Saving Time

By Jenny Odell | Random House (2024)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* We are living on the wrong clock, and it is destroying us. The author of How to Do Nothing offers us different ways to experience time in this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful book.

“[Saving Time] humbly suggests: Rather than try to beat the clock and then punish yourself when you inevitably fail, [ask] yourself why our society’s conception of time – and our obsession with mastering it – exists in the first place?” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Paradigm-destroying”—New York Times Book Review

“Saving Time is the rare book that does more than meet the current moment, it defines it.” –Booklist, STARRED REVIEW

Why does our time conform to a corporate timetable? In this “hopeful and subversive cultural history” (Esquire), Jenny Odell explains how time became money and urges us to become stewards of different rhythms of life—shortening and lengthening days, gardens growing, birds migrating, cliffs eroding, the time it takes to heal from an injury, the stretchy quality of waiting and desire—in which time is not reducible to standardized units and instead forms the very medium of possibility.

“One of the most important books I’ve read in my life.” —Ed Yong, author of An Immense World