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    Saving Time by Jenny Odell Summary

    Saving Time
    Jenny Odell
    3.6 (4613 Reviews)
    Philosophy
    Mindfulness
    Productivity
    Overview
    Key Takeaways
    Author
    FAQs

    Overview of Saving Time

    In "Saving Time," Jenny Odell dismantles our clock-obsessed culture, revealing how modern timekeeping became a tool of control. What if escaping the "corporate clock" isn't about productivity hacks, but rediscovering pre-industrial rhythms? A radical manifesto for reclaiming time beyond capitalism.

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    Key Takeaways

    1

    The Clock That Rules Us All

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    Time wasn't always money. The seemingly neutral ticking of our clocks masks a history of control and exploitation. When factory owners declared "time is money," they weren't stating a universal truth but advancing a specific worldview that served their interests. The mechanical clock emerged not as an innocent technology but as a tool for control-first organizing prayer schedules in monasteries, then coordinating labor in factories. Colonial powers imposed Western clock time worldwide, judging societies by how "progressed" their time systems appeared. Imagine the revealing exchange between a colonial commissioner demanding to know an Aboriginal man's numerical age, while the man referenced natural markers like "no whiskers"-two fundamentally different ways of understanding time colliding. Modern management techniques have disturbing origins in slave plantations, where owners meticulously tracked labor output. Thomas Jefferson calculated precise labor outputs in his memoranda, while plantation owners conducted time-motion studies similar to those Frederick Winslow Taylor would later popularize. The concept of selling your time through wages is surprisingly recent. In early 19th-century America, self-employed people outnumbered wage earners. After the Civil War, both white workers and Black freedpeople compared wage labor to slavery. As miner Richard L. Davis noted, "none of us who toil for our daily bread are free."

    2

    The Self as Factory

    3

    Time's Unequal Distribution

    4

    Leisure as Commodity

    5

    Beyond the Anthropocene's False Inevitability

    6

    Creating Alternative Time Communities

    7

    Time as Co-Creation, Not Conquest