NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The visionary author of How to Do Nothing returns to challenge the
notion that ‘time is money.’ . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical way of
seeing.”—Esquire One of the most important books I’ve read in my life.”—Ed Yong author of An
Immense World A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Harper’s Bazaar Esquire Chicago Public Library
Electric Lit In her first book How to Do Nothing Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of
disconnecting from the attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But what if you
don’t have time to spend? In order to answer this seemingly simple question Odell took a deep
dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was
built for profit not people. This is why our lives even in leisure have come to seem like a
series of moments to be bought sold and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how
our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social
inequities but to the climate crisis existential dread and a lethal fatalism. This dazzling
subversive and deeply hopeful book offers us different ways to experience time—inspired by
pre-industrial cultures ecological cues and geological timescales—that can bring within reach
a more humane responsive way of living. As planet-bound animals we live inside shortening and
lengthening days alongside gardens growing birds migrating and cliffs eroding 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 the time it takes to heal from injuries.
Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life in which time is not
reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility. Saving Time
tugs at the seams of reality as we know it—the way we experience time itself—and rearranges it
imagining a world not centered on work the office clock or the profit motive. If we can save”
time by imagining a life identity and source of meaning outside these things time might also
save us.
