NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of How to Do Nothing comes a paradigm-destroying
new book . . . about the various problems that swirl out from dominant conceptions of ‘time’”
(The New York Times Editors’ Choice). Saving Time’s real triumph lies in her road map for
experiencing time outside the capitalist clock. . . . Expect to feel changed by this radical
way of seeing.”—Esquire 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.
