Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

I came to understand moss as the signature of water, both in placement and appearance, as it grew wherever water had collected in the past, but it also answered the rain in real time, expanding and turning greener within minutes of a light shower.

I think the reason most people see time as money is not that they want to, but that they have to.

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. Even when external circumstance or internal compulsion forces you to live entirely on Pieper’s horizontal axis—work and refreshment-for-more-work—it remains possible to harbor desire for the vertical realm, that place for the parts of our selves and our lives that are not for sale.

Even for a very privileged person who is isolated from the effects of climate change, toggling between a Slack window and headlines about a soon-to-be-uninhabitable earth produces, at the very least, a sense of dissonance and, at the very worst, a kind of spiritual nausea and nihilism.

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.

The difference between perceiving chronos and perceiving kairos may begin in the conceptual realm, but it doesn’t end there: It directly affects what seems possible in every moment of your life.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, I witnessed several processes of shedding: on a local webcam, where baby falcons, still mostly gray and fluffy, were growing individual feathers on the very tips of their wings, like fingers; on an Oakland hillside, where I found a snakeskin, its owner having disappeared into the brambles; on my desk in my apartment, where the leading edge of a plant stem peeled itself back to allow a new section to stretch toward the window. There was something difficult and self-defying about these processes of shedding, I thought. And this quality was also mine to claim, given that I, too, had desires to follow, a will to express, and a container to supersede. Tomorrow was growing raw out of the husk of today, and in it, I’d be different. All of us would.

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 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.” An active volcano provides as good an opportunity as any to consider “our place” and what it means to see “Nature” not as an object but as a subject, as something (someone) acting in time. The lava moves, and it’s not because of us.

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.

To speak another language about time, to eke out a space different from the dominant one, you need at least one other person. That speaking can invoke a world, perhaps one less characterized by a cruel, zero-sum game.

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.

In the conclusion of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein writes honestly about her own fear regarding the future and motions toward kairos as it relates to action. She recognizes “upwellings” and “effervescent moment[s]” in which “societies become consumed with the demand for transformational change.” These moments often come as a surprise, even to longtime organizers—the surprise that “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.” She adds that “no one knows when the next such effervescent moment will open.”

In order to wring the most value from this time material, the employer resorts to surveillance and control.

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.

Understanding the invention of modern mechanical clocks, the historian David Landes writes, means first asking who needed them.

Likewise, in the Philippines and Mexico, Spanish colonists would convert natives into Spanish subjects by placing them bajo las campanas (“under the bells”).

to task-oriented communities who organized their activities based on different ecological and cultural cues—such as the flowering or fruiting of a certain plant—and where things took however much time they took. These communities, for whom work was not profit but part of a social economy, did not make the same distinctions between what was called “work time” and “nonwork time.”

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.

the science of recording labor days was inextricable from the project of intensifying them.

In early-nineteenth-century America, which was still largely rural, self-employed people outnumbered wage earners.

When workers did organize, many of them immigrants, cities like Boston and New York followed London’s lead and created formal police forces to suppress the unrest. Leaders of commerce urged northern cities to build armories in urban industrial areas where strikes were imminent. Labor historian Philip Dray writes that although “Americans have come to think of these dour, substantial buildings as historic rallying places for troops in the case of foreign threats to U.S. soil…their original purpose was to allow the rapid deployment of the militia to keep workingmen in check.”

Time discipline was and is a tool used both inside and outside the factory to render a more docile and productive workforce,

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.

In the drive to make time equal more money, the employer has two strategies to pursue: extension (increasing the amount of time that money buys) or intensification (demanding more work in the same amount of time).

But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits.

And even if you’re looking for something very traditionally mechanical, you can find time-saving systems in Catharine Beecher’s 1841 housekeeping bible, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, well predating Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Beecher’s book was largely responsible for the rise of the fitted kitchen, envisioning both a living space and a mode of work that would be designed to reduce the time and effort women spent on housework. Yet the aims of this efficiency were clear: Beecher wasn’t seeking profit but, rather, “economy of labor, economy of money, economy of health, economy of comfort, and good taste.”

Once again, we may ask: Who is timing whom? Scientific management was a matter not just of measuring work and increasing productivity but of discipline and control. As Taylor’s years-long battled showed, workers would have some control over the pace of work as long as they held knowledge about the work process. As much as it was about intensification, Taylorism was also about breaking apart and codifying this process in a way that concentrated knowledge in the hands of employers rather than employees. “Under our system the workman is told minutely just what he is to do and how he is to do it,”

Meanwhile, the relatively few persons for whom special knowledge and training are reserved are freed so far as possible from the obligations of simple labor. In this way a structure is given to all labor processes that at its extremes polarizes those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing.”

That this development merely extended the old relationship between standard time and control has been noted by Dan Thu Nguyen, who observes that “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.”

During World War II, women employed in military intelligence did the tedious and repetitive calculations, which resulted in the term kilogirl. (One kilogirl was “equivalent to roughly a thousand hours of computing labor.”)

“Just one minute per driver over the course of a year adds up to $14.5 million.” But this time is also money in a different way. Data collected through telematics systems like the one used by UPS is also used to prepare the grounds for driverless cars.

Now, not only does increased productivity not lead to free time, but it doesn’t lead to money for American workers. Their time is more money, but for someone else.

If you have reason to—and many do—you can measure anything in a way that seeks to maximize a certain numerical outcome: words of content per day; test score increases and “learning outcomes” per semester; and clients, customers, or patients per hour.

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of a carbon capture company, may have coined the expression “above the API” in a 2015 blog post called “Replacing Middle Management with APIs.” Describing automated processes at Uber (freelance drivers) and 99designs (freelance designers), he gives examples where a line of code is executed by humans: “The Uber API dispatches a human to drive from point A to point B. And the 99designs Tasks API dispatches a human to convert an image into a vector logo (black, white and color). Humans are on the verge of becoming literal cogs in a machine, completely anonymized behind an API.” Reinhardt worries that “as the software layer gets thicker, the gap between Below the API jobs and Above the API jobs widens.”

Particularly in the United States, 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.

After all, as a system for ordering time and increasing profit, Taylorism never restricted itself merely to the workplace; that would have been impossible in a time when, as Taylor put it in The Principles of Scientific Management, “it is to the greater productivity of each individual that the whole country owes its greater prosperity.” It was just one part of an obsession with rationalization, efficiency, and measurement that pervaded American Progressive Era culture at large.

“Have you given as much attention to your personal mental efficiency? Are you laying your mental bricks with eighteen movements or with five?”

In place of the question “How Much TIME do They pay You?” we now get something like “How Much TIME do You pay Yourself?”

If we take this game as a metaphor, we can appreciate how much business there is in teaching people to play their cards right in a culture that systematically blocks avenues toward changing the rules.

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.

A feeling of time pressure can result from constantly having to switch tasks or coordinate with external factors. Here, the German word zeitgeber, which translates roughly to “time giver,” is useful.

There’s a pattern here: With a zeitgeber, someone or something is always giving time to someone else—not in the sense of gifting them minutes and hours, but in the sense of determining their experience of time.

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. For example, one study showed that both men and women expect women to offer help and respond to requests for help; in the study, men would wait to volunteer for favors when there were women in the group, but would raise their hand earlier if the group contained only men.

“It’s almost like the car seat, but as a metaphor. It’s like you’re trying to make yourself more man-shaped in order to not die in the car.”

It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question “Who will do the low-wage work?” is that it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not you. That answer doesn’t feel so good.

Time management illuminates the assumptions of the will-versus-circumstance debate because it takes the individual as the absolute unit and the near future as the time frame, at the expense of the collective good.

“It is an intoxicating concern: how to have a better relationship to time control and technology,” she writes. “But this cultural fixation on time control and one’s ability to modulate time, to manage it better, slow it down and speed it up, is antithetical to the collective sense of time necessary for a political understanding of time.” 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...

If time management is not simply an issue of numerical hours but of some people having more control over their time than others, then the most realistic and expansive version of time management has to be collective: It has to entail a different distribution of power and security. In the realm of policy, that would mean things that seem obviously related to time—for example, subsidized childcare, paid leave, better overtime laws, and “fair workweek laws,” which seek to make part-time employees’ schedules more predictable and to compensate them when they are not. Less obviously related to time—but absolutely relevant to it—are campaigns for a higher minimum wage, a federal jobs guarantee, or universal basic income.[*5]

In a piece on the “time tax” experienced by people dealing with government services, Annie Lowrey observes that poorly run bureaucracy deepens gulfs between the rich and poor, white and Black, sick and healthy. She calls it “a regressive filter undercutting every progressive policy we have.” Lowrey suggests the elimination of hurdles like asset tests and interviews, as well as the use of better tools—for example, well-designed forms easily readable in one’s own language. But she also notes that the history of the time tax has deep, persistent roots in racism, skepticism of bureaucracy, and an old distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.