Jenny Odell’s New Book, Saving Time, Is a Self-Help Manual for the Anxious Middle Class
Dressed in radical language, Jenny Odell’s new book, Saving Time, offers up positive thinking as a solution to exploitation. But the real reason people don’t have enough spare time is that low wages and high rents force them to work constantly.
Jenny Odell's new book Saving Time draws a connection between one's personal struggle with time management and society's broader struggle with wage labor. (Jenny Odell website)
During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, multimedia artist and writer Jenny Odell began to have panic dreams about the future. “The future has disappeared,” she writes in her journal, as she wakes to a rusty glow of wildfires burning behind her window blinds in Oakland, California. The threat of an unlivable planet is not only hard to bear, but it creates, as Odell reflects, a “temporal weirdness.”
Odell is not alone in finding it difficult to imagine the future. A recent survey by Yale and George Mason Universities reveals that over half of Americans are feeling “disgusted” or “sad” about global warming. A sense of dread about the future, coupled with a sense of powerlessness to do anything to shape it, has led to the rise of solastalgia — a new term to convey the existential angst prompted by the foreseen loss of the world as we know it.
In this climate of frayed nerves and foreclosed futures, Odell, who was until recently a professor of digital art at Stanford University, began to reflect on the meaning of time and work. Odell doesn’t remember the year that students in her art classes at Stanford began to make collages that resembled Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, but she recalls of one that it “got darker and bleaker from left to right” and the student’s words: that it was “kind of like… the sunset of humanity.” Some years later, she would see her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which was published in 2019, in a forum for people “heartbroken by climate change and worried about civilization collapse.”
In How to Do Nothing, a New York Times bestseller that made its way onto Barack Obama’s books of the year, Odell sought to create a meaningful way to engage with time through investing in more time away from work, privileging the spiritual over the material, and in finding alternatives to the distraction endemic to the digital age. She meanders in a rose garden; she watches the flight of a bird; she meditates on plants (which she uses the iNaturalist app to identify) that sprout with a nurturing slowness. Surprisingly, for a digital artist based in the techno-capitalist landscape of Silicon Valley, she is skeptical about technology, which she sees as ultimately a waste of everyone’s time.
Can I Take My iPhone to Hawaii?
Readers of Odell’s first book found that one of the primary obstacles they faced with heeding her advice on how to cultivate a more languid, measured, attentive way of engaging with the world was time itself. In her latest book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Odell follows up her inquiry on the attention economy with a cultural and political meditation on the history of time. Saving Time wants its readers to understand their personal struggle with time management in terms of a broader struggle with wage labor.
Since our perception of time is rooted in the working day, Odell sets out to trace the roots of our current system — back to the sixth century when St Benedict implemented a strict routine of work and prayer that made monks the most efficient generators of enterprise in their time; forward to Taylorism, which systemized factory work; then to the British Empire which regulated clocks; and to Leland Stanford, who sought to crush revolt as he expanded his own empire in California.
Odell calls for a way of living that is less exploitative, individualistic, and dependent on structures of power, and so she seeks to make legible how the history of empire has given us our present sense of time. She notes how the idea of the twenty-four-hour clock was started by Sandford Fleming in an 1886 paper “Time Reckoning for the Twentieth Century” and how a standardized approach to time ensured the smooth functioning of labor, particularly in the colonies. She quotes from a letter written by colonizers in South Africa who report feeling more civilized having unpacked their clocks.
Turning to the twentieth century, Odell considers how the principles of time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism, theorized by E. P. Thompson, one of the many scholars she draws on, are internalized. Amongst the scattered and heterogenous historical reference points is psychologist Donald Laird’s 1925 book Increasing Personal Efficiency, “A practical and detailed manual to help the reader through step-by-step procedures to improve self-mastery,” a Progressive Era forerunner of today’s landscape of mechanized well-being, ergonomics, and time efficiency (commuters can rest assured that “every minute of complete relaxation while riding can be subtracted from your sleep”). Odell notes Laird’s references to eugenics, his framing of psychological breakdown as a loss of productivity, and his gendered division of labor, before moving swiftly onto the next historical example.
Two things worry Odell about our internalization of values required by wage labor: Why do we find it so difficult to stop working even when we don’t have to and why is it so difficult to create a relationship to work that isn’t punishing or exhausting, where even the teaching of art ends up being so much routine labor?
A short way into the book, Odell alights on a perfect analogy for her own experience in a hypothetical character called “Linda,” who she adopts from the sociologist Hartmut Rosa. Linda — an overwhelmed professor who rushes through her day, without enough hours to fulfill her obligations to coworkers, family, and friends — is the archetype for the professional worker who feels constrained by time. To acquire a sense of leisure, Linda will have to go on a retreat or — more rustically — stay in a mountain hut with no reception. Disconnecting from technology and privileging thought, in Odell’s account, seems to be the only solutions to finding a model of freedom from the internalization of workplace routine.
Though Odell says she has “tried to make the case for both the difference and the link between those . . . who can say no to work and those who cannot,” between the Lindas and the non-Lindas of the world, Saving Time speaks exclusively to those sections of the laptop classes with elegant, variegated flower boxes in their windows and a regular paycheck. For a book written during the pandemic, it has nothing to say about the landscape of frenzied overwork faced by people employed in the service sector, health care, and logistics.
Odell poses several questions that are designed to free the laptop classes from a notion of time bound up with an endless struggle to increase productivity: Is leisure possible (can people really go to Hawaii without using a laptop or an iPhone)? If it is, what is it for, beyond a recovery from work? What if time off work just makes people anxious, reminding us that “preparing for the future” in a landscape of precarious (“freelance”) work is “an infinite task”? Is there an alternative way of thinking about how one might use time other than that offered up by the regimented regime of “productivity bros”?
Half-Baked Beans
In one example of how the recovery of time from the wage relation might occur in Saving Time, Odell offers an anecdote about a handful of scarlet runner beans that her septuagenarian friend gifts her from a bean farm that no longer exists. After Googling and discovering that you can plant store-bought beans, Odell recognizes that the beans are not just commodities; they offer — magically — a way of reconnecting with a lost past and conceiving of productivity in a less market-orientated way (Odell calls this “gardening time”).
There is a strange disconnect between the systematic accounts of the history of time in capitalism in the book and Odell’s own whimsical reflections. Repeatedly, one has the impression that Odell is trying to reach a more profound idea — possibly that our current landscape of work prevents us from imagining a different future or that a critique of capitalism is so easily co-opted into forms of time management — but we are left only with a handful of cute metaphors and half-baked, derivative ideas.
Surely, a life dedicated to individually repurposing mass-produced store-bought beans, for example, would entail more, not less, labor? That such exertions are dressed up in tree-hugging language does not disguise the fact that planting beans is never going to solve the climate crisis, though it might allow Odell and her friends to feel a little less anxious for a few hours.
Without stopping to interrogate these thorny issues, Odell concludes by replacing one tired bromide with another. “Time,” she tells us — an inside joke, she says, amongst friends — “is not money. Time is beans.” At a certain level of abstraction, it is of course true that, given time, individuals could redefine what it means to be productive in a way that does not necessarily overlap with a vision of labor geared entirely toward generating profits. But Odell’s vision of this change — literally tending one’s own private garden — is not up to the task of thinking seriously about the extent to which any attempt to free people from drudgery would require a large-scale, collective political intervention.
Odell started working at Stanford in 2013, the year that Sheryl Sandberg published her manifesto Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which, as her former colleague Kate Losse notes, was “not so much a new Feminine Mystique as an updated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In this model of corporate feminism, there is no space for time-out; all time is accounted for. The only rationale for dropping out of this intensified working clock would be, on this economic model, to have another child.
Odell dismisses this version of corporate feminism, with its limited horizon for leisure (“productivity bros” but for women), and other liberal feminist accounts of time management such as Kate Northrop’s advice that women sync their work schedules with their menstrual cycles to “exploit different energy levels through the month.”
There is an attempt here, as in other sections, to acknowledge the power relations and forces that dictate our individual experiences of time, and which constrain us to a cycle of productivity and overwork, which makes that cycle so difficult to break. But the critique — which Odell admits to borrowing from a Goodreads review — never goes so far as to invert this logic and we are left instead with the impression of a conceptual paralysis.
In the decade since Sandberg published her girlboss manifesto, shortly after which she became a billionaire, salaries for the middle and working classes have stagnated, and structural inequalities and discrimination continue to make it difficult for most workers to have time off the clock, let alone decent pay.
Rising discontent with this stultifying work landscape has found articulation in a new movement for a four-day workweek and in a growing wave of strikes and labor organization since the pandemic. Odell has little to say about these methods of responding to the current political and economic crisis. Instead, she takes solace, as she does in her first book, in switching off, in attending to nature, and in the truism that slowness can be more rewarding than speed.
Not Another Self-Help Manual
In the introduction, Odell asks her reader to imagine that they’re in a bookstore. In one section, there are time management accounts of how to speed up time and maximalize productivity — to outpace the next worker, rise up, and pierce the glass ceiling; and in another section, there are cultural histories that are structured as philosophical inquiries, which take their reader on a meditative historical journey through time. Odell wants her book to sit firmly in the latter section. But one of the main conceptual problems with Saving Time is that it slips so readily between a reckoning with the ills of capitalism and a self-help-style brand of time management.
“I think the reason most people see time as money is not that they want to, but that they have to” Odell writes in a rare moment of insight. But the solution to this psychological constraint, which perpetuates a culture of overwork, lies not in finding one’s own personal time, but in addressing the material causes of the feeling that we are always on the clock. Chief amongst these are the high cost of housing and the slow growth of wages.
The obsession with productivity which so irks Odell is merely an attempt by individuals to accommodate themselves to a world they feel they cannot change. By embracing the language of self-help, Odell continues the trend of offering coping mechanisms, rather than solutions, to the mounting economic and political problems that push an alternative, green future ever further from view.