Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

This phenomenon, in which one adapts her temporal rhythms to those of something or someone else, is called entrainment, and it often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability. How much someone’s time is valued is not measured simply by a wage, but by who does what kind of work and whose temporality has to line up with whose, whether that means rushing or waiting or both. Keeping this field in sight is all the more important amid exhortations to “slow down” for which one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.

“Beliefs matter.”

we can choose to believe that time is the site of unpredictability and potential rather than inevitability and helplessness.