Saving Time

An original, life-affirming book that reshapes our relationship with time from the bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.

We're living on the wrong clock—one that tells us time is money—and it's destroying us. Here is a radical argument for other ways of experiencing time that offer hopeful possibilities for ourselves and the planet.

Our daily experience is dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside. It wasn't devised for people, but for profit. Saving Time rearranges how we experience time and imagines a world not centred around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by— inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time.

In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful journey, Jenny Odell takes us through other temporal habitats—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 slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal.

She urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms, to imagine a source of meaning outside the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives—or the life of the planet—is not a foregone conclusion.

Now is our moment to rethink. And if we do, time might just save us.