Saving Time

Saving Time Plot Summary

Introduction

Time is not merely a neutral backdrop against which our lives unfold, but a socially constructed concept deeply intertwined with power, capitalism, and colonialism. The dominant view of time as a commodity—something that can be bought, sold, and optimized—shapes our daily experiences in profound ways that often go unquestioned. This commodified understanding of time emerged alongside industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, creating a temporal framework that privileges certain ways of being while marginalizing others. By examining time through multiple lenses—historical, political, ecological, and relational—we can begin to see how our current temporal crisis extends beyond mere busyness to encompass deeper questions about agency, connection, and possibility. The challenge is not simply to manage time better within existing frameworks, but to fundamentally reimagine our relationship to time itself. Through this exploration, we might discover that liberating time from its commodified form opens pathways to different futures—ones where time becomes not something we save or spend, but something we inhabit collectively, with awareness of our embeddedness in multiple, overlapping temporalities that extend beyond human concerns alone.

Chapter 1: The Historical Construction of Time as Money

The commodification of time has a long and complex history that has profoundly shaped our modern experience. Far from being a natural or inevitable development, the concept of "time is money" emerged through specific historical processes tied to industrialization, colonization, and the rise of capitalism. Before mechanical clocks became widespread, time was primarily experienced through natural rhythms and religious practices. In medieval monasteries, bells marked the canonical hours for prayer, creating a rudimentary time discipline. However, these hours varied in length according to seasons - a fundamentally different conception from our modern understanding of time as consisting of uniform, exchangeable units. The standardization of time accelerated dramatically with industrialization. Factory owners needed to coordinate labor and maximize productivity, leading to the implementation of time clocks, punch cards, and other mechanisms of temporal control. This shift wasn't merely technological but represented a profound conceptual transformation. Time became abstract, detached from natural cycles or human needs, and reconceived as a resource to be allocated efficiently. This abstraction enabled time to be commodified - bought, sold, and measured in monetary terms. Workers no longer simply performed tasks; they sold their time, a transaction that fundamentally altered the human relationship to labor and existence. Colonial powers exported this conception of time globally, often using temporal discipline as a tool of subjugation. Indigenous populations worldwide were characterized as "lazy" or "outside of time" when they resisted European notions of punctuality and productivity. The imposition of standardized time zones, synchronized clocks, and industrial work schedules became instruments of cultural domination. This process wasn't merely about coordination but about establishing a particular relationship to time that privileged efficiency, productivity, and profit over other values. The plantation system, particularly in the American South, played a crucial role in developing techniques of temporal control that would later be adopted by industrial capitalism. Plantation owners meticulously tracked slave labor through time accounting systems, creating detailed productivity metrics that foreshadowed modern management techniques. This historical connection between slavery and time management reveals the deeply problematic origins of our contemporary understanding of time as a commodity. By the early twentieth century, scientific management pioneers like Frederick Taylor further refined techniques for maximizing temporal efficiency. Taylor's time-motion studies broke down work into its smallest components, seeking to eliminate "wasted" time and establish optimal standards for every task. This approach treated workers essentially as machines whose movements could be optimized, ignoring the human dimensions of labor. The logic of Taylorism eventually expanded beyond the factory floor to influence education, healthcare, and even leisure activities. Today, this commodified conception of time has become so naturalized that we rarely question it. We speak casually of "spending," "saving," or "wasting" time, unconsciously reinforcing the notion that time is a form of currency. Digital technologies have intensified this commodification, enabling ever more precise tracking and monetization of temporal experience. Understanding the historical construction of time as money allows us to recognize that our current temporal regime is neither inevitable nor neutral, but rather the product of specific power relations that continue to shape our lives in profound ways.

Chapter 2: The Illusion of Personal Time Management

The modern obsession with personal time management rests on a fundamental illusion: that individuals can solve structural temporal problems through better personal habits. This approach treats time as a resource that can be optimized through the right techniques, apps, and mindsets. However, this framing obscures how temporal experiences are shaped by social, economic, and political forces beyond individual control. The time management industry has exploded in recent decades, offering countless books, courses, and digital tools promising to help people "make the most" of their time. These approaches typically frame time scarcity as a personal failure rather than a systemic issue. They suggest that with enough discipline and the right productivity hacks, anyone can achieve work-life balance and accomplish their goals. This narrative is particularly appealing in neoliberal contexts that emphasize individual responsibility over collective solutions, treating structural problems as matters of personal choice. The bootstrapping mythology underlying much time management advice ignores vast disparities in temporal autonomy. A CEO with flexible hours, household staff, and the ability to delegate has fundamentally different temporal constraints than a single parent working multiple jobs with unpredictable schedules. Race, gender, class, disability, and citizenship status all profoundly shape one's relationship to time. Women still perform disproportionate amounts of unpaid care work; racial minorities face "time taxes" through discrimination and bureaucratic hurdles; disabled people must navigate environments designed for normative temporal capacities. The quest for perfect time management often creates what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the "achievement subject"—a self-exploiting individual who has internalized external demands for productivity. Unlike earlier disciplinary regimes that relied on external coercion, today's workers often become their own taskmasters, pushing themselves toward ever-greater efficiency. This self-optimization creates a particularly insidious form of burnout, as there is no external authority to resist—the pressure comes from within. The achievement subject believes they are exercising freedom while actually conforming to market demands. Technological solutions to time scarcity frequently exacerbate rather than solve the problem. Digital calendars, productivity apps, and time-tracking software promise to help us manage time better, but often intensify the commodification of every moment. These tools extend workplace logics into personal life, encouraging users to maximize output in all domains. Meanwhile, the same technologies that supposedly save time—email, smartphones, social media—create constant demands for attention and response, fragmenting time into ever-smaller units and eroding boundaries between work and rest. A more liberatory approach requires shifting focus from individual time management to collective temporal justice. This means examining how time is distributed in society, who has autonomy over their time, and how economic systems could be redesigned to value care, creativity, and ecological regeneration rather than just efficiency and productivity. Rather than asking how individuals can squeeze more activities into limited hours, we might ask more fundamental questions: Why are some people's hours valued so much more than others? Who benefits from the current organization of time? What alternative temporal frameworks might better serve human flourishing?

Chapter 3: Ecological Time vs. Clock Time: Reconnecting with Natural Rhythms

Ecological time presents a profound challenge to human temporal frameworks, particularly those shaped by industrial capitalism. Natural systems operate across vastly different timescales—from the microseconds of insect wing beats to the millennia of forest succession to the epochs of geological transformation. These diverse temporalities exist in complex, interconnected relationships that industrial time has systematically ignored and disrupted, with increasingly catastrophic consequences. The mismatch between ecological and industrial temporalities lies at the heart of our environmental crisis. Capitalism's drive for continuous growth and immediate profit fundamentally conflicts with natural regenerative cycles. Fossil fuel extraction represents this temporal disjunction in its most extreme form—burning in minutes what took millions of years to create. Similarly, industrial agriculture imposes artificial timeframes on natural processes, using chemicals and genetic modification to accelerate growth beyond sustainable limits. These interventions treat nature as a resource to be optimized rather than a complex temporal system with its own rhythms and requirements. Indigenous knowledge systems offer alternative temporal frameworks more aligned with ecological realities. Many indigenous cultures maintain sophisticated calendrical systems based on close observation of local environmental changes rather than abstract numerical sequences. These systems integrate human activities with natural cycles through practices like seasonal harvesting, controlled burning, and ceremonial observances tied to ecological events. Such knowledge represents not primitive superstition but sophisticated temporal intelligence developed through generations of relationship with specific landscapes. These traditions demonstrate how human temporal practices can be synchronized with, rather than imposed upon, ecological rhythms. The biological basis of human temporality further challenges the notion that mechanical time represents our "natural" temporal experience. Our bodies contain multiple internal clocks - circadian rhythms, hormonal cycles, digestive patterns - that evolved in response to environmental cues like sunlight, temperature, and seasonal changes. The imposition of standardized schedules often conflicts with these embodied temporalities, contributing to health problems ranging from sleep disorders to metabolic dysfunction. The growing field of chronobiology reveals how deeply our wellbeing depends on maintaining temporal coherence between bodily rhythms and environmental patterns. Reconnecting with ecological time requires developing what geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls "timefulness" - an expanded temporal perception that recognizes the deep history and future implications embedded in present landscapes. This involves cultivating attention to the multiple temporalities operating in any environment: the geological processes visible in rock formations, the ecological successions revealed in forest structures, the atmospheric patterns expressed in weather systems. Such perception doesn't require specialized scientific knowledge but rather a shift in attention that allows us to read the temporal signatures present in our surroundings. Practical approaches to reconnecting with ecological time might include bioregional practices that synchronize human activities with local seasonal patterns, temporal design that accommodates natural rhythms in built environments, or simply regular immersion in natural settings where mechanical time recedes in importance. These practices aren't about romanticizing a pre-industrial past but rather developing temporal intelligence appropriate to our current ecological challenges. By expanding our temporal perception beyond the narrow confines of clock time, we can begin to imagine and implement more sustainable relationships between human systems and the ecological processes upon which they depend.

Chapter 4: Leisure as Resistance: Beyond Productive Time

Genuine leisure has become increasingly difficult to experience in a culture where time is fundamentally conceived as an economic resource. The dominant temporal paradigm evaluates all activities through the lens of productivity, transforming even ostensibly recreational pursuits into forms of work. Social media platforms encourage users to curate leisure experiences as personal brand assets, while wellness practices are justified through their contributions to workplace performance. This instrumentalization of leisure reflects what philosopher Josef Pieper identified as a fundamental inversion: rather than work serving as a means to enable leisure, leisure has become subordinated to work. The commodification of leisure is particularly evident in the tourism and hospitality industries, which market experiences as products to be consumed efficiently. Travel influencers showcase carefully staged moments of "authentic" relaxation that paradoxically require extensive behind-the-scenes labor. Luxury resorts promise rejuvenation through programmed activities designed to maximize experiential return on investment. Even mindfulness and meditation practices are frequently marketed as productivity tools rather than as ends in themselves. This commercialization transforms leisure from a qualitatively different mode of being into another form of consumption within the same economic logic that governs work. Historical and cross-cultural perspectives reveal alternative conceptions of leisure that challenge this instrumentalization. Ancient Greek philosophers distinguished between ascholia (busy-ness) and scholē (leisure), viewing the latter not as mere recreation but as a contemplative state essential for human flourishing. Similarly, many indigenous cultures maintain cyclical temporal patterns that integrate periods of activity and rest according to natural rhythms rather than economic imperatives. These traditions suggest that leisure isn't merely the absence of work but a distinct mode of temporal experience characterized by receptivity rather than productivity. The devaluation of non-productive time disproportionately affects marginalized communities. Those performing essential but undervalued care work - predominantly women and people of color - often lack access to socially recognized leisure. Low-wage workers facing unpredictable schedules struggle to coordinate social time with friends and family. Meanwhile, the wealthy increasingly signal status through conspicuous displays of busyness rather than leisure, reinforcing productivity as a moral virtue. These patterns reveal how temporal inequality intersects with other forms of social stratification, creating hierarchies of who deserves rest and who must remain perpetually productive. Reclaiming leisure as resistance requires challenging the fundamental equation of time with money. This means creating temporal spaces protected from market logic - periods where efficiency, optimization, and productivity are deliberately suspended. Such resistance might take various forms: embracing activities with no instrumental purpose, protecting collective temporal commons like weekends and holidays, or practicing forms of attention that prioritize presence over outcome. These practices aren't merely personal lifestyle choices but political acts that challenge the commodification of human experience. Ultimately, genuine leisure offers a glimpse of temporal autonomy beyond the constraints of economic rationality. When we experience time as abundance rather than scarcity, as quality rather than quantity, we access modes of being that cannot be captured by market metrics. This doesn't mean abandoning all temporal structure or responsibility, but rather recognizing that human flourishing requires rhythms of engagement and withdrawal, productivity and receptivity. By creating spaces where time can be experienced differently, we begin to imagine alternatives to the dominant temporal regime and its reduction of human experience to economic value.

Chapter 5: Social Death and Temporal Exclusion

Temporal exclusion functions as a powerful mechanism of social marginalization. Certain populations are systematically denied access to socially valued time through various institutional and cultural practices. Incarceration represents perhaps the most extreme form of temporal exclusion, forcibly removing individuals from shared social time and subjecting them to rigid institutional schedules. Prison sentences are literally measured in time, with "life" representing the ultimate temporal penalty. Yet beyond this formal sentence, incarceration creates profound temporal distortions: the paradoxical experience of time that simultaneously drags interminably and disappears without meaningful differentiation. This temporal dislocation continues after release, as formerly incarcerated people face a society that has moved on without them. The concept of "social death" illuminates how temporal exclusion operates across various marginalized groups. First developed by Orlando Patterson to analyze slavery, social death describes conditions where individuals are denied full recognition as temporal subjects with pasts and futures. This manifests in multiple forms: the unemployed person whose time is devalued as "empty" rather than recognized as a legitimate form of temporal experience; the asylum seeker trapped in bureaucratic limbo, unable to plan for a future; the person with disabilities whose pace of movement or communication is treated as deviant rather than valid. In each case, the individual is positioned outside "normal" time, their temporal experience delegitimized. Racial dynamics profoundly shape temporal exclusion in ways that extend beyond formal institutions. As scholar Brittney Cooper argues, white supremacy operates partly through control over time - determining whose time matters, whose is expendable, and who sets the temporal standards against which others are judged. This manifests in everyday experiences like what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "the robbery of time" - the countless moments Black Americans must spend navigating racism, preparing for potential discrimination, or recovering from its effects. Similarly, indigenous peoples face temporal violence through colonial disruptions of cultural continuity and traditional temporal practices, creating what some scholars describe as "temporal dispossession." Care work reveals another dimension of temporal inequality. Those performing essential care labor - predominantly women and particularly women of color - experience what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls a "time bind" between paid employment and unpaid care responsibilities. This work follows a fundamentally different temporal logic from wage labor, responding to human needs that cannot be neatly scheduled or optimized. Yet care time remains largely invisible in economic calculations, creating forms of temporal exploitation that disproportionately affect already marginalized groups. The devaluation of care time reflects broader patterns of whose temporal experience counts in social and economic systems. Digital technologies have created new forms of temporal exclusion even as they promise greater connectivity. The "digital divide" isn't merely about access to devices but about temporal autonomy in digital spaces. Precarious workers in the gig economy face algorithmic management systems that demand constant availability while providing no temporal security. Content moderators for social media platforms process traumatic material at speeds determined by corporate metrics rather than human capacity. Meanwhile, those with greater privilege can purchase temporal protections like ad-free experiences or premium services that reduce waiting time. These digital temporal hierarchies often reinforce existing social stratifications. Addressing temporal exclusion requires recognizing time as a dimension of social justice. This means moving beyond individual time management toward collective temporal rights: the right to meaningful temporal autonomy, to temporal experiences that align with human needs rather than market demands, and to equal participation in shared social time. It means designing institutions and technologies that accommodate diverse temporal needs rather than imposing uniform standards. Most fundamentally, it requires challenging the assumption that some people's time is inherently more valuable than others - an assumption deeply embedded in our economic and social systems.

Chapter 6: Building Alternative Temporal Commons

The concept of temporal commons offers a powerful framework for reimagining time beyond market logic. Just as physical commons provide shared resources managed by communities rather than markets or states, temporal commons create spaces where alternative temporalities can flourish. These commons challenge the hegemony of clock time and its associated values of efficiency, productivity, and linear progress. Temporal commons take diverse forms across different contexts. Religious practices often create distinct temporal zones governed by non-market values—Sabbath observances, prayer times, or meditation retreats that temporarily suspend ordinary temporal demands. Cultural traditions like siestas, carnival seasons, or harvest festivals similarly carve out alternative temporal experiences. Even within capitalist societies, certain institutions maintain different temporal logics—universities with their academic calendars, artistic communities with their emphasis on process over product, or mutual aid networks that value care time differently than wage labor. Creating effective temporal commons requires both physical infrastructure and social agreements. Public spaces designed for non-commercial activities provide essential foundations for alternative temporalities. Libraries, parks, community gardens, and cultural centers can serve as "temporal shelters" where different rhythms prevail. Meanwhile, formal and informal agreements—from labor regulations limiting work hours to neighborhood quiet times—protect shared temporal resources from encroachment. These commons work best when communities actively participate in their creation and maintenance, developing norms and practices that reflect collective values. Digital technologies present both threats and opportunities for temporal commons. On one hand, always-on connectivity erodes temporal boundaries, extending market logic into previously protected times and spaces. On the other hand, digital tools can facilitate new forms of temporal coordination and resource-sharing. Time banks that allow community members to exchange services based on time rather than money, open-source software projects that value contribution over credentials, or mutual aid networks coordinated through digital platforms all represent potential digital temporal commons. Labor movements have historically played crucial roles in establishing temporal commons through struggles for shorter workdays, paid vacations, and protected rest periods. Today, campaigns for four-day workweeks, right-to-disconnect laws, and universal basic income continue this tradition, seeking to reclaim time from market domination. These efforts recognize that temporal autonomy represents a fundamental aspect of freedom and dignity—one that requires collective action rather than just individual choice. The most radical temporal commons challenge not just how time is distributed but how it is conceptualized. Indigenous temporal frameworks that emphasize cyclical patterns and relational time; disability justice movements that advocate for "crip time" recognizing diverse embodied temporalities; feminist approaches that value care time and reproductive labor—all these offer profound alternatives to dominant temporal regimes. By creating spaces where these alternative temporalities can be experienced and practiced, temporal commons nurture the imagination needed for broader systemic change.

Chapter 7: Finding Agency in Uncertain Futures

The climate crisis has profoundly disrupted conventional temporal frameworks, creating what some scholars call "temporal dissonance" - a gap between official narratives of progress and lived experiences of ecological breakdown. Traditional linear conceptions of time, with their assumptions of continuous improvement and predictable futures, become increasingly untenable as climate instability accelerates. This temporal disruption manifests in various ways: the compression of previously distant climate scenarios into immediate threats, the uncanny experience of "weather weirding" that disrupts seasonal expectations, and the cognitive dissonance between daily routines and awareness of systemic collapse. These conditions create a temporal vertigo that can lead either to paralysis or to new forms of agency. Confronting uncertain futures requires developing what philosopher Hannah Arendt called "the gap between past and future" - a space of potential action that exists between deterministic interpretations of history and fatalistic projections of inevitability. This temporal gap represents neither blind optimism nor resigned pessimism but rather a position of critical agency within contingent conditions. It acknowledges both the constraints of our historical moment and the openings for intervention that always exist within any situation. This perspective rejects both the techno-optimist belief that innovation will automatically solve environmental problems and the collapse narrative that renders human action futile. Indigenous approaches to time offer crucial resources for navigating uncertain futures. Many indigenous traditions maintain what Kyle Powys Whyte calls "spiraling time" - a conception that sees past, present, and future as mutually informing rather than strictly sequential. From this perspective, ancestral knowledge isn't outdated information but living guidance for contemporary challenges, while present actions are understood through their implications for future generations. This temporal orientation fosters both historical accountability and future responsibility without assuming linear progress or predetermined outcomes. It suggests that meaningful agency exists precisely in the relationships between temporal dimensions rather than in mastery over time. Practical approaches to finding agency include developing what Michelle Bastian calls "temporal literacy" - the ability to read and respond to multiple, overlapping temporalities beyond clock time. This involves recognizing the various temporal scales operating in any situation: the immediate timescales of daily life, the institutional timescales of policy and planning, the ecological timescales of environmental processes, and the intergenerational timescales of cultural continuity. Temporal literacy allows for strategic intervention across these scales, identifying leverage points where present actions can influence longer-term trajectories without claiming complete control over outcomes. The concept of "prefigurative politics" offers another approach to agency in uncertain times. Rather than deferring change to some future moment when conditions are ideal, prefigurative practices embody alternative temporal arrangements in the present. Examples include intentional communities experimenting with sustainable rhythms, mutual aid networks creating care-centered temporalities, or artistic practices that cultivate different modes of attention and presence. These experiments don't claim to solve global temporal problems but rather create lived experiences of alternative possibilities that can inform broader transformations. Finding agency in uncertain futures ultimately requires embracing what Rebecca Solnit calls "hope in the dark" - not optimism based on certainty of outcomes, but commitment to meaningful action despite uncertainty. This perspective recognizes that history is made through countless interventions whose full significance cannot be known in advance. It suggests that temporal agency doesn't mean controlling the future but rather participating responsibly in its emergence. By creating a gap between deterministic narratives of both past and future, we can discover forms of agency appropriate to our precarious moment, neither overestimating nor underestimating our capacity to influence what comes next.

Summary

Time is not an abstract, neutral medium flowing uniformly around us but a socially constructed relationship deeply shaped by power, culture, and history. By examining how our dominant temporal frameworks emerged alongside capitalism and colonialism, we can begin to see alternatives that might lead toward greater freedom and connection. The liberation of time requires moving beyond individual management techniques to address structural inequalities in temporal autonomy while also cultivating different ways of experiencing and sharing time. The path forward involves both political struggles for temporal justice and everyday practices of attention and relationship. By reconnecting with ecological temporalities, building alternative temporal communities, and challenging deterministic narratives about the future, we can begin to inhabit time differently. This shift is not merely conceptual but practical and ethical—it changes how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world. In a moment of intersecting crises, reimagining time offers not an escape from reality but a deeper engagement with the contingency and possibility that exists in every moment.

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Jenny Odell

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