I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.
It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.
The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.
Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.
So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.
Literary Vice 