Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

In her 2019 book, On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, Emily Guendelsberger describes this reality: Working in an Amazon warehouse outside Louisville, Kentucky, I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task. Working at a call center in western North Carolina, I was lectured about how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company and had the minutes I spent in the bathroom tracked in a daily report sent to my supervisor. Working at a McDonald’s in downtown San Francisco, we were underscheduled to the point of a constant, never-ending line of customers—everyone worked at the frantic speed of those in-the-weeds waitresses of my youth all shift, nearly every shift.