Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

It was a short step from seeing people as the embodiment of work to turning the units of time they spent working into money. While the systematic management of other people’s time is often associated with Taylorism, the roots of modern management can readily be found on West Indian and southern U.S. plantations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Caitlin Rosenthal surveys the bookkeeping practices of these plantations and finds an uncomfortable analogy with more contemporary business strategies: “Though modern practices are rarely compared to slaveholders’ calculations, many planters in the American South and the West Indies shared our obsession with data. They sought to determine how much labor their slaves could perform in a given amount of time, and they pushed them to achieve that maximum.” Plantation owners were some of the earliest users of what we would now call spreadsheets, producing preprinted work logs and conducting labor-timing experiments similar to the ones Taylor would become famous for many decades later.

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. In the lengthy meantime, I’m reminded of a saying that a Spanish journalist shared with me, regarding the phenomenon of burnout: “Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?”