1장
Time's Rebellion: Breaking Free from the Capitalist Clock
Have you ever felt like time is slipping through your fingers? Like there's never enough of it, yet somehow you're wasting it? You're not alone. Jenny Odell's "Saving Time" has become a cultural phenomenon for challenging our most fundamental assumptions about time itself. This New York Times bestseller has resonated deeply with readers seeking liberation from the crushing pressure of productivity culture, earning praise from thought leaders like Rebecca Solnit and Ezra Klein. What makes this book so revolutionary is how it connects our personal time anxiety to broader systems of exploitation, offering a path toward reclaiming our relationship with time that feels both radical and deeply necessary in our accelerating world.
2장
The Tyranny of Clock Time
Time wasn't always money. The commodification of time-the idea that it can be measured, divided, bought and sold-has a specific history tied to colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism. When factory owners in the 19th century declared "time is money," they weren't stating a universal truth but advancing a specific worldview that served their interests.
At the Port of Oakland, massive cranes load shipping containers onto vessels bound for distant shores. This landscape of commerce represents the culmination of centuries of time discipline. The mechanical clock itself emerged not as a neutral technology but as a tool for control-first in Benedictine monasteries organizing prayer schedules, then in Cistercian enterprises, and finally in merchant trade networks coordinating labor.
Colonial powers imposed Western clock time on indigenous peoples worldwide, judging societies based on how "progressed" their time systems seemed. In Australia, a revealing exchange between a commissioner and an Aboriginal man highlighted fundamentally different conceptions of measuring age-the commissioner seeking numerical precision while the Aboriginal man referenced biological markers like "no whiskers." Colonial missions explicitly framed time as money, with one South African publication comparing well-used moments to deposits in God's bank that would earn "good interest."
The railroad industry epitomizes this battle against space and time. At the Port of Oakland, old train tracks mark what was once the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad, built through the brutal labor of Chinese workers who endured forty-four separate storms in a single winter. When these workers organized the largest strike in U.S. history in 1867, demanding better conditions and wage parity, railroad baron Leland Stanford cut off their food supply.
Modern management techniques have disturbing roots in slave plantations, where owners meticulously tracked labor output. Plantation owners in the American South conducted time-motion studies similar to those Frederick Winslow Taylor would later popularize. Thomas Jefferson calculated precise labor outputs in his memoranda, while George Washington insisted slaves should work as much "as their strength, without endangering their health" would allow. Unlike wage workers, enslaved people "could not quit," allowing planters to blend "information systems with violence" to optimize human labor.
The concept of selling one's 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 often compared wage labor to prostitution or slavery. As miner Richard L. Davis noted, "none of us who toil for our daily bread are free."
3장
The Self-Timing Machine
As we exit the port onto Interstate 880, we join commuters, delivery trucks, and tech buses forming an anonymous morning mass. Advertisements bombard us with promises to save time, boost productivity, and maximize efficiency. A billboard announces a tech company hiring "self-driving people"-a fitting metaphor for our relationship with time.
In America, busyness isn't just considered good-it's morally virtuous, stemming from Protestantism's sanctification of hard work. This ethic emerged alongside Europe's bourgeoisie, who owed their social dominance to personal industry. According to Protestant doctrine, wealth accumulation wasn't for personal enjoyment but served God and signaled salvation. Seventeenth-century Puritans practiced intense self-evaluation through daily journals where they acted as both "preacher and auditor." This moral framework survived America's industrialization, creating fertile ground for Taylorism to spread beyond the workplace into personal development.
Psychologist Donald Laird's 1925 book "Increasing Personal Efficiency" applied factory management to the mind itself, urging readers to become their own "time-study man" to maximize output. His advice included avoiding "excessive eye movements" while reading and not looking out windows during commutes. Most disturbingly, Laird divided thinking into productive "active thought" (exemplified by a businessman making decisions) versus wasteful "passive thought" (a woman daydreaming about romance). This approach masculinized efficiency while feminizing contemplation, asking readers to be both the time-study manager and the timed worker within their own minds.
While styles have evolved, contemporary time management advice still follows personal Taylorism: tracking time in detailed logs, identifying peak productivity hours, and eliminating distractions. This approach treats time as fungible currency, exemplified by the common claim that "everyone has the same number of hours in the day." Books like "Real-World Time Management" calculate that after work, sleep, and basic maintenance, you still have "1,940 hours to do as you please"-nearly 22 percent of the year!
The modern bootstrapper mentality demands individuals secure their own futures through personal time investment and risk calculation. Americans particularly embrace this individualism-a 2012 Pew study found 62% of Americans disagreed that "Success in life is determined by forces outside our control," compared to just 27% of Germans. This belief persists despite structural inequalities that limit individual agency.
The "productivity bros" offer a vision beyond work-life balance-they promise complete freedom from selling your time at all. Following Tim Ferriss's "4-Hour Workweek" philosophy, they advocate creating passive income streams that let you "screw the nine to five" by essentially becoming a one-person capitalism machine. The cruel irony is that more "freedom" demands ever more self-mastery and self-surveillance, turning individuals against themselves with spreadsheets, averages, and point systems.
4장
The Politics of Time Inequality
Time isn't equally distributed, despite Arnold Bennett's claim that "your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours" daily. For working parents especially, this notion of "unstealable" hours is laughable. The German word "zeitgeber" (time-giver) reveals how someone or something always determines others' experience of time-whether it's children's schedules for stay-at-home mothers, university quarters for professors, or app interfaces for gig workers. This power dynamic extends into workplace structures, where corporate policies and management expectations often dictate how employees must allocate their supposedly "personal" time.
Women, especially BIPOC women, face additional time pressures, expected to say yes to requests more often and perform "office housework" while risking being labeled as "aggressive" when they attempt to control their time. This manifests in countless ways: being asked to plan office parties, take meeting notes, mentor junior colleagues, or serve on diversity committees - all unpaid labor that takes time away from career-advancing work. Women-targeted time management books like Laura Vanderkam's "168 Hours" offer a "Lean In" approach-essentially becoming "more man-shaped in order not to die in the car." These books suggest outsourcing disliked tasks, finding "core competencies," and treating time as a "blank slate" to be optimized. While providing practical advice for privileged women to "have it all," they avoid questioning why women still shoulder disproportionate work burdens, from childcare to elderly parent care to household management.
Time management's individualistic focus undermines collective political understanding by framing systemic issues as personal failures. The "time tax" disproportionately burdens marginalized communities through poorly designed bureaucracy, deepening gulfs between rich and poor. This manifests in longer wait times at government offices, complex paperwork requirements for basic services, and inflexible scheduling systems that assume workers have control over their hours. Brittney Cooper's provocation that "white people own time" challenges Bennett's notion of unstealable hours, highlighting how race determines whose time is valued and how it's controlled - from workplace expectations to institutional processes.
For individuals, burnout represents the opposite of time management-when obligations can no longer fit into the time grid. This phenomenon has intensified with remote work, as the boundaries between professional and personal time blur completely. Hartmut Rosa's "logic of increase" infiltrates all aspects of life, making standing still feel like sliding backward. Social media amplifies this through endless "upward social comparison," creating a never-ending race where "the finish line never stops moving." The constant pressure to optimize, achieve, and compete creates a cycle of perpetual inadequacy.
This history reveals the moral equation "busy = good"-where busyness becomes a lifelong performance of productivity and worthiness. In professional settings, being seen as busy has become a status symbol, while having free time is often viewed with suspicion. The difference between privileged professionals and more precarious workers is that the former can afford to pay the social cost of opting out, but their "timers" share common roots in a system where time exists only as a means for profit. As Fred Moten suggests, coalition emerges not from helping others but from recognizing "this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly." This understanding points toward the need for collective solutions rather than individual optimization strategies.
5장
The Commodification of Leisure
The commodification of leisure extends beyond physical spaces into social media, where platforms sell a sense of community in exchange for our attention to ads and data collection. As one marketing expert advises businesses to "build community" while "thinking about stuff in a new way," social media exemplifies this approach-monetizing our need for connection in ways that feel "nefarious, like Nestle selling us the public water supply in private bottles."
This commercialization creates a troubling dynamic where people consume "experiences of slowness" rather than reclaiming their time or building mutual support networks. Such consumption becomes compensatory-addressing psychological deficits in a world full of anxiety. As researcher Hiroshi Ishida notes about Instagram culture, young people "want to collect experiences of value now while they can" due to uncertainty about the future.
Historically, leisure has maintained a paradoxical relationship with work. The Protestant work ethic eventually accommodated consumerism by making nonwork time "economically relevant"-creating new reasons to work more. When assembly-line jobs made individual work performance less visible, consumption became the signal of how hard someone had worked. Today, leisure itself has become "a form of life coaching," exemplified by Larry Ellison's data-driven Sensei Lana'i resort where guests set goals and have their metrics tracked.
Social media transforms leisure into work, as users become their own ad agencies. Instagram creators describe exhausting content schedules required by the algorithm-"three posts, eight to ten stories, four to seven reels" weekly. Even for casual users, the platform blurs the line between individual and entrepreneur, making leisure the arena for "eternal self-upgrade" where marketing advice once given to companies now applies to individuals "during every moment of the day."
At its worst, leisure becomes an undignified process: working to buy temporary freedom before faithfully returning to work. Barbara Luck's 1982 poem "The Thing That Is Missed" captures this absurdity with lines like "Have FUN-dammit-FUN" and "More relaxing to work isn't it... heh heh heh heh." At its best, however, leisure creates a vertical crack in the horizontal scale of work-a critical pause where workers question why they work so much, process collective grief, and glimpse possibilities beyond the current system.
When community organizer Niki Franco was asked about experiencing leisure in a world saturated by oppressive systems, she described hiking with close friends in Puerto Rico. Despite being aware of colonialism and Hurricane Maria's devastation, through gratitude, trusted companionship, and sensory immersion in nature, "it was like all of that didn't exist." These moments bring us back to our humanity, reminding us "I'm a living human in this moment in time. And wow, even with all the bullshit, I'm actually deeply grateful to be alive."
6장
Reclaiming Time from the Anthropocene
The term "Anthropocene"-describing the geological age where humans are the main influence on climate and environment-gained currency during Odell's college years. Indigenous scholars like Zoe Todd have criticized it for adopting a hierarchy between human and nonhuman, "flesh and things." Unlike Paula Gunn Allen's view where "land is our self," the Anthropocene concept often portrays naturally exploitative humans exercising will over something separate and inert.
Ironically, this framing denies agency to both nature and humans. The "Anthro-" lumps all humanity together, obscuring how specific portions of humanity created extractive cultures that visit environmental horrors on the rest. This deterministic view presents history as a mechanical process without actors-merely technological inventions causing inevitable effects, with social and political factors "bracketed out."
Daniel Hartley critiques this "billiard ball model" of historical causality that ignores how technology is bound up with social relations and class struggle. Such determinism portrays history as an inevitable march of progress that can only be sped up or slowed down, never questioned or redirected. It blindly ignores urban poverty and gentrification while dismissing the bloodiest century in human history as "a mere blip on the rising line of progress."
Wells Fargo's ATM asking for wildfire donations represents a bitter irony, as the bank has invested $198 billion in fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement. This mirrors how time management industries resell the concept of time as money to isolated individuals, while energy companies promote carbon footprints to conceal more significant avenues for change. These avenues include public regulation, oversight, policies like the Green New Deal, and challenging global trade agreements that favor energy companies' short-term profits.
Like a fog machine spewing predetermined dystopia, energy companies sell their version of an inevitable future, portraying us as helplessly drifting toward their designed targets. This raises the question: who wrote these apocalyptic scenarios?
While grief is important, especially collective grief, apocalyptic sentiments echo the nightmare of a non-future where people's beliefs are as determined as the earth seems helpless. Without suppressing grief, we need different ways of thinking about time beyond being "strapped in all the way to the end." One approach is recovering the contingencies of past and present; another is shifting our temporal perspective by looking to those whose worlds have already ended many times over.
Thom Davies' study of Louisiana's Cancer Alley-where the air is sometimes "so full with gas you can hardly breathe"-illustrates Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence," but Davies asks a crucial question: "out of sight to whom?" Communities experiencing toxic pollution have abundant "testimonies, experiences, and bereavements that bear witness to the brutality of gradual environmental destruction."
Seeing the future may be more about looking around than looking ahead. The Philippines has experienced increased tropical storms since the 1970s and sea level rise nine times the global average. In Sitio Nabong near Manila, locals attend church in boats, having not walked on paved streets for decades. Perspectives vary even within regions-while a New York Times headline hypothetically asked "What Happens When [California's Lovely Weather] Is Gone?", California farmworker Martha Fuentes had already observed temperature shifts during her thirty-one years in the fields.
7장
Creating Alternative Temporalities
Just as families develop "familects" (household-specific language), communities create "time familects"-shared temporal agreements like Filipino relatives' acceptance of "Filipino time" or arbitrary rituals observed between friends. These can clash with dominant time structures, as when different religions choose different Sabbath days to distinguish themselves.
Time zones and standardization imply dominance-the subsumption of local solar time into international standards. China's single time zone exemplifies this, with Xinjiang's Uyghur population defiantly maintaining their own "Xinjiang Time" two hours behind Beijing time despite severe repression. In the United States, Daylight Saving Time created a nation "absurdly out of sync with itself" by the 1960s, with practical concerns (like Arizona's desert heat) still preventing uniformity.
Colonial powers targeted both linguistic and temporal practices to eradicate indigenous cultures, but conquest never meant complete internalization. The Xhosa broke a mission bell over stone to silence the European zeitgeber, while the Lakota cleverly used American holidays like the Fourth of July to hold traditional dances under the guise of patriotism. These "inside jokes" create new centers of mutual intelligibility while remaining unintelligible to overseers-a linguistic and temporal resistance against hegemonic control.
In the early 1980s, alienated office temp workers in San Francisco created Processed World magazine using paper stolen from banks where they worked. This irreverent publication combined Marxist labor analysis with biting satire, distributed by hand in the Financial District and mailed worldwide to anyone who requested it. The magazine featured articles on alienation and white-collar strikes alongside inside jokes and satirical ads like "BFB: Brains for Bosses, Inc."
Processed World functioned as a pre-internet social network for isolated workers. The magazine's letters section overflowed with gratitude from readers discovering they weren't alone in their workplace alienation. "JUMPIN' JEHOSEPHAT! THERE'S INTELLIGENT LIFE OUT THERE!" wrote two secretaries offering their copying services. Another reader described secretly finding an issue at their desk at 7am, "joyously sucking in each page" later, grateful to know "there are others who despise the purposes to which they are employed."
This horizontal communication remains vital today as work grows increasingly fragmented. While gig workers occasionally find solidarity at physical meeting points (like food delivery workers chatting at waiting areas), most communication has moved online. Workers use forums to share information about exploitative algorithms, compare strategies, and build solidarity across geographical boundaries.
8장
Beyond Productivity: Crip Time and Being Alive
Sara Hendren's concept of "crip time" offers an alternative perspective to productivity culture. Used to describe the tension between disabled people's temporality and industrialized timetables, crip time requires "reimagining our notions of what could and should happen in time." For Hendren, whose son Graham has Down syndrome, this has meant being dislodged from lockstep culture and its rigid sense of time.
Graham's "invitation to life on crip time" has been a gift, allowing Hendren to see how economic tempo shapes everything while schools and workplaces assume "a form of able-bodied productivity, an ideal of speed and efficiency." Graham demonstrates a different orientation to time-one unconcerned with comparative percentages, milestones, or bell curves, instead approaching life with curiosity and joy.
Disability activist Patty Berne offers a powerful alternative to the transhumanist ideal of being "better than well" or "excellent all the time." While acknowledging the appeal of enhancement when we're tired, Berne finds this constant excellence lifeless. "It's actually okay to be on a spectrum of reality," she explains. "There are times when it's juicier, times when it's drier... It's actually part of being alive. It IS being alive."
This conception of "being alive" differs radically from the cultural view where being recognizably "alive" means producing at a certain mastery of time. Berne's vision embraces the rich topography of experience rather than reducing life to maximal output.
Crip time abandons the rhetoric of mastery regarding schedules, careers, and the future. During COVID-19, many abled people were thrust into a relationship with time familiar to the disability community. Ashley Shew described living with uncertainty: "Everything I enter in my calendar has an asterisk in my mind... depending on my next cancer scan." This points to both the inhumanity of standard schedules for disabled people and a truth about the human condition generally.
Rather than extending life through lengthening one's numerical lifespan, a more meaningful life extension reaches outward instead of forward. It increases aliveness for everyone through mutual regard-creating a world with living beings, not zombies. As prison activist Albert Woodfox writes, quoting Frantz Fanon: "Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover the other?" Working to end carceral logic creates "a world more alive to itself, full of spirit life instead of spirit murder."
9장
Time as Co-Creation
The tafoni formations-mysterious spongelike rock structures created through salt weathering and other factors-visualize something happening everywhere constantly: things acting on other things, leaving traces of something like experience.
In English, "experience" shares origins with "experiment." To experience is to be present, to respond and co-create something happening. Mel Baggs demonstrated this in their video "In My Language," showing interactions with objects in their home while explaining that their language "is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment." The water "doesn't symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts with me."
Ted Chiang's story "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" further illustrates this connection between experience and ethics. Ana raises artificially intelligent "digients" and hopes one will achieve legal personhood, while a company merely wants "superintelligent products" without obligations to them. Ana realizes they "want something that responds like a person, but isn't owed the same obligations as a person." She concludes that "experience isn't merely the best teacher; it's the only teacher"-you can't shortcut the twenty years needed to create common sense.
Seeing more of the world as constitutive of time, full of agency, and deserving respect means abandoning hierarchies between actors and the acted upon. Indigenous thinkers see contingency and humans' lack of control as "empowering and humbling, not something frightening." In a worldview where power and agency reside "in and through the relations and processes that constitute life," this paradox dissolves.
The real paradox is a mind that conceives the world as inert while seeing itself bound to determinism-"the ultimate self-own." While eugenicist Francis Galton found little room for free will in his experiments on "man as a conscious machine," Bergson found significant freedom at one end of the spectrum between habit and choice. For Bergson, freedom is choice, "scattered throughout the universe, pushing forward and acting upon what would constrain it."
Like rocks emerging from depths and water wearing them down, like ripened buckeye fruits falling and rolling downhill, like poetry straining ossified language-the co-creation events of our lives don't play out in external, homogenous time. They are time itself. When fully grasped, the future ceases to be an abstract horizon toward which our ego plods in a lonely body. Instead, that irrepressible force driving each moment into the next speaks back to us always, even from unexpected places. Our task is to learn once more how to hear.
