Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

without exploring the social and material roots of the idea that “time is money,” we risk entrenching a language about time that is itself part of the problem.

Consider the difference between work-life balance and the notion of leisure outlined by the German-Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in his 1948 book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture. In work, he writes, time is horizontal, a pattern of forward-leaning labor time punctuated by little gaps of rest that simply refresh us for more work. For Pieper, those little gaps are not leisure. True leisure, instead, exists on a “vertical” axis of time, one whose totality cuts through or negates the entire dimension of workaday time, “run[ning] at right angles to work.” If such moments happen to refresh us for work, that is merely secondary. “Leisure does not exist for the sake of work,” Pieper wrote, “however much strength it may give a man to work; the point of leisure is not to be a restorative, a pick-me-up, whether mental or physical; and though it give new strength, mentally and physically, and spiritually too, that is not the point.” Pieper’s distinction strikes an intuitive chord for me, as it probably does for anyone else who suspects that productivity is not the ultimate measure of the meaning or value of time. To imagine a different “point” means also imagining a life, identity, and source of meaning outside the world of work and profit.

the reason most people see time as money is not that they want to, b...

The wage relationship, in turn, reflects those same patterns of empowerment and disempowerment that touch everything else in our lives: Who buys whose time? Whose time is worth how much? Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose, and whose time is considered disposable? These are not individual questions, but cultural, historical ones, and there are few ways to liberate your time or anyone else’s without considering them.

“studies show that people who feel in control of their time are more relaxed, creative and productive.”

As long as slowness is invoked merely to make the machine of capitalism run faster, it risks being a cosmetic fix, another little gap on the horizontal plane of work time.

What first appears to be a wish for more time may turn out to be just one part of a simple, yet vast, desire for autonomy, meaning, and purpose.

As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.

it’s this very awareness of overlapping temporalities that invites a deep suspicion that we are living on the wrong clock.

“the clock can tell me whether I am late for work, [but] it cannot tell me whether it is too late to mitigate runaway climate change.”

the origins of the clock, calendar, and spreadsheet are inseparable from the history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labor time from people.

In Ancient Greek, there are two different words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos, which appears as part of words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like “crisis,” but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or “seizing the time.”

described kairos as qualitative rather than quantitative time, given that, in kairos, all moments are different and that “the right thing happens at the right point.” Because of what it suggests about action and possibility,

kairos is a lifeline, a sliver of the audacity to imagine something different. Hope and desire, after all, can exist only on the differential between today and an undetermined tomorrow.

It is kairos more than chronos that can admit the unpredictability of action, in the sense that Hannah Arendt describes it: “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” In that sense, the issue of time is also inextricable from the issue of free will.

painful experiences of time comes from an inability to recognize or access that fundamental uncertainty that lives at the heart of every single moment, where our agency also lives.

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.

In the experience economy, nature (and everything else) appears devoid of agency, a backdrop to be consumed.

In 1989, Bill McKibben wrote, “I believe that we are at the end of nature.” Then he clarified: “By this I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall, and the sun will still shine. When I say ‘nature,’ I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it.”

At the time, I was learning that whether you see an inert world or an agential one—whether something like Ijen is a pile of stuff or a subject deserving of regard—is an outgrowth of an age-old distinction about who gets to occupy time and who (and what) does not.

Of all the senses of time I will describe in this book, this is the one I most want to “save”: that restlessness and change that runs through all things, making them anew, rending the crust of the present like the molten edges of a lava flow.

“we are so much more than we have been told we are—that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined.”

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster: “Beliefs matter.”

Perhaps this confusion arises because productivity and policing are two sides of the same coin.

Allen C. Bluedorn calls fungible time, meaning that, like currency, it is consistent and can be endlessly subdivided. Measuring fungible time is like envisioning standardized containers that can potentially be filled with work; in fact, there is a strong incentive to fill these units of time with as much work as possible. As opposed to the duration of life or even the processes of the human body, one hour is meant to be indistinguishable from another—decontextualized, depersonalized, and infinitely divisible. In its most dehumanizing form, this view sees individual people as interchangeable, separate repositories of this usable time stuff: as Marx put it, “nothing more than personified labour-time.”

The idea of fungible time as money is so familiar that it’s easy to take for granted. But it combines two things that are not as natural as they’ve come to seem: (1) the measurement of abstract and equal amounts of time like hours and minutes, and (2) the idea of productivity that divides up work into equal intervals. Any system of time reckoning and any measurement of value reflects the needs of its society. In our system of standard time units, grids, and zones, for instance, one can still read the marks of the Christian, capitalist, and imperialist crucibles in which it was formed. Understanding the invention of modern mechanical clocks, the historian David Landes writes, means first asking who needed them.

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.

in the eighteenth century, a Chinese reference book called Western clocks “simply intricate oddities, destined for the pleasure of the senses,” objects that “fulfil[led] no basic needs.”

Observing clock time signaled a supposed domination over the natural world that was similar to other rationalist ideals, like the imposition of an abstract grid onto a decidedly diverse landscape.

A clock hour was meant to be an hour, no matter where or what the season, just as a man-hour would be expected to be an hour, no matter who the man. This was as useful for regulating labor as it was for conquering land.

the colonists were not able to perceive it at all, because the native sense of time and space did not exhibit the same abstraction and independence from natural cues as their own. On a larger scale, they graded native populations as being more or less “progressed” into modernity based on how removed their systems of time seemed from nature—a

Puritanism entered a “marriage of convenience” with capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming “the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men’s minds with the equation, time is money.”

WHEN LOOKING AT the history of how productivity has been measured, it is always illuminating to ask: Who is timing whom? The answer to this question often identifies a person who has purchased someone else’s time or owns it outright—and who, in either case, wants to make the most of it.

A MORE FAMILIAR form of time as money is the wage. But, just like the “tic tic” and “ding ding” in the midst of eternity, the widespread phenomenon of selling one’s time is historically specific and surprisingly recent.

that owners of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, tried to argue that longer hours were actually good for the women. Without the “wholesome discipline of factory life,” the women would be left to their own dangerous whims, “without a warrant that this time will be well employed.”

You must apply yourself industriously, at whatever employment is assigned you; and when your task is finished, it is recommended that your time be devoted to the proper improvement of your mind, either in reading the books provided for the purpose, or in case you cannot read, in learning to do so.”

When the relationship of time to literal money is expressed as a natural fact, it obscures the political relationship between the seller of time and its buyer. This may seem obvious, but if time is money, it is so in a way that’s different for a worker than for an employer. For the worker, time is a certain amount of money—the wage. But the buyer, or employer, hires a worker to create surplus value; this excess is what defines productivity under capitalism. From an employer’s point of view, purchased time could always yield more money.

“The only reward for working faster is more work.”

IT’S WORTH NOTING here that a scrupulous accounting of time is not in itself unique to capitalism. As I’ve mentioned, pre-industrial or pre-colonial societies were and still are imagined to have been inherently leisurely, or even “without time,” in part because they were task oriented—a way of working that follows the contours of different tasks rather than a rigid, abstract schedule. But as the sociologist Michael O’Malley has pointed out, such societies exhibited their own “fierce attention to saving time.” Besides the precision required for agricultural timing, every society makes social determinations about what is worth spending time on, as well as how much.

“metric time first gave us the rule of the seas and oceans, then the colonization of the land; it taught us how to structure our bodies and movements in work and how to rest when the job is done.”

In his history of Luddism, Gavin Mueller gives a useful overview of such reconfigurations, including “Potemkin AI,” Jathan Sadowski’s term for what he calls “services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans somewhere else acting like robots.”

Making up the “human cloud,” those humans can be recruited from anywhere and paid very little for their time.

In a 2019 Verge article about Cognizant, the content moderation company used by Facebook, Casey Newton writes about a very specific timetable on the job: Moderators were required to watch at least fifteen to thirty seconds of each video, which might well contain something unspeakably horrible. Employees were given nine minutes of “wellness” time per day to deal with this trauma.

law professor James Grimmelmann has pointed out, “even humans have a hard time distinguishing between hate speech and a parody of hate speech, and AI is way short of human capabilities.” To

The tragedy of fungible labor time lies first in its historical association with coercion, exploitation, and the imagining of people as machines. Time is the punitive dimension in which the wage worker is both measured and squeezed. But beyond that, an overemphasis on fungible time upholds an impoverished view of what time and labor are in the first place. The industrial view of time as money can see time only as work, the masculinized work of a machine with an On/Off button.

this framework contributes to a view of individuals who hold time like private property—I have my time, and you have yours, and we sell it on the marketplace. Now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labor time; it’s you, too, when you look in the mirror.

when employment is insecure, “we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing.”

According to the Protestant work ethic, you weren’t supposed to get rich in order to spend your money; work and the accumulation of wealth were inherently good, a way to serve God. And if you did manage to get rich, those weren’t your riches to spend; they were God’s, and they signaled your eternal salvation. Rich (but ascetic) was the way to go, the “business” of life a moral affair.