I consider myself lucky to get my hands on Jenny Odell’s Saving Time. Odell is the author of one of my favorite books, How to Do Nothing, and when I heard she was working on a new book, I was more than a little excited. Technically, Saving Time doesn’t come out until March, but I was able to get a digital review copy. Like her previous book, Saving Time is a book to be savored, as it bounces between research and observations on the different ways we view and experience time. I’ll admit that I didn’t find this book as earth-shattering as How to Do Nothing, likely because it seems that Odell and I have similar reading tastes – I had read a number of the books she sites in Saving Time. But I’d still emphatically recommend this book, and I look forward to reading it again when it’s published and I can get my hands on a physical copy.

Big thanks to Random House and Netgalley for sharing this advanced copy of Jenny Odell’s revolutionary book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. While I acknowledge that the COVID pandemic and social distancing were truly awful experiences where we regularly witnessed illness and death in an unprecedented scale daily and were sometimes subject to horrid hording behaviors stoked by fears of access to daily products and goods as well as the uncertainty of the time, there were some elements of social distancing that I really enjoyed and appreciated. I really appreciated being able to spend more time with my children, who were 6 and 3 at the time. While working days and nights, I was often missing from school drop-offs and bedtimes and all the playtime in between. Weekends were often spent on other chores and taking the kids to various activities, so we also didn’t have much time to go to parks or take hikes around our neighborhood like we did when my kids were infants and toddlers. However, the social distancing (plus the need to get my kids out of the house) allowed a kind of slowing down where we were able to take trips to state parks around our area and explore creeks and other forested areas nearby. My kids got so used to visiting a creek in walking distance to our house that they named a snake they discovered and looked for it each time we visited the creek, sometimes more than once a day. Jenny Odell’s book starts off with a kind of similar observation about time during the pandemic and how the near stoppage of work time (or its disruption) allowed her to focus on natural developments and growth near her home. I could immediately relate to Odell’s observations, although I didn’t have plants or cacti in my house, I remember how my kids and I charted time and change at the creek, noting different ducks and how the plants flowered during the springtime. I also ended up spending more and more time in my home office, working from home in a converted attic room. This was always my space in the house—I moved most of my books and my record collection along with my stereo and record player to this room. However, when I was able to work in the office, I loved revisiting my records, especially some of the classical albums I neglected. I also loved the view and breeze that arrived from the 3rd floor in April and May. There was a tree nearby, and the room was filled with different birdsongs. While I don’t necessarily want to revisit the pandemic lockdown, I do appreciate that it allowed me some time to slow down, spend more time with family, and really closely analyze the growth and development, the changes happening around me.


When I initially requested this book for review, I was kind of expecting something of a self-help or primer about adjusting work habits or developing more self-care. I wasn’t expecting the kind of clarion call and critical analysis that Odell engages her readers. However, I was so appreciative of her stance in challenging popular notions about the hustle culture that pervades our economy and current times. Nevertheless, I needed to readjust my mindset to consider the critical approach and close analysis that Odell engages in throughout the book. I was not really familiar with Odell’s artwork, but from her writing, I can tell that she draws from a wide range of disciplines as each chapter regularly cites biology, sociology, economics, art, and psychology, among other disciplines. One of the more powerful chapters frames its analysis in disability studies, examining how our kind of western economic conceptions of time often fail to be inclusive and do not consider the experiences of those with physical or cognitive differences. Odell cites a parent and disability studies scholar whose experience raising a son with a disability challenged her conceptions of time and education, and helped her realize that learning is and can be an enjoyable experience that lacks the kind of stress or pressure to train and develop skills to be employable. Rather, she saw the joy and engagement that her son experienced in working with others and recognized that this was important. There were many other powerful experiences that Odell cites about people who maybe live outside of the clock—I’m struggling to come up with a term since she regularly cited the condescending and colonial-imperialist idea about indigenous people living “outside of time”, when really there concepts of time were not market driven. It was both enlightening and sad to learn that others like Native Americans and African Americans were often subject to a new concept of time, and frequently criticized when they failed to readjust their ideas and concepts of time to servile duties, and that these characterizations have often persisted despite being thrust upon these groups. Odell makes convincing arguments using the experiences of these marginalized groups why we should reconsider our conceptions of time, often slowing down or taking more time to explore the world on our own. Not only does her argument include being more inclusive, but she is also critical of the kind of hustler-striver culture that social media reinforces. The early chapters that are critical of this kind of concept of time that requires workers (and influencers) to always be on and reachable by email or other methods reminded me of some of Jia Tolentino’s criticisms in Trick Mirror, especially in the chapter that deals with the ideal woman. In fact, Odell thanks Tolentino in the acknowledgement section in the end, and their valid criticisms of how both technology and social media have disrupted our sense of time (and ourselves) are in synch. Odell, like Tolentino, sees that we often get less from social media than it takes from us, and for Odell, this means we lose more than just our time; we lose more of our ability to look closely at the world around us. It alters our perceptions and many times our enjoyment of the world. It almost seems like social media warps our sense of the world around us, and we frequently will look to objects, experiences, and people around us as to what will drive more engagement and clicks on our posts. Odell presents important ideas and reconsiderations of time throughout the book, but this one of the more interesting and topical arguments she makes.
Odell intersperses her arguments with personal narrative and images she has collected. It seems like each narrative focuses on a journey she’s taken somewhere around the bay area, where she lives. In one chapter, it looks like she is outside the Meta campus, exploring the natural area around, but also recognizing how the buildings and development of Silicon Valley have altered the natural beauty of the environment. In another chapter, she describes a shipyard and the vast shipping containers that both contain many of the items we depend on for our lives on a daily basis, but also serve as impediments to the fauna around the port of the bay area. It was interesting to see how these animals have somewhat adapted to the presence of all of these large metal containers. The last chapter has her in a Columbarium, which I found out was a building that holds the urns of the cremated. I loved how this was the last section, and it sounded like a really interesting concept—that the urns were often shaped like books that would never open. It seemed like a kind of memento mori, but also an idea about the ways that our concepts of time have been set for us from birth (at least if we are born in western capitalistic systems). Yet living within this system for all of our life, it really doesn’t seem to matter much in the end.

Odell’s book has really challenged the way I think about time, not only how I spend my time, but also what I value in my life and what I value for my children’s time. There’s been other instances of Odell’s arguments about time—especially thinking about Cathy Davidson’s “Project Classroom Makeover”, and how US schools have largely have operated under the same system for the past 120 years (if not longer). Much of our education system is based on the factory model, and reminding us of why we have separate classes and bells to signal when to be in what place. Schools operate under these behavioristic principles to train students to be workers, not really thinkers. It’s great that Odell, as an interdisciplinary artist, is able to take these fragments and pieces from so many different sources and bring them together to challenge this dominant way of thinking. I can tell that she is a teacher, beyond her references to her classes and the challenges of assessing art work, Odell uses the stories and examples from different disciplines to not only highlight elements of her argument, but also to appeal to different groups of people, helping them recognize the broader application of this challenge to economic time keeping. I also loved that she referenced the two different types of time in Greek—the Chronos and the Kairos. She uses these two words to emphasize the difference in considering time and to make the argument that we’ve gotten too far away from the Kairos, the consideration of the right time or the critical moment for action and are too focused on the chronological concept of time as a sequential unfolding of experiences. Although I recognize that this book may be challenging and somewhat controversial to some, I am going to recommend it to others. This was the kind of book that upon finishing, I wanted to tell my wife and others close to me about it, to recommend it, and to discuss it further. I would love to see how teaching one of these chapters might work for undergraduate students, helping to challenge their concepts of time and how we spend our time and what we value. I don’t think that Odell takes a kind of all-on-nothing stance, as she recognizes that this kind of dominant system of time is not going away. Rather, I really appreciated her consideration of alternate and more natural ways of telling time that seem to be more in synch with nature and the surrounding world. Plus, it allows us to stop and consider our relationships with our environment, not treating everything as something to use or gain, but rather as something to appreciate and share.

Sadly, this did not live up to my hype. 50 pages worth of notes, bibliography etc, and still it seems just like a bunch of thrown-together quotes. I did not enjoy reading this—maybe I'll try the German version instead to see if translation fixes it a bit :)

Jenny Odell's critical acuity and practical yet optimistic vision is charming and also carries the potential to excite action. Reading this alongside "How to do Nothing" is a terrific pairing, and a coherent vision becomes articulated in broader ways than either text accomplishes on its own. I really appreciate Odell's argument as well as her style of writing, and I hope others get the chance not only to read this book but to exhibit its advice in their everyday lives.

SAVING TIME by Jenny Odell is a critical examination of the ways in which we experience and spend time, in the vein of her prior book, HOW TO DO NOTHING. Like the previous effort, SAVING TIME places personal observation in dialogue with philosophers, drawing on a rich cultural tradition of self-examination.

There is a lot to like in SAVING TIME - in today's brisk hustle culture, it's worth a critical examination of why it is that we do what we do. The beginning of the book really shines in highlighting the historical legacy of timekeeping at work and at home, and how it is embedded with the history of slavery and the rise of industrial labor. Multiple examples help demonstrate the ways in which our "objective" sense of time is historically contingent, and I thought the exploration of different cultures' definitions of seasons helped drive home the ways in which our modern structures of time are artificial inventions.

However, I thought that the rest of the book didn't cohere quite as well as HOW TO DO NOTHING did. The interplay of cultural commentary and personal observations didn't come together quite as neatly as the prior book (which was intrinsically about close observation of our world), and it felt like I was reading two separate books rather than one unifying whole, at times. The writing is beautiful throughout, but I found myself skimming more aggressively through some sections.

Overall, I'd recommend this book, particularly the first third, to those looking for a different way to understand how to spend their time in the world, one that challenges conventional notions of "productivity" to consider how we should spend our time doing what matters most to us in the world, and how to exist in harmony with the world around us. I do look forward to seeing what other work Jenny Odell will produce in the future.

While I found parts of this to be very interesting, the pacing dragged for me. I'm still very interested in reading Odell's first book and it's clear she's a talented writer.

Another important text on how to better engage with the world and be present, Not to dwell on all the other nagging mc naggers stuff that coopts space in my mind.

Thank to NetGalley and Random House for providing me access to this book for review purposes. I liked Odell's previous work but this one seems a bit cobbled together. There is a lot of good ideas in here but they do not really cohere as a book-length project

I love Jenny Odell’s first book and her second didn’t disappoint. There was a lot of information to process and sometimes it felt overwhelming to get through. It will definitely be a book that I come back to.

I found this as a different way to think about time and productivity and how time controls our lives. It was interesting to learn about how the clock and time were created and the difference between created time measurement vs how seasons and time naturally occur. It did feel a little tedius at times and seemed to drag on. I did enjoy this different take on time management.

Banger alert that I very much recommend that the recently jobless like myself dig into lol. Jenny Odell is one of the smartest and well-spoken writers that we have and I will devour anything she writes.

If you're interested in how capitalism drove society to be heavily reliant on the clock, and to at least attempt to control members of society down to the minute, then this is the book for you. Jenny Odell covers the history of clocks driving society - of doing things because the clock says it is time, and the push to get the greatest benefit for the least cost out of employees - in great detail, with a great many examples along the way. The examples, however, are so numerous and wide ranging that they often detract from the content of each rather long chapter; the time frame referred to in the history is largely ignored in the examples, which are predominately modern, and following how each example relates to the history being presented can sometimes be rather difficult.

There is a lot of good information here, but it can be hard to separate the information from the examples, to follow the timelines of the history, and it can be difficult to keep track of the main idea of each chapter, which is well-presented with quotes at the beginning of each one, further complicated by Odell's travelogues about her trip through the Bay Area. I'm sure there are people for whom this presentation method will be quite fascinating; I'm simply not one of them. If you enjoy this style of parenthetical writing - and many do - then you will find this volume fascinating.

This book is a trip, kind of intense and extraordinarily thought-provoking. First of all, it wasn't at all what I was expecting - although to be fair, I didn't pay close enough attention when I requested it. This book is essentially about the philosophy and politics of time. It took me a long time to get through it because it was my stop-reading-fiction-at-bedtime book but also because it was a lot to process. It broke my brain a few times if I'm honest.

The book takes inspiration and reference from hundreds of different sources, curating a collection of ideas related to time and using that collection to come to new, deeper and more personal conclusions.

This is not a book about time management! The author makes it clear that how one experiences time is not just about your mindset and approach but as much about privilege and the structural forces that make access to true leisure much more difficult for many people. It very effectively depicts the reality of how much time robbery comes with racism and other types of oppression and made me think more about how marginalization impacts people's control over their time.

All that to say, overall, this book worked for me, even though there were times it borders on pretentious and times I had trouble following the content because the it felt abstract to me. It worked well for me to read it in bits and pieces. I often shared passages with others and it sparked new ideas and conversations for me.

The themes and ideas that really stood out for me included: vertical vs horizontal time (and the idea of finding awe in horizontal time), wondering how we could get to a more collectivist view of time, managing feelings of nihilism with the reality of climate change, the ways that capitalism and colonialism have impacted how we experience time (and punished oppressed people for not conforming to that), the link between the drive for efficiency and productivity, and eugenics and abelism. It also reinforced my feelings about the need for prison abolition, and the need to understand and reverse the way some people are exploited to conduct more than their fair share of emotional labour.

What I'll be taking away from this book is the reminder that it's can be a revolutionary act to slow down, reflect and make choices about how I spend my time, and to use my privilege to support others to do the same.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book. I absolutely loved How to Do Nothing, and was excited to read Odell's latest book. It did not disappoint. I love the way she meanders through topics and philosophical queries, while continuing to weave in the thread of the main concept about time. Her writing reminds me a lot of one of my other favorites, Rebecca Solnit. Highly recommend if you want to think deeply.

I love Jenny Odell! Her books are so unique. They’re like curio cabinets of all kinds of interesting and challenging ideas. She’s always exactly of the moment and there’s so much more to explore in her bibliographies after you finish.

This book was the peg for a longread in Zoomer magazine this spring, about timely books on how to spend one's precious time. (link attached)

A central point of Saving Time, in my view, is that we can't improve the world by improving ourselves. We need to look outward.

And Odell looks all over, turning to her experiences, to philosophers, writers, and theorists, and the arc of time as it plays out in nature. She looks at leisure, and the spaces that are outside of working time. She ponders the conception of time across ages and cultures, among trees and moss and mushrooms, and in non-western configurations. She considers the clicking clock of climate crisis, and also our own mortality. She considers what it is to exist in the here and now and how time and place converge.

As a result of all of this searching, Saving Time is deeply insightful, resonant, and full of wisdom, about the time in which we are living and the conception of time in general. In my favorite part of the book, Odell makes a compelling argument for viewing time as beans--something that can be used and given, but also planted, propagated and renewed--as something other than a commodity.

I love to think of time as a thing we can garden and I think this is what Odell is saying again and again. We don’t need optimization. We need to realize our own aliveness and acknowledge the aliveness of others. We need to work towards policy change. We don’t need a habit stacking strategy, we need to meet our neighbors, to grow to know them, and then to meal train with them and find ways to pool our resources so that our time is more equitable and balanced, so more people have a chance to truly live.

For this message, this is a book worth reading and passing along to everyone you know.

"Saving Time" is a powerful and inspiring book that challenges us to rethink our relationship with time and shows us how to live a more fulfilling and meaningful life. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to break free from the tyranny of productivity and find a deeper connection with themselves and the world around them.

This book offers an insightful and inspiring critique of our modern society's obsession with productivity and efficiency, and shows us a path towards a more fulfilling and meaningful life. Odell invites us to reclaim our intuitive and felt experience of time, and to reject the quantitative view of time that dominates our society. She shows us how to slow down and cultivate meaningful relationships with ourselves, others, and the world around us, and how this can lead to a more just and sustainable future.

Really enjoyed all the different avenues of time explained in this book! Definitely an essential read for our capitalist ruin of a country.

Thank you to Net Galley and Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This book looks at time - how we think and talk about time, productivity/time is money our ideas of leisure, how cultures perceive it differently, time zones/daylight savings time, life and death and the irreversibility of time - basically every way it permeates our life.. Great writing that made me more aware of how I want to use my time and resist our culture's ideas about time that take away from the pursuit of my best life.