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 how can we
reclaim our time? 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.
