods, or mountain lions: “The general public perceptions are that forest fires should be controlled and not pose a threat to humans and property,”41 they write. “It is interesting to note that what attracts people to live on the forest margins, that is a sense of living in a ‘natural environment,’ is done under the mystique of eliminating the ‘wild’ from wild lands.” The geographers suggest that what has been lost is a “vernacular” relationship with fire and a dynamic landscape.

“The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies. It is not a means of survival, a setting for our affairs …. It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is our self.”

In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein describes extractivism in terms that may sound familiar by now: “a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth,”51 a “reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own,” and a “reduction of human beings either into labor to be brutally extracted, pushed beyond limits, or, alternatively, into social burden, problems to be locked out at borders and locked away in prisons or reservations.” In other words, abstract people, abstract trees, abstract animals, abstract land; none of them subjects with agency; all of them ready to be mined, squeezed, bracketed, or simply destroyed.