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.

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.

This is, of course, Marxism

What I find in chronos is not comfort but dread and nihilism, a form of time that bears down on me, on others, relentlessly.

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

it’s not just busyness that’s considered good—it’s a specific image of industry, the result of a long romance among morality, self-improvement, and capitalist business principles.

each individual has an equal “supply” of these fungible hours to exploit is still the bedrock of mainstream time management.

While slavery has been (officially) abolished, it’s still the case that the majority of people “rent their time to employers simply in order to survive.”

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.

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.

To some extent, you can trace part of it to the increasing “flexibility” of work. If you don’t know what’s coming down the line, preparing for the future becomes an infinite task.

The hustle means different things to different people. 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.

Choose what to suck at

“Why work hard? I don’t own my work.”

Work dominates everything around it as a mountain dominates a plain.

that leisure involves a fundamentally different attitude toward time than the one found in the world of work.

This is hard to fathom in practice

leisure cannot follow automatically from circumstances.

If the concept of leisure has any utility, for me it has to be this: an interruption, an apprehension, a glimpse both of the truth and of something completely different from what we normally see.

Oh, wow, I’m a living human in this moment in time. And wow, even with all the bullshit, I’m actually deeply grateful to be alive.

Look again at the pebbles. Make no mistake: They are neither signs nor symbols of time. No—they really are two things at once: seafloor from the last ice age, and future sand.

“we all want to grab more resources, Europeans just did it better than everyone else”—came to vindicate capitalism, white supremacy, and imperial expansion. The West invented Man and projected Him onto the past as natural and timeless, rather than historical and cultural.

The story of Enlightenment Man teaches me an all-too-common truth: that the people who stand to gain the most from determinism (in others) are typically the people doing the determining.

Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better; abolition was moral, a question of who was a subject. Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object.

I remember telling two close friends, at a dinner right before the Covid-19 pandemic, that I thought I might be depressed. The way I talked about it, you’d think it was a broken limb, a nutrient deficiency, or even a personal failing, and not the heartbreak of a person existing in a world.

“It’s actually okay to be on a spectrum of reality. It means that there are times when it’s juicier, there are times when it’s drier, there’s times when I’m gonna be tired, there’s times when I’m going to have a lot of energy. It’s actually part of being alive. It is being alive.”

Maybe “the point” isn’t to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.

Yes

bell hooks: “Reduced to the machinery of bodily physical labor, black people learned to appear before whites as though they were zombies, cultivating the habit of casting the gaze downward so as not to appear uppity. To look directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality. Safety resided in the pretense of invisibility.”

I find a live self who is always questioning, always “trying to get it together,” always writing toward a future and refiguring the past.

Worth remembering for journalling

Realizing that I cannot be everything is in one sense incredibly freeing: It means I am not responsible for being everything. Yet the fact that life ends, for anyone who enjoys being alive and in the world, is also inherently sorrowful.

See also: 4000 Weeks

It is one thing to die into a dead world and, metaphorically speaking, leave one’s bones to bleach on a desert lit only by a dying star. It is another thing to die into the actual world, which seethes with life, with agency other than our own, and, at the very least, with endless possibility.

**

when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.”

If I am an event, when did I start?