SAVING TIME by Jenny Odell is a critical examination of the ways in which we experience and spend time, in the vein of her prior book, HOW TO DO NOTHING. Like the previous effort, SAVING TIME places personal observation in dialogue with philosophers, drawing on a rich cultural tradition of self-examination.

There is a lot to like in SAVING TIME - in today's brisk hustle culture, it's worth a critical examination of why it is that we do what we do. The beginning of the book really shines in highlighting the historical legacy of timekeeping at work and at home, and how it is embedded with the history of slavery and the rise of industrial labor. Multiple examples help demonstrate the ways in which our "objective" sense of time is historically contingent, and I thought the exploration of different cultures' definitions of seasons helped drive home the ways in which our modern structures of time are artificial inventions.

However, I thought that the rest of the book didn't cohere quite as well as HOW TO DO NOTHING did. The interplay of cultural commentary and personal observations didn't come together quite as neatly as the prior book (which was intrinsically about close observation of our world), and it felt like I was reading two separate books rather than one unifying whole, at times. The writing is beautiful throughout, but I found myself skimming more aggressively through some sections.

Overall, I'd recommend this book, particularly the first third, to those looking for a different way to understand how to spend their time in the world, one that challenges conventional notions of "productivity" to consider how we should spend our time doing what matters most to us in the world, and how to exist in harmony with the world around us. I do look forward to seeing what other work Jenny Odell will produce in the future.