Saving Time
Jenny Odell
Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 400 Pages (Hardcover)
Audiobook: 11 Hours, 27 Minutes
Publication Date: March 27, 2023
Get More Info: Goodreads | Storygraph
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Publisher’s Description
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 by Jenny Odell 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.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell is published by Penguin Random House.
Content Advisory
Saving Time by Jenny Odell includes content that may be sensitive, emotional, or difficult for some readers (e.g., death, grief, and other topics). For reader-submitted content warnings, view them on StoryGraph.
About Jenny Odell
“I am a writer and artist based in Oakland, California. My work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screen shots, researching trash, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In general, I am searching for frameworks that allow us to perceive something new about everyday reality.
My first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published in 2019, and my second book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, was published in 2023.
My visual work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas), Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), the Lishui Photography Festival (China), and apexart (NY). I have been an artist in residence at Recology SF (the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, I taught digital art at Stanford University,” (Jenny Odell, 2025).
Read more about Jenny Odell here.
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