178: 📕Book Club — 3 Big Ideas from SAVING TIME by Jenny Odell

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What if time wasn’t something we had to hoard, protect, or chase? What if we could change our relationship to time—to life itself—expanding beyond the linear, grid-like units running out as we race against the clock, and toward a true sense of aliveness instead?

Today’s I’m trying an experimental format: diving deep into a book that relates to so much of what we talk about here, Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. I haven’t landed an interview with her (yet!), but I also really appreciated her previous book, How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, so am happy to spotlight both.

A few caveats: This is not a book review where I critically examine the content (here are two from The New Yorker and the NYT), nor a comprehensive summary. Instead, I’m bringing you three big ideas from the book related to our Free Time universe, that sparked aha moments and mindset shifts for me. I hope these inspire similar paradigm shifts for you. As always, my goal is to help set even more of your time freeeeeee!

As Jenny writes, “Would it be possible not to save and spend time, but to garden it by **inventing and stewarding different rhythms of life? And wouldn't this simply be an acknowledgment and use of the chronodiversity that already exists for all of us on some level, individually or communally?”

🌟 3 Key Takeaways:

• Notice the productivity paradigm that many of us are still operating under: seeing our days as a race against time, leading to an internal tyranny and guilt even if self-employed.

• Embrace the roads not taken: Step off the hedonic treadmill by allowing limits, and even deliberate mediocrity. Who gets to say what is mediocre in the first place?

• Cultivate abundance: “What if time [could] be gardened?” Jenny writes, “Then it's also possible to imagine its increase in ways other than individual hoarding.”

📝 Permission: To be tired in a good way, one that softens you; to be unproductive, to stop optimizing every micro moment of your day, to do less, to be free.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Be an observer as you go about your week; look for people and places that give you time, that expand your sense of aliveness.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Articles: The New Yorker—Why We Never Have Enough Time, NYT—Time Has Been Codified and Commoditized

• Community: BFF (apply promo code PODCAST)

• Podcasts: Sustainable Ambition, What Works

📘Books Mentioned

• Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

• How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business

• What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting by Tara McMullin

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

• Life After College

🎧Related Episodes

• Interviews with Jenny on Saving Time: Jenny Odell Saves Time, and Herself, by Living Beyond the Clock, Making Sense of Time (Jenny Odell), Jenny Odell on Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

• Free Time:

  • 141: Process, Permission Slips, and Business Pivots with Tara McMullin

  • 143: Exploring Time, Money, and Energy Capacity with Tara McMullin and Charlie Gilkey (Replay)

  • 027: Time Management for Mortals with Oliver Burkeman

  • 172: Free Time Isn’t Just for the Fun Days

  • 046: Time Margin—Are You Drowning, Treading Water, or Gliding?

  • 002: Eliminate Email with Cal Newport

• Pivot:

  • 305: Is What You Are Wanting Actually What’s Best For You? With Luke Burgis

  • 294: Confidence Conundrums and Attention Budgets with Terri Trespicio

  • 23: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking With Oliver Burkeman

  • 122: Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport

  • 29: Deep Work: Ditch Cognitive Junk Food with Cal Newport

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