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I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore. —agnes martin, Writings
as it probably does for anyone else who suspects that productivity is not the ultimate measure of the meaning or value of time.
“studies show that people who feel in control of their time are more relaxed, creative and productive.”
Under the grid of the timetable, we each know many other varieties of time: the stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries, physical or emotional.
Indeed, it’s this very awareness of overlapping temporalities that invites a deep suspicion
There is a lonely absurdity in the idea of racing against the clock at the end of time, as evidenced in a headline by the parody site Reductress: “Woman Waiting for Evidence That World Will Still Exist in 2050 Before She Starts Working Toward Goals.”
“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.”
In How We Show Up, Birdsong writes that the American Dream exploits our fears, creating real and imagined scarcity, and she calls for “accessible, celebrated models of what happiness, purpose, connection and love look like” that are different from what we are ordinarily taught.
“Good science can’t be measured by the clock,”
isn’t just about what work is and how it should be measured. It’s also about what an employer buys when they pay you money. For Anderberg, it’s a package deal including not only work but also life minutes, bodily presence, and humiliation.
On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane,
“Time is money. Discover exactly what your employees are up to every minute of the day with all-seeing employee monitoring and complete behavior analytics.”
This uneasy awareness of management exhibits the dual function of workplace surveillance as both a spur and a disciplinary mechanism.
Perhaps this confusion arises because productivity and policing are two sides of the same coin.
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.
“none of us who toil for our daily bread are free.
Wage labor, or “the unfettered ability to sell the self,”
“I object to the constant hurry of everything….Up before day, at the clang of the bell—and out of the mill by the clang of the bell—into the mill, and at work, in obedience to that ding-dong of the bell—just as though we were living machines.”
Who is timing whom? Scientific management was a matter not just of measuring work and increasing productivity but of discipline and control.
one demonstration of the way automation doesn’t so much replace work as reconfigure its content, conditions, and geography.
“The aim is to achieve a laser focus and find ways to work around the limitations of the human body. There isn’t always time to eat, but there are so many innovative ways to fuel your body and mind.”
“Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives,” Oliver Burkeman observes that when employment is insecure, “we must constantly demonstrate our usefulness through frenetic doing.”
This whole time, “he was apparently as motionless as a statue. But was he doing nothing? He was probably doing the hardest work of the week. The man we have just been observing was engaged in active thought.”
Kevin Kruse describes putting a giant poster up in his office with the number 1,440 on it: “I encourage you to try it yourself. Just draw a big ‘1,440’ on a piece of paper and tape it on your office door, under your TV, next to your computer monitor—wherever it will best serve as a constant reminder of the very limited and oh so precious time you have each day.”
Appropriately enough, the modern meaning of bootstrap—to “better oneself by rigorous, unaided effort”—arose
“Success in life is determined by forces outside our control.” The number of people who felt this way was lower in Spain, Britain, France, and Germany (where only 27 percent disagreed). Asked to choose between “freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference” and “state guarantees nobody is in need,” the former won out in the United States 58 percent to 35 percent, with those numbers essentially reversed in the other four countries.
First of all and most basically, some people control other people’s time. 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.”
“The computer chip didn’t free us. It coerced us to produce at its speed.”
Entirely apart from the phenomenon of the “second shift” and women’s frequent role as the “default parent,” multiple studies show that women in the workplace are expected to say no to work less frequently than men are.
“We’re all socialized to believe moms are helpful and dad is watching football.”
Becoming more man-shaped in order not to die in the car was my unwitting description of a Lean In type of feminism, and of time management aimed specifically at women.
Although this avoids the question of why women still do an outsize share of paid and unpaid work, suggesting instead that a woman’s response to this reality should be a better allocation of resources, it’s not an outright cruel book.
The anthropologist Kevin K. Birth has described clocks and calendars, seemingly inert pieces of technology, as “cognitive tools that think for their users,” reproducing “cultural ideas of time” and “structural arrangements of power.”
If time is simply life, then, as Cooper makes clear, the question of “time management” boils down to a question about who controls whose lives.
Han observes that “the positivity of Can is much more efficient than the negativity of Should” and that “the achievement-subject is faster and more productive than the obedience-subject.”
In the meantime, it is worth decoding the advice to “live your best life” as what it sometimes is: an imperative to “live the best life,” in the sense of a high score. What about choosing to just “live a life”?
Other times, I try to have a sense of humor about the American logic of endless expansion, in all its arbitrariness and absurdity, and also the quiet, comical dignity of refusing it.
“It’s just wild to me that everyday [sic] we read headlines about pandemics, climate change, famine, drought, fires, hurricanes, weapons programs and war, and folks at Bloomberg just want us to work through it for $36k a year,” wrote one user.
Work dominates everything around it as a mountain dominates a plain. —Michael Dunlop Young and Tom Schuller, Life After Work
“Happiness can be found in the smallest of things. It is our passion to turn everyday routines into more meaningful moments.”
A study that same year showed that two-fifths of American Millennials chose their travel spots based on their Instagrammability.
Where they get everything they want but they don’t even know what they want or what day it is or where they are or who we are or what the fuck is going on.
This experience further soured the idea of “fun” being sold back to me in a carefully contrived package.
I keep wanting to do something instead of consume the experience of it. But seeking new ways of being, I find only new ways of spending.
In marked contrast to an experience to be consumed or a goal to be met, Pieper’s leisure is something closer to a state of mind or an emotional posture—one that, like falling asleep, can be achieved only by letting go.
also means trying to see the vertical within the horizontal, the free within the unfree, and even peace of mind within a world marked by violence.
“the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos.”
My example of a noncommercial leisure space, a municipal rose garden in Oakland, was supposed to represent an escape from the productive and the commercial to something else—a place where you could be free from care and from work, including the work of self-optimization.
“[in] a public space, ideally, you are a citizen with agency; in a faux public space, you are either a consumer or a threat to the design of the place.”
