Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

Further illustrative of the genre is the site Screw the Nine to Five, whose founders share how they’re “making money from our fleet of over 30 online businesses while living overseas.” In comparison to those other forms of “screwing the nine to five”—worker organizing, legislation, and mutual aid—the allure of the productivity gospel is supposed to be that you don’t need anyone but yourself to achieve freedom. The problem is that, according to this plan, more freedom requires ever more (self-)mastery, ever-better playing of your cards. Increasingly unable to control any of her surrounding circumstances, the consumer of this kind of self-help risks turning on herself with displaced intensity, surveilling herself with spreadsheets and averages, docking points, and meting out punishment in a secularized space of “confession and rebuke.” This approach perfectly fits the neoliberal worldview of total competition. Not only will you not find help among others, but everyone else becomes your opponent while you jealously guard and “supercharge” the time you possess. Whether you wring enough value out of it is on you.