First Jenny Odell examined our obsession with productivity. Now she’s turned to our relationship with time — and what happens when you remove the grid.
For many people locked away during the pandemic in the summer of 2020, time felt different. Gummy and unfamiliar, it lacked the usual signposts of a commute, a day in the office, time in a classroom. A single day, or just an hour, felt like it could go on forever.
To counter the “deadening” effect of the sameness, the author Jenny Odell said, she focused on natural markers of time: migratory birds passing through her part of California, the flowering of a buckeye tree or a friend’s baby growing into a toddler and learning to speak.
She poured that frame of reference into her new book, “Saving Time,” which will be published Tuesday by Random House. In it, Odell looks at how time became codified and commodified, and how it might be different.
Arriving after the perspective-shifting experience of the pandemic lockdown, the book lands as many are trying to define a new normal and re-examining their relationship to time — in particular, how much of it they want to devote to their jobs.
“I’m really interested in problems that feel personal and are experienced personally, but tie into much larger historical and structural forces,” Odell said.
The project, Odell said, grew out of her first book, “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” which targeted the zeitgeist in a similar way. In it, Odell examined our obsession with productivity, and why creating monetizable things feels productive, while taking care of our own children doesn’t.
The book became a best seller. But Odell said that when she heard from readers, they often told her they didn’t have enough time in the day to reconsider how they approached productivity.
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“I want to think about time in a shared way,” Odell said. “What becomes possible collectively when you remove the grid, and stop thinking about it as little bits of time currency in each individual person’s time bank, and that all you can do is hoard it.”
“Saving Time” is an unusual book, a mix of history, philosophy and personal narrative. And while it takes on a topic that is central to work-life balance and conversations about well-being, it is not self-help. Odell isn’t trying to tell anyone what to do. She doesn’t see herself as “fixing anything,” she said, but as mapping out a societal problem.
“She’s a good teacher,” said Joshua Batson, a good friend of hers. “She wants you to have an experience, not to listen to her.”
Odell, 36, is an artist by training who taught digital art at Stanford for eight years. Her work often has an environmental focus; in one art show, she displayed refuse from the trash, sometimes pairing them with images of those same objects when they were new, along with research on where they were made. The idea was to encourage people to think about the entire life cycle of an object, she said, not just our short relationship with it. A CD player, for example, which was muddy and crushed and looked “like it had been run over by a truck,” she said, was juxtaposed with an advertisement for it in pristine condition, and information on its manufacture. She has been an artist in residence at a recycling center in San Francisco and at the San Francisco Planning Department.
“My whole vibe,” she said, “is artist in residence at weird places.”
What unites her work is an appetite for research and an attention to detail. As a small child, she said, she once played a carnival game where the goal was to guess which foil boat had an X on the bottom. Winners received a ticket to a water theme park. Odell noticed that one of the boats was shaped a bit differently, and she thought, that must be from where they picked it up.
“I got two or three tickets and they were like, ‘you can’t play anymore,’” she said. “That was an early experience of: If you pay really close attention to things in a way you’re not expected to, you may find something — in that case, valuable, but at least interesting.”
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John Shoptaw, an English professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was Odell’s teacher in college and is now a friend, described Odell’s attention as “wide-eyed.”
“A lot of environmental people will have a tight focus, and they call that attention,” Shoptaw said. But Odell “takes in a lot of space and a lot of time.”
In “Saving Time,” Odell looks at how quantified time was exported around the world by colonialists and how plantation owners used early spreadsheets to track the labor of enslaved people. She pulls from Karl Marx and eviscerates the mind-set of those she calls “productivity bros.” A significant portion of the book examines climate change; Odell tries to translate her “climate dread” into something useful rather than crippling, arguing that we are at a moment when the future of the planet can still change.
But the book also focuses on the immediate physical world. Each section begins with a few paragraphs in italics that take the reader to a particular place in the San Francisco Bay Area — a cemetery, a beach, a stretch of highway where the minutes slip away in traffic. The book is structured as a journey around the Bay Area in one imagined day, and each portion in italics is a stop along the way. The interludes, Odell said, were partly inspired by the video game “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” where the game’s challenges and battles are tied to specific locations, like a particular mountain top, rather than moving linearly.
One important moment in the book comes when Odell visits a friend who offers some lettuce from her garden. Odell tries to decline, until her friend explains that taking off the outer leaves will stimulate growth, and then there will be more lettuce for everyone.
“It’s sort of beautiful, right?” Odell said. “It’s a concrete example of how my friend needs to give me something so that she can have more of it.”
Odell even approached the interview for this article in an unusual and physically grounded way: She assigned me homework, hoping I would better understand the version of time she was pursuing. In her book, there is a picture of a giant boulder in Upper Manhattan sandwiched between two residential buildings on Bennett Avenue, a protrusion of Manhattan schist about three stories tall rising out of the ground.
“Observe the outcrop of 450-million-year-old schist on Bennett Ave.," Odell instructed by email, “at first from across the street, then up close, including any plants that may currently be growing on it.” (On the day of my visit, the rock was decorated with a snow leopard stuffed animal and a large plastic reindeer named Sven from the “Frozen” movies.)
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Stuffed animals aside, this kind of grounding is central to Odell’s relationship with time, the one she forged while writing this book.
“This is probably something a lot of people experienced during the pandemic,” she said. “There was some assurance in seeing, ecologically speaking, big things, like migratory birds, seeing the flowers come back and seeing that this goes on. I think that was very therapeutic for people — it obviously was for me.
“Your body also has that kind of time,” she continued. “You are in that. You’re not just in a calendar box.”
Ultimately, she said, her goal in writing this book was to find a relationship to time that “wasn’t painful,” she said. And while she isn’t living in bliss every moment of the day, she said, she thinks she succeeded.
“I feel better,” she said. “Time feels thicker. It’s made out of stuff. It’s made out of people and things that are in it. It doesn’t have as much of that ‘empty grid of minutes’ kind of feeling,” she said. “When you start to think of time in more collective ways, trying to leave behind the individual time banks, it opens up the horizon of what’s possible in your and others’ time — together.”
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