Factually! with Adam Conover - Saving Time Is For Suckers with Jenny Odell

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Our conception of time is a construct, so why does it have so much power over us? Adam and author Jenny Odell delve into the history of "time" as we know it, and how the popular obsession with trying to make the most of every second is a losing battle. Pick up Jenny's book at factuallypod.com/books SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know

and that you might not know. Both of our minds are going to get blown together and we're going to have so much fun doing it. Now, this week on the show, we're talking about time. I often find myself obsessed with my time and how I use it. You know, I'll schedule meetings down to the minute. I'll try and fit as much as I possibly can into every single day because I know that time is a limited and precious resource. So I bend over backwards to make productive use of every last second. But of course, doing all this makes me absolutely miserable. On my deathbed, am I going to feel more peace because of the extra emails and lunch meetings I crammed

into my calendar decades earlier? Or am I going to wish I spent a little bit more time relaxing and playing video games? You know, it can't be the case that cramming as much work in as possible is the best and only use of my time. In fact, the truth is that looking at time this way through the lens of productivity as a finite resource that we have to use wisely, well, that's just one way of looking at time. In fact, the very idea that time is this objective, jointly shared resource is pretty new. In the past, humans experienced other forms of time. Before the modern era, farm life, the life most people lived, was regulated in large

part by nature. The seasons decided what kind of work needed to be done. The amount of light decided how much work could be done. Weekends and happy hours didn't mean shit. Your time was managed by the field and the sun, not by the clock. Even sleep was very different until quite recently. Every night was actually a two-act play.

Across Europe, people would have something they called a first sleep that began around sunset. Then at midnight, they'd wake up to hang out, have sex, do chores, or just futz around before they went back to bed for their second sleep. Then they'd wake up at daybreak and begin the cycle known as biphasic sleep again. And this wasn't inherently better. I'm not suggesting you live this way, but it was a very different way to organize time. And guess what? If you wanted to do something at the same exact time as your friend

in another town, well, there was no shared clock, so you just couldn't. Everyone, in a sense, operated according to their own clock. But all of that changed with the Industrial Revolution, which quantified, mechanized, and synchronized our use of time. In the factory, the clock operated the same all year, no matter what the season or where you were, and you better believe it was controlled by the boss. But it wasn't just workers who had to obey this new chronological master. Schools began to operate by regular hours, and women running households were urged to formalize their routines and set things like regular mealtimes for when the menfolk returned from the factory. Time, which used to serve us, started to control us. This capitalist notion of

time is really a form of discipline. It makes time a servant of productivity. And though we've accepted it as normal, it's definitely not natural. So the next time you're feeling stressed out because that ticking clock is bearing down on you, remember, that is just one form of time. There are others. If we look on larger timescales, much larger, well, there's geologic time. There's natural time. And if we look inward at ourselves, at the biological rhythms that rule us,

well, there's no question that your body follows its own time scale as well. And these are just the beginnings of different ways to think about time. Our guest today wrote an incredible and fascinating book on the topic. She's one of my favorite guests we've ever had on the show, and I'm so excited to have her back. Her name is Jenny O'Dell. She's an artist and an author, and she was a guest a couple of years back to discuss her first book, How to Do Nothing. Her most recent book is called Saving Time, Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. I'm so excited to have her back on the show. But before we get to the interview, I want to remind you that if you want to support

this show, you can do so on Patreon. I am so grateful to the community of people who listen to this show and come back week after week. If you'd like to join them, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We would love to have you. And if you love stand-up comedy, just a reminder that I am going on tour this year. If you live in Maryland, Rhode Island, or St. Louis, or anywhere else in the country, head to adamconover.net to find tickets and tour dates. I do a meet and greet after every show.

I would love to see you there. And now without further ado, let's get to this interview with Jenny O'Dell. Jenny, thank you so much for being on the show again. Thanks for having me. You are one of my favorite guests we've ever had on this show. We've rerun the past episode

that we did with you in the past because it was just one of my favorites. I wanted people to hear it again. Please go back and listen to that interview, folks, if you haven't heard about Jenny's previous book, How to Do Nothing. You have a new book out called Saving Time. What is this book about? It is... Sorry. I mean, no, it's okay. My friend and I have this joke that it's like about like time, man, you know, like, you know, like, what is time? No, I mean, it is. I mean, it is about, okay, it's about different ways of thinking about time. But it's, there are a lot of books about that, that are all very fascinating.

um but i think mine is is more specifically motivated by like this very contemporary feeling of on the one hand always feeling like you're racing against the clock which is like a burnout feeling but at the same time feeling like you're living at the end of time and how sort of demoralizing that feels and so it's it's written it's it's my attempt to kind of like write through that or like find some way of relating to time, whether that's, you know, time as money, mortality, climate dread, like find some way of thinking about time in which it's not punishing. yeah the the fact that you mentioned that about the way it feels like we're living at the end of time that is such a pervasive notion that i just heard people start saying around 2016 uh coincidentally people started saying people started saying well the world's ending well what you know what are we gonna oh we're all fucked oh we're all gonna if there is another president ever you know like that that sort of thing this like this sort of bizarre apocalyptic thinking you know uh about oh we're living at the end of history there's not going to be another generation after us um which to me seemed like a very distorted way to think because that's not the

case there's nothing that's happening right now is truly that different from, you know, really, it's not like we're living through World War I or World War II, you know, which were moments of huge historical rupture. There is historical rupture happening now, but it's on a scale that, you know, has also happened in the last couple hundred years. Yet there is this pervasive sense that it's all ending and it's all over. And a lot of that, obviously, there's been political change in the United States. It's also been the pandemic was a big cause of that kind of thinking. How did the pandemic change your notion of time?

I mean, it was kind of interesting because I wrote the proposal right before the pandemic started, which is, I think, surprising to a lot of people because- The proposal for the book. Yeah. Yeah. Because it sounds like something that would have occurred to someone during the pandemic, that time is weird, right? So actually what happened was I had already thought about it a lot and I had written the proposal and I was you know about to start writing it and then the pandemic started so so the way that it affected it was it just it honestly either like affirmed a lot of the questions that I was setting out to research

anyway um or it made things that I was thinking about maybe abstractly feel more immediate to me. Right. Like I, like one of the things that I had wanted to research was this notion of like abstract time, like time as like stuff that you buy, right. For example, or that you hoard or that you organize, or you make more efficient as opposed to like time, just being things that happen like in an an ecosystem or in your body or whatnot. And in one of those scenarios, time is very interchangeable and empty.

And the other one is very concrete and full. And so I was already wanting to think about that. And then I was really struck personally by how, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, when there was kind of no end in sight, I was like, oh, this is that sense of time where all days are the same. You remember all those memes about, oh, it's the 47th of March. Yes. You know, right? There was this, because the kind of social structures around time were gone for a lot of people. A lot of the things that help us unconsciously mark time, like just Fridays, the existence of

Fridays where, oh, there's happy hour that I'll go out to with my friends or whatever. That sort of stopped existing. Once we were all working from home, It's like, well, I mean, I'll work on Saturday too, or whatever. Like it was, I keep a, um, uh, a five-year journal where every page has an entry for the same day for five years. It was like January 1st, 2018, January 1st, 2019, January 1st, 2020, January 21, 2022. And so I write a journal entry on that page. I recently completed my first of these. And now I'm on to my second five years every time I write a journal entry

I can see the previous entries from the previous year which is part of my own way of sort of charting time and when I started to get to it was 2021 and 2022 I was looking back at the ones from 2020 all my entries are like they're all the same

it's like woke up and did, had zoom meetings, made dinner, played video game, went to sleep. Like all the days are blurring together. I, what is time? Like I started to get really existentialist in my journal entries, um, in a way that I no longer am. It was like almost sort of, I had a sense of like weird vertigo, I think at the time. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, um, I mean, that was kind of my experience as well. I mean, in my case, it's sort of weird cause I was working on the book, but I was also teaching. Um, and yeah, but I had my, you know, it was like, it was either I was on the computer or I was like going on the same walk, um, around

the same part of my neighborhood. Um, and there was also a weird part of the pandemic where the parks were closed around me. Um, so you couldn't go into the parks. That was really, I was just going on kind of the same like circuit over and over again. Um, and so I think for that reason, like I, yeah, it was just an opportunity for me to, to like be like inhabit that kind of sense of time and see how much it was tied to despair.

Because like if, if all, if time is like, if all time is the same or it feels that way. And, you know, thinking about that time, it's like,

you see these like blocks of time stretching into the future um i think in the book i call it like i was i was like just experiencing blocks of time in my box of a room like day after day like this kind of endlessness and repetition um it makes it really hard to imagine a future that's different. Yeah. Like, or, or to imagine that like something might happen in a moment in the future that you can't anticipate necessarily right now, or you can't see.

And it really lends itself to this, like the, the idea of like the foregone conclusion. Like I, it's like the sort of like, which I associate with climate dread. Like I, I know it's going to be bad.

So I'm just going to give up because, because I literally can't imagine it going any other way. I can't imagine it going like differently. And, you know, for me, like those, that was also part of the pandemic experience. Cause like, you know, here in California, we had those fires in 2020, it was like September, 2020. And like the, the experience of actually watching the sky get darker between 10 and 11 AM here and being able to see like my neighbor across the streets,

like laptop as like she and I are both just continuing to work through this disaster, you know? You know, it's like hard i i think um i i think it helped me understand that a lot of the this inability to think or unwillingness to think about the future it just comes from being comes it comes from like exhaustion like it's easier to just let it go yeah it's like either blind optimism or blind pessimism are easier to inhabit than like something in between. Then what do you actually do to fix a situation or to make any progress in a situation? Like it's, yeah, it's a little bit easier to throw your hands up, but it's also natural when I remember that time. I mean, I remember being in, it was, yeah,

the late summer of 2020 being, I've been stuck inside for four or five months now. There's an unprecedented civil unrest because of, you know, against racial injustice and violence in America. There's cops beating people in downtown Los Angeles, arresting people, killing people. And also there's unprecedented forest fires and I cannot actually leave my home without wearing a mask, not just because of COVID, but also now because of like particulate smoke. Like if I'm outside for more than half an hour, I get a headache. And I was like, wow, this is the worst it could be. I mean, unless we were like, you know, actively, I don't know, being bombed by planes from the air, like, you know, being in London during the Blitz or something, that would be worse. But I remember feeling this sense that I could succumb to despair in that way.

And also this feeling of, you know, I'm a stand up comic. I like going out and doing shows. I'm doing that right now. Last night I got to go do a show, my favorite thing, you know, and hang out with other standup comics and make people laugh. And I remember being there going, I'm never going to do that again. Like I'm going to, how could I, I'm going to be stuck in my, in my house. My I'm lucky to have a comfortable house with like good air filtration, you know, so I'm like not in direct danger, but you're right. It narrows your narrows your possibilities.

And so the experience of time that you're talking about there is you are contrasting abstract time with the experience of just one thing happening after another. So can we talk about that more? What do you, what do you mean by those two ways of experiencing time? Yeah. I mean, if you think about I mean, one example, you know, because I live in the Bay Area and I grew up here. I mean, actually, so just side note, something that was kind of shocking to me was when I was reading about the colonization in time and the idea of the four seasons. Yeah. Like the fact that a lot of places don't have four seasons. Oh my God. This is my favorite topic. Please go into this. Oh, okay. So, you know, like that's, there are a lot of

things that were exported from Europe time-wise, right? Like through colonization. And that's one of them is like, yeah, like one places, um, kind of scheme of seasons, right. Being imposed onto places that have, you know, not four seasons might have like 12 seasons or, you know, it depends on how you define a season. Right. We experienced this in Los Angeles because our notion of seasons came from, you know, the westwards expansion of, you know, white Europeans from east to west. And if, you know, growing up where I lived in Long Island, yes, four seasons does make sense in that climate here in LA. People still say, oh, it's June summer started because we have that notion of seasons, but right now it is June and it is like 60 degrees out and cloudy and like a little drizzly today. Cause that's what June is like in Los Angeles. It doesn't get hot until July and then it stays hot until like mid NovemberNovember here.

And so you're talking about just what is the hot season? That's what it is. But we also don't really have a spring. We've got really a dry season and a wet season. And so flowers bloom around January because that's when the rains have come. But we're applying these terms that don't, you know, just that don't apply because people just like brought them over from New York. And as you say, they brought them over from, uh, Europe before, from, from England and Holland before then, or the Netherlands. I mean, yeah, right.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, and I think it's a, it's a really good, um, example of how language and framing will, will change what you see and it or can make you insensitive to something that's actually happening right like like if someone is is has the framework of the four seasons they might not be as liable to notice like those actual patterns that you're describing yeah and then and then for me it was even worse i uh there was you know there's this notion that the bay area doesn't have seasons which is like definitely a new york person thing to say right but um it's and it's like and i grew up and i just completely internalized that to the point where i i in my childhood memory there

aren't really seasons like i don't i was not paying attention to like the these obvious changes that are very obvious to me now you know i mean like what are those changes um like so we have like our thing our spring is kind of similar right like it's it starts really early i mean early right compared to what people consider spring but um there's like like there's definitely like waves of things that flower and it's very distinct. Right. And you know, when it's starting,

um, cause it starts really fast. Um, and then, you know, there's, it's followed by another wave, but it's like,

they're, they're like the Douglas Iris is like this flower that I think of as showing up. Like it just shows up all of a sudden, like early in the year when it starts raining. And like, so, um,

you know, there's just uh there's i don't know how many seasons numerically we have but but that is you know to me one example of of time where obviously not all time is the same no moment is the same especially during those parts of the year when things are changing really fast like i in the book i talk about that branch that i basically chose a branch of a tree to pay attention to pretty much for the entire pandemic um because i was walking past it all the time and it's part of a california buckeye tree which has these when it does flower it has these amazing like tall flower stalks um and you know i uh i was just in australia for three weeks and right before i left i saw like the first little flower had opened on one of the stalks and i was like oh no i'm gonna miss it like i got so worried i thought about it a lot while i was gone i was

like is it gonna be over by the time you know and's like, and then I got back and it was like the whole tree had flowered. Like it's just all flowers right now. And as I mentioned in the book, it's my favorite smell. But one of the reasons it's my favorite smell is because I have to wait for it. And I think that that's, that's the other thing about this kind of sense of time is like, I think there's a lot about, um, there's a lot of our culture that's geared towards convenience and, and it can make you believe that, that what you want is to have anything you want whenever you want. That sounds good.

Right. Like, but it's actually, it, it like leads to meaninglessness in my opinion, like the whole reason things are enjoyable a lot of the time is because you have to wait for them and because they only happen in certain places in certain times and that's why i love i love when there's really like niche festivals for things you know

like um like in way super northern california there's a marbled godwit festival which is like all this festival for like this one kind of bird that shows up, you know, this migratory bird. Um, and it's like, people are just so excited, but you know, it's the same thing with like pumpkins or like things that like, you know, it's like, Oh, it's that time of year again. We're excited. You know? Yeah. Bird migrations are a wonderful example of this that, uh, you know, I've been bird watching for the last couple of years. Actually, I, I started birdwatching around the time that I read your first book, which also talked about birdwatching as being a way to, uh, escape the attention economy and

notice the world around you. And, and, uh, my own form of, of meditation that isn't in an app. It's just, you know, I can, I can go out and get out and get lost uh you know in a little piece of nature and and just like look at stuff for an hour or two is is really restorative um and i go down to the la river which is my favorite spot in la it's really you know it's like this this dug out concrete channel but there's a surprising amount of bird life there i've probably seen like 50 different species of birds um in this channel next to the freeway. And the first year I was doing it, I was like, oh my God, there's, I saw so many ducks. I saw a duck I haven't seen before. I saw a wood duck and I saw a widgeon. I love wood ducks. I wanted to see a wood duck so much. I finally saw one. I was so excited. They're so cool looking. Guys, if you're listening to this, go Google image search.

Immediately Google wood duck. Yeah. Look up a wood duck. They look like little dolls or something. They're like so perfectly like painted. Also, they look like mallards, but like fancy. Yeah. Yeah.

Like a fancy little duck. But they are actually, everyone imagines a duck, you imagine a mallard. They are really the canonical American duck. They're the really duck lovers know the wood duck. It'sines a duck. You imagine a mallard. They are really the canonical American duck. They're the, they're the really duck lovers. No, the wood duck. It's their favorite duck. So anyway, I, so I was saying that to a friend who also birdwatches and she was like, oh yeah, it's duck season. It's winter. It's like, you know, that's when we get ducks in, in around here. And now I know that about the area that I live in. People like there's no seasons in LA. People said about LA too. Well, no, there's a duck season and there's also a hummingbird season where we have

more hummingbirds. And, and, uh, these are like other, this is a really, once you start looking for it, a really nourishing way to, to chart time, because there's sort of always something happening that you can watch and, and look at. Uh, and it's really in contrast with this other form of time. We're talking about abstract time, time where, uh, you, it's a commodity, it's a quantity that you're trying to save and you're trying to use as effectively as possible. And most of the time I feel myself trapped in that kind of thinking, you know, like literally I'll be walking down the street and be like, oh wait, if I use this little trick, I can get across the street a

little bit sooner and not have to wait for the, for the walk sign. And I'll have saved some time I can use on something else. And then I start thinking, wait, if I do that a lot, I can like really save up some time as though I'm like saving money and putting it in an account that's going to bear interest. Right. But another way, this is crazy. What am I going to use this for? Like, what, what am I, what am I saving? So what is your relationship with that form of time? And do you find it's, it's something that you, you feel you need to escape from as well? Yeah. I mean, I think anyone who's, you know, uh, I mean, that, that's just kind of like the unfortunately like the dominant language of time i think for a lot of people in a lot of places um and i think i think in the book i

compare it to like you know if i turn on the tv like most of the channels will be in english right it's like most of the ways that people talk about time are this really, you know, historically specific, but ubiquitous way of conceiving of time. That does, I think, take a lot of conscious effort to let go of, especially because it's not it's not just you. Right. It's like how other is all around you. It's like how everyone talks about time. Um, so I guess, and I, I mean, I should also say like, it's a, it's, I try to think of it as like, there are times when you have to think about time that way. Like, um, I, I think, um, I think the problem is when you sort of internalize it and start to believe that that is actually what time is like i've been really surprised at the resistance that you will get if you say really simple things like like you know minutes and hours aren't real like like

i feel like that's self-evident you know but but like people will be like what do you mean minutes minutes and hours you know it's like, what do you mean minutes, minutes and hours? You know, it's like, well, what do you mean by that? Whether there aren't minutes and hours. Uh, well, I, so, okay. Minutes and hours are a way of measuring time and they are. And again, I would compare them to a language. And I think the important thing for me that I kind of found in, in researching other ways of marking time and the history of how time has been measured is that obviously human beings have always needed to do that.

Like time is important for us. And we've needed to coordinate activities and time things like forever, basically. Right. and time things like forever basically right um but every system of marking time is is kind of married to some kind of overarching goal right like whether that's survival and like mutual flourishing or like capitalism and so you know like the the the whole notion of And so, you know, like the whole notion of time that exists separately from natural cues where you can have something called an hour that exists. Like an hour here is an hour there. And the hour is this like unchanging kind of receptacle for something is not something that you get until people have the need or the desire to buy the labor time of other people like it it goes with that goal so like it's it's real insofar as like yeah we all

live according to the system now like i'm not denying that i'm not saying that like you could suddenly wake up tomorrow and be like i don't believe in minutes and hours like i'm just gonna do whatever but like but it's also not true that minutes and hours have any are like the fundamental structure of time and are like the only way that time can be measured i mean again i think this goes without saying but but i just think sometimes like i've run into like how like deep-seated that is and like the way people think about time it's a collective it's a collective fiction that that way of looking at time that we all maintain because it's sometimes useful for us to, and it's especially useful for capitalism for us to maintain this version of time. But it's not, it's, we came up with it.

We could change it. Similar to money, right? When people point out, well, as a matter of fact, we made up money and it's not like a natural resource that some people naturally don't have enough of. We could, in fact, just collectively decide that everybody could have the same amount of money because we did, in fact, just make it up. And there's reasons that we don't, but we can acknowledge that it's a fiction and time is the is the same way. Yeah. Yeah. I was really struck by during the pandemic, how precise my notion of time got. Like once I moved to Zoom meetings, everything being on Zoom meetings, it got so precise. Like I'd just be sitting in front of my computer all day.

I have a Zoom meeting at two and it would be 1.58. And I'd be like, I got plenty of time before I got to get into that Zoom meeting. Because like I'm going to log into that zoom meeting precisely at two. And I know that everybody else on the other end, because we're all stuck at home, they're doing the same thing. They're looking directly at it at the little clock in the right hand corner of their screen. And if it says one 59, they're not clicking that button yet. Right. And that was not how time operated for me, even in a work setting before that, when I was in an office, it's like, people don't look at their watches that much. You know what I mean? And then you

have, then you have to walk to the other person's office. Oh, I got to get a coffee. I got to use the bathroom. Yeah. Well, I'll be right there. You know, that kind of thing. But on zoom, it was like, we, we, this meeting is beginning at two o'clock exactly um yeah and so it's fascinating how technology changes our our sense of time but also not just technology the conditions of all being stuck you know at home in front of clocks but also being on the clock and that we have a work product we need to make in our case it was a television show in your case it might be a a book that you're writing. And there's a huge difference between that

and like, you know, a couple hundred years ago, the way humans thought about time. Yeah. Also, you just made me realize that I feel like Frederick Taylor would have loved remote work. I'm sure someone else has made that observation. Remind us who he is. He was the founder of taylorism which is um

the sort of process of breaking up industrial work tasks into like very minute motions and also like you know designing workspaces so that you know like you reach the furthest distance to to get something basically like hyper efficiency hyper efficiency in the workplace. Um, like, I feel like a lot of people associate that with like the Charlie Chaplin, like assembly line. Yeah. Kind of.

Late 19th century, early 20th century, kind of early 20th century. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it was part of like, I think a larger American kind of,

um, there was efficiency was having a moment. Yeah. And some kind of nefarious ways. Um, and so, uh, but, but I, you know, efficiency was having a moment in some kind of nefarious ways. And so, but,

but I, you know, it was all about, you know, reducing any kind of unnecessary movement or time. Like one of my favorite things actually that I cite in my own book is like, it's from a a book on uh scientific so taylorism was called scientific management there was also scientific office management where people were trying to apply this to office work um and there was a there's part of a scientific office

management book where they were timing how long it takes to to punch time card. And it's broken into like six things. It's like identify card, like pickup card. And it's like, it's literally like 0.0158 seconds. And I'm like, okay, like, how did you, what does identify card? How is that measurable? Yeah. At that point in time.

How long does it take you to find the card in the stack of cards that you would then stamp the card? How do they know that someone's, I don't know. Anyway, I was just like, it's so, and the fact that it's a,

that they're timing, punching a time card. So meta. Anyway, I love that. But anyway, clearly he would have loved remote work because it eliminates the movement from the home to the office.

Like, and as you said, everyone is just like hyper aware of every last minute that they have before and and during work so yeah yeah and and actually i mean that makes total sense because in that same chapter that i talk about taylorism i i i talk about um like remote work surveillance and um that company that is amazingly called staff cop really it's called staff called staff top yeah and this is a company i assume that sells products that allow you to uh spy on your employees to see if they're working when they're remote working yeah measuring measuring productivity which is yeah the same thing as measuring productivity and and policing basically wrapped up into one one product and this and

taylorism by the way is still being used on workers today in fact a lot of uh workers who are engaged in labor struggles like the railroad workers earlier this year their their complaint is scheduling it's that they have been scheduled within an inch of their lives, that it has gotten so efficient and so precise that A, they can't have normal lives anymore because they're constantly being asked to work crazy hours or they're not getting enough hours

in the cases of some other workers. But also it's gotten so efficient that if one person misses a shift or calls in sick, they're actually not allowed to do that because of the whole system breaks down. Yeah. And that's sort of like a focus on using time as efficiently as possible has made like our society really, really brittle. Brittle. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Yeah. But what really strikes me is that that Taylorism idea has infected people's own way of thinking about time. When I think about how many blogs I have read and how many books I have read about productivity, about improving your own productivity with people who, you know, share their, here's how I track every minute of my day to make sure that I'm as productive as possible. You know, and I log it all. And at the end of the day, I review it and I look for the, you know, this, you know,

inefficiencies in my process. It is, it seems like it's a sickness that we have internalized. Yeah. And I was surprised to find how early on that started. Like, so around the same time that they were timing the the punching the time cards um there was this amazing amazingly bad i i really like things that are so bad they're good um and so when i say i like this book that's what i mean um this book called increasing personal efficiency but yeah it's literally like it's written by the psychologist who is so obsessed with taylorism

that he like wants to apply it. He's like, why stop at the factory? And it's tips for thinking more efficiently. He has speed reading tests in the book. And he has a super unscientific map of efficient weather zones. What does that mean um if it's like places where people like think more efficiently because of the weather and then he yeah yeah because of the weather and then he has like a little side note that's like note that the

best universities are all in the high efficiency weather belt i I mean, but I hear that today in that literally I've read studies about how poor air quality reduces productivity because it makes you think more slowly and you'll get less work done. Of course, it more importantly affects your health if you have poor air quality. But I've literally seen that about office settings that you should buy purifiers for your office

because it'll make people work more efficiently. right the reasoning is interesting it's like well as opposed to health yeah yeah yeah right um but yeah so that um i i looked at that book and then i also looked at this amazing magazine called physical culture which was basically like a blend of bodybuilding um what do you call it uh what do you call it when it's like um it's like success gospel what uh prosperity prosperity gospel yeah yeah yeah um and like eugenics basically like all like wrapped into one convenient package um where it's like like i found uh they were really into um like this idea of strategic marriage right like like genetically strategic marriage and there was this one article about genes that was also very unscientific and it was

like it was describing the genes themselves as workers like it was like, this gene works as a, like there's, and it had a little illustration of them, you know, like as like workmen. And it's like, wow, these people really believed that it was like work all the way down.

Yeah. And that like, we are just like working, like the goal of life is to become an efficiently working machine. Yeah. And so it was just interesting to see those early examples because it gives more context to that category of content creators that I refer to as productivity bros. We were talking about crushing your morning and crushing all kinds of things.

Because you see this longer lineage of where this language comes from and where that kind of self-punishing rhetoric also comes from. Because it's like, this makes a lot of sense if you think about it as like, you are both the factory owner and the factory worker now. And you've taken that relationship and now you just have it with yourself. Yeah.

And where that kind of self-punishing- I do this to myself. I push myself way too hard. I'm doing the new hour of standup. I'm touring is largely about this. It's about me pushing myself to build the career in comedy that I've built, but I've also made myself miserable. And I often envision myself standing over myself with a whip, just being like, go, go,

you piece of shit. You know, that's how i kind of talk to myself what are you doing you can't play video games no yeah why would you do that you have emails you need to reply to and then if you once you're done with all the emails no now there's other shit you should do you you need to get ahead of that other project go open your to-do list what if you knocked off a couple more things then you'd be able to get more done like all your heroes you know and it's like it's it it's it infects you and it's toxic to to treat yourself that way uh yeah yeah yeah that's so real do you do that to yourself i mean you're as someone who who wrote a book about this very topic did you sometimes find, because you get a lot done.

I mean, you're a teacher, you're an artist, you're also a writer. You're very productive, Jenny. Are you? It looks that way. Are you toxically productive? No, I think I have like, I mean, it's like, it's as hard for me as it is for anyone else.

And I feel like uh i i have my good times and bad times but but i at least i i feel like the one the thing that i that has changed for me like since i wrote how to do nothing is like it is at least always a question for me that's like hovering in the back like am i am i doing that thing again you know um and i i've been thinking so much lately about um something that i talk about at the end of how did you do nothing which is do nothing farming that um that method that this japanese farmer came up with for rice farming that looks from the outside like um it i mean it requires less labor um like fewer inputs um like no no chemical fertilizer all the stuff that looks like it would it would make no sense

but then his rice farm ends up being more productive than everyone else's and then it it actually allows him to even like create farmable area out of like previously unfarmable area. Anyway, it's very productive in that sense. But if you, if you read his book, he has such a, he's, he has a sense of humor that comes from someone who has a lot of humility, you know? And he's like, I had to mess up so many times, basically to like get to this place. And, and it becomes clear that that method is all about um observation and

respect for the processes that already happen in an ecosystem so it only works because he really understands like the relationships between like the insects and the birds and the plants and and like and at because of that he can do things at the right time in the right way. But he never uses the language of making something do what you want it to do. It's more like, I'm just kind of... Any good gardener will talk this way, right? They're like, I'm just kind of here to try to shape the way things are going. But I know that it could all go wrong tomorrow. And that it's not all completely under my control.

And nor would i want it to be because like in order for it to flourish like i need to rely on processes that are exist outside of me right yeah um and so like i that is like the attitude that i try to have towards myself which is like okay i have some kind of capacity to observe things or write things or whatever. But just like any landscape or ecosystem, you can really mess that up. Like if you try to do the industrial farming thing to yourself, right? Yes. Like, yeah, you can just like we've actually done in this country, right?

Like you can get a certain amount of time out of that and then you've exhausted the soil and then you're just screwed. I love that so much. Uh, it actually, a friend of mine, who's a, uh, fellow TV writer told me that that's what she does is she, she knows how she works best. She observes herself and figures out here's when I do my best work and then allows that to happen rather than push, push, push, push, push saying, wait, hold on a second. When I push in this way, then I don't get the output that I need. I need to build in this time to rest or whatever. And you know, this is, this is how the process actually works. You know? Um, like it's maybe me noticing like, yeah, I need to like get high and

walk around, you know what I mean? Or whatever, whatever. Like that's part of, that's part of my process rather than constantly, you know, beating myself to continue pushing. Um, but look, we have to take a really quick break. We write back, spend a lot more time with Jenny Odell right after this, like get high and walk around, whatever, whatever. That's part of, that's part of my process rather than constantly, you know, beating myself to continue pushing. But look, we have to take a really quick break. We write back to spend a lot more time with Jenny O'Dell right after this. Okay. We're back with Jenny O'Dell.

We've just been talking about this horrible productivity focused way of thinking about time where we subdivide our own time and we try to get as much done as possible. And we try to like sync up with people exactly on the dot and all this sort of thing. Sometimes that kind of timescale is necessary to get certain things done. You have to think that way to have a zoom meeting, but what are some other timescales that we could be thinking about that? And what do we lose when we ignore those timescales? Uh, I mean, I think you, it's almost funny. Like you could almost just look at anything else other than the clock,

right? Like either inward or outward. Like I, um, I mean, yeah, like because I was just overseas, um, experiencing jet lag, I was very aware of the ways in which you literally embody time. Time is in your own rhythms. And you know when they're disrupted. But also looking outward, not just seasons, but things that change throughout the day. I mean, I mentioned in the middle of the book during that part of the pandemic where time felt really like it was at a standstill or it wasn't changing,

that I put a camera on a tripod and pointed it out my window at the sky and was just taking, between various tasks, I would just take a photo and scroll through them later just to kind of convince myself that time was moving forward

because the sky I mean depending on what time of year it is but that you know that was in March right March April right the sky was very dramatic so like there were a lot of clouds it was constantly changing the shadows were changing right so I don't know like I mean in the book I do talk about like geological time as well, like these much, much longer timescales. But I think like what's more important to me than any particular timescale, because, you know, sometimes people will say things like, oh, geological time is helpful for realizing how like insignificant we are, which is like, which true and it's nice to think about sometimes but but i think what's more useful to me like what i think about when i go to the the beach that i describe in the middle of the book is more just the sense of time as being active and dynamic and having change in it um like change unpredictability um being able to recognize the agency of of everything right like outside of the human world um but that that is what feels like useful to me like as a counter

to this feeling that i think really goes hand in hand with abstract time, both on a daily and a kind of historical level, which is like this idea of that humans are like working machines and we live on a world that is inert and doesn't speak back to us at all. Ah, yeah. I, uh, I, I, what I love about geological time, what I love about talking to geologists, by the way, I've never had a geologist on this show. I should, because I love talking to geologists. Yeah.

They're so great. Yeah. They're like very, they're very chill, cool people. There's probably some stressed out geologists, but you know, I've, I've run the perspective they have is they're like, everything is changing all the time. So much, you know, you look at like mountains are like evidence of change. You change you know every every spot on the earth is transforming itself at every moment and that is what it is to study geology and yet i don't see any of it in real time you know i as a person like since the since the invention of geology as a as a study in what the the 19thth century, I believe, or late, late 18th century, maybe they're about like, not much has happened geologically in that very short period of time yet.

It's the study of like huge amounts of change that are, that are happening all around us. And that's that, like gulf between the observed change and like the moment to moment experience of being alive is so cool. Yeah, for sure. And I also think there's things that are there somewhere closer to the middle. Like I there's a book that just came out here in Oakland called Deep Oakland by Andrew Alden, who's awesome geologist who I really leaned on for the parts of my book that are about rocks because I am not a geology expert. So thanks to him.

But he's had this blog called Oakland Geology for more than 15 years. And it's just like how a blog should be. It's like an old school. It's just very consistent. And there's a lot of comments. People are really engaged with these articles. But I've read, you know, all of the ones that are about my neighborhood and the kind of the places that I go hiking, like in the hills.

And I've actually been surprised at how there are some things that are observable, right? Like, I don't know if If you think about like erosion, obviously there's a difference between like a huge amount of erosion over a long period of time and like a little bit of a cliff that fell off like in the last storm, but they are related. Those are part of the same process. Yeah.

And I don't know. I was really fascinated with the parts of John McPhee's book, um, control of nature that I quote in my book about the San Gabriel mountains, which I'm sure you're more familiar with than I am, but Los Angeles. Yeah. Yeah. But those, that those are very sort of geologically young and very active mountains.

And they're so, they're so steep that like rocks actually kind of can't hold on all the way. So there's just constant landslides. And some of the descriptions in that part of that book are like, he talks about the debris flows that will happen during a winter storm if there's been a fire the summer before. And he describes this family that like looks out the window basically sees this dark mass coming towards them and then their house fills up with rocks in like six minutes you know like um this really happened yeah yeah they were they lived they were um but but like there's there's a lot about that occurrence that complicates, I think, the idea of a short-term and long-term. Because obviously, six minutes, their house fills up with rocks.

That's very short. Yeah. The debris flow probably, I don't know, that must have been maybe a couple evenings or something like that. But then as he goes on to describe, those happen in the winter after a summer where there was a certain type of fire, followed by a certain amount of rain, right? So he also talks about one summer there was a fire. The city officials kind of went around to these neighborhoods that are right up against the mountains and told them, you know, there was this fire. You might want to be aware this coming winter, there might be this debris flow and no one no one does anything and then sure enough there's a debris flow right like yeah so then so then there's a question of like well did that debris debris flow happen when the rocks started

coming down the hill or when it started raining or when there was a fire or when there started to be enough like brush for the fire like you know what i mean and then you could just keep going back right forever so it kind of like it it's like this interesting question of like what is an event like what are the bounds of an event right yeah i mean we tend to neglect the other time scales that we are present for i think is the recurring theme here uh you one of the things that really stuck with me about how to do nothing and by the way people please read how to do nothing in addition to Jenny's notebook saving time. But you talk about how no matter where you are, there's features of the natural landscape you're in that no matter how much we pave it over are still going to be there.

You talk about watersheds and rivers that, you know, watersheds are such features, the natural environment that rain falls, water flows in a particular direction. It collects and forms a river. And most of the time, all we do, water flows in a particular direction, it collects and forms a river. And most of the time, all we do is we cover it up or we channel it. We can't really eradicate it. We're still subject to water flowing downhill and flowing its way to the sea. We still live in the middle of that system.

And I feel that time is very similar, that we still are present for these other timescales, whether or not we choose to acknowledge them. I read an article a couple of years ago. I believe this might have been an earther, the climate focused blog. But the journalist who wrote this and I apologize for not remembering their name. They wrote about how Barack Obama had recently purchased a home on Martha's Vineyard, which is his favorite spot on Earth. Of course, he can purchase a home there. But if you look at the climate change maps published by the U.S. government, the place where he bought the home is predicted to be subject to sea level rise within the next

decade or two. And that will eradicate the value of the home if it's even still livable. It's in a, you know, climate prone area. And this article pointed out if even the, you know, Barack Obama must know more about climate change than almost anyone else on the planet being a, you know, democratic president who is very well informed and reads a binder of documents every single weekend. And yet he made a pretty elemental mistake of ignoring what is going to happen to this piece of property he purchased over the next couple of decades. If even he made this mistake, what hope do the rest of us have basically? Or point out a fundamental problem that we have of thinking on the scale of climate change. So let's bring it into that. I mean, how, how can different perspectives on time help us think differently about, you know, the ecological crisis that we're,

that we're slowly rolling into? Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there's a really, um, kind of understandable, like reaction to that. That's part of that inability to think about the future where it's like your mind kind of like turns away from even imagining how you might respond to something. Like I'm thinking about there's like a little detail that I cite in the book where in Pacifica, which is next to San Francisco, and it's like a city that is right on the cliffs has a lot of has already had a lot of problems with erosion um and there's already like you can go there and see like condemned houses or like lots where there used to be a building um there there were some basically meeting minutes that i saw where people were debating people who live in the town were debating like what to do about like the seawall failing basically that's in the main part of the town and some people were arguing for uh restored uh shoreline there's also like managed retreat right and then there's like there was one comment that was like

i don't want any of that i just want a seawall that works for 50 years and like that number was so interesting to me. Like, it's like 50 years. Like, is that how long you think you're going to like? Yeah, they're about 45 and they're like, 50 years is enough. That'll be, that'll be plenty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I think it's like, and I, but like, I think that's kind of a pretty common, like sort of, that's an extreme example of like a common like thing that people's an extreme example of like a common like thing that people run up against um where it's like well if i can't have it the way that i'm used to it being or that i want it to be then i don't want to imagine anything else or i can't imagine anything else yeah um and so uh i think again that's that's one of those places where it's so important to not see time as this like linear foregone conclusion type of thing um like i in the book i compare it to trying to imagine

having a conversation with someone before you've actually had it like it's never gonna be it's never gonna be obviously it won't be accurate because the person's not there but you're you the other thing that you're getting wrong is like you you yourself will be changing throughout the conversation like so so even you like you the day before you're always going to be imagining it standing from where you are at that particular moment having not progressed any amount into the conversation yeah right um which is why when you have a good one like you always end up somewhere that you didn't expect and that has so much to do with the other person. And I feel the same way about time where it's like,

like it's, it's, it is possible to hold in your mind the fact that like things, certain things we know will get worse and more difficult, but that's not the same thing as knowing what's going to happen. And it's definitely not the same thing as knowing or rather knowing that you don't know what is possible. Not so much, I think, for one individual to do like yourself world is ending. No, I can't imagine today any amount of effort

causing a difference with this crisis that, you know, I saw a scary YouTube documentary about or whatever. But we're ignoring the fact that if we make the effort, we will already be in a different condition than we are when we're imagining it today. And new possibilities will arise. We will be different people. It'll be a different time and we can't predict how we will be changed or how the world will be changed. Is that sort of the point? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also, in the chapter where I talk specifically about despair and kind of climate dread, I ask the reader to do this thought experiment in which you imagine that you weren't born at the wrong time, that you were born at the exact right time. Yeah. And how does that change how you feel about the present and about the future because i think you know like i'm someone i'm in my late 30s like

i i grew up you know in elementary school they were already talking about climate change right like i think there are some of us who grew up thinking like feeling like you were born in the wrong time or like like you you came at the end of the party or something i don't know like this kind of like like things were already going downhill by the time you were old enough to understand that. Yeah. And, and there's like a feeling of like, of just frustration, like, which is warranted, right? Like it shouldn't have been this way, but, but I think like there's, in addition to frustration, there's also this possible feeling of like, well, I was born at the time that I was born. Maybe actually, maybe it turns out that I

find like purpose and meaning in through responding to this moment. Yeah. I mean, at any moment, there are things that are dying and there are things that are ending and doors that are closing. And at the same moment, there are new things being born. There's new shoots, shoots growing up. There's new doors opening in other directions. And it's sort of your opportunity you always have to go find those. You know, I think a lot, even just what I do in media, right? Sometimes I think I missed the boat. You know, I missed the boat on YouTube or whatever it was, something, you know, there was some big trend that if I had gotten onto it early, right, I could have, I could have

hopped on and had a lot of success. But there's always new shit that I can hop on now. So the lesson is find the new thing. onto it early right i could have i could have hopped on and had a lot of success and like but there's always new shit that i can hop on now so the lesson is find the new thing right and hop on that or create the new thing yourself um there's always a new frontier which has colonialist implications which are uh very relevant for this conversation but uh there's always a new there's always a new frontier there's always new work to be but there's always a new, there's always a new frontier. There's always new work to be done. There's always something new happening. And there's always change that can be made. It's sort of, it is a,

it is a difference of mindset to some degree. Yeah. And I think not just mindset, but also like perception and observation. Like if you, I mean, this is an odd example, but if you think about like even just personally, right. Like if you i mean this is an odd example but if you think about like even just personally right like if you were if you're in some kind of situation that is really stressful for some reason right like like you you're like really angry or i don't know like something bad is happening like you're like you're not perceiving there's so many things about the situation that you're not perceiving because you're it's all framed like through that emotion right like when you think about it later

your memory your memory will be totally distorted and it'll be like missing a lot of details um and so i think there's like i think that that's maybe something that actually both of my books have in common which is that i put a really big emphasis on um um, like the, a pause that's long enough for you to consider that you, maybe you haven't seen everything about a situation. Um, and because that will affect how you respond to it, basically. Like I just, uh, I wrote this, um, the, the Sydney writers festival that I was just at, they asked us to write a letter to the future. And mine was kind of about this. And it was about this phrase that I just learned from a Filipino artist.

But then I talked to my mom about, cause she also speaks Tagalog and it's Bahala Na. And it means like, so the guy who told me about it, he, he translated it as like, fuck it. It's just like, I'm not prepared. I'm going into a situation like, fuck it. My mom's translation was, whatever happens, happens. And then, but this artist, he told me about this Filipino psychologist who had like looked,

like looked further into this phrase and like, how do people actually use it in Manila? And his conclusion was that it was a positive response to uncertainty and that it was like, it meant like, it doesn't really conform to like our understanding of like either giving up or going forth. It's kind of like both because it's like it's basically being like i don't have control over the situation but because i accept that i can actually observe like what is here and i will bring all of my resources that i

do have to the situation in like a highly improvisational and like engaged way by paying like super close attention and he and the psychologist was he was arguing that that was like a uniquely filipino thing because of in part of having to live next to volcanoes and like in the middle of typhoons you know look the volcanoes erupting i can't change that but i i can i i can like i don't know come on it's like it's yeah it's volatile right it's like you have to be on your feet all the time you can never sort of like rest you know or or or feel like you have control like it's so different from the kind of like like the western sort of like i'm going to control this landscape kind of thing or like yep like the the headline in um that john mcphee book the part about the

san gabriel mountains where there's like there's a newspaper headline that was like landslides declared unnecessary like that kind of like hubris right um so i don't know i find like that that's uh i ended up writing my letter about that because it was kind of like, it's an attitude that's both, it doesn't recede from the situation. Because I think like either being, you know, blindly optimistic or just kind of resting in despair, those are both kind of a way of pulling back from the actual details of a situation, like as it's unfolding right now.

Yeah. And it might overlook like really important details that are like very salient to what it's possible to do. Yeah. Yeah. I, I sometimes, what was the phrase again? Say it again in Tagalog. Bahala na. Bahala na. Yeah. adopting that point of view sometimes where I think a negative way that it's put in English is it is what it is, you know, uh, which is that, that people often hate to hate to hear that.

Um, but that is a perspective I try to take sometimes of like, well, I, I need to stop worrying about what should be right. And say, this is what is, and what do I do now? Right. And in response to it. Yeah. Yeah. It's very helpful if you can move on to that second question. It's like, okay, I accept this. Now what?

It's the now what part, but you can't get to that part unless you kind of stop hitting your head against the wall. It's like when people get mad at bad drivers on the on the road and i and they're oh god why don't people know how to drive well guess what there's gonna be bad drivers like we're not gonna we're not gonna get rid of those right so what are you gonna do you know how do you how do you respond to that um how do you design a transportation system that's resilient in the face of bad drivers blah blah blah blah blah um you could answer the same question about about climate change yeah it's pretty it's pretty bad but yeah you know instead of uh we can we can have space for grief about that too yeah but yeah you have to you have to um but there's always the opportunity to to look at what is and say okay

what am i going to do that's going to be creative and improvisational and and constructive in the face of that is that sort of the point yeah and that you might surprise yourself like i i always think about the um rebecca sold its book um paradise built in Hell, which is about both manmade and natural disasters. In that book, she talks to and researches people who were responding in some way, like in the wake of a disaster. So like the 1906 earthquake or Katrina and like, especially pushing against like kind of larger narratives in which people were portrayed as being very selfish or individualistic. And she finds not only that people were, you know, people stepped up in ways that were surprising to themselves.

She's in some cases, she finds that people were, are nostalgic. Like they'll, they'll say like well obviously it was this horrible disaster and there's this loss of life and like that's traumatic but but it was also a time when they maybe met their neighbors for the first time and had a sense of purpose that was very unfamiliar to them yeah it's like like like you went off script or something yeah and i think there's there's a really interesting kind of question in that book, which is like, how, how do you keep that window open and not have the impetus be disaster? Because I think you did see that during the pandemic as well, right? Like people, some people really stepped up and they did things that hadn't been done in ways that had, that they hadn't been done.

And they, they made use of things that were not supposed to be used for those purposes you know right like things that were like even just building spaces right like using them for other things right like people are very resourceful and there's a lot of creativity in that even in the midst of something really terrible that involves a lot of grief and i think being open to that um you know is not just practically useful because it allows you to have those responses, but it's also like a really, really important source of hope and believing that like people believing that other people will do things's gold is on strike right now. And in the moments before we went on strike, you know, I was on the negotiating committee, uh, the last couple of days of negotiations that started to look more and more like the companies were going to force us to go on strike. And we had been negotiating for weeks and it was all that it was months of work on my part

and on all of our parts. You know, when I was like, I want to be doing standup, I want to do some others. I want to travel. I don't want to do this right now, you know, and Oh my God, they're going to make us go on strike and it's going to be so hard and people are going to lose work and we're going to be doing this for months. And I just want it over. And I was really depressed about it. Uh, and then, you know, we had to call the strike because they made us do it. And then the first day of being on the picket line was so profound to see all these people suddenly come together to fight for their shared needs. And people had a lot of fear about it, but people also brought so much joy. And it has continued to be so joyful for we're

in our sixth week now, as we're recording this, um, people are still so joyful going over the picket line every day. And I'm starting to appreciate how much good is going to come out of this strike that, you know, people are forming community. People are getting to know their fellow writers in a way that they never did before. You know, the earlier this week, we had a pride day on the picket line, you know, and it was like, here's all of our LGBTQ plus, you know, writers and supporters showing up. And I, as a straight guy, get to come and participate in that. So do so many other writers and get, oh my God, like, yeah, this is part of our union too.

And we have a shared struggle here and that's going to lead to more understanding between people. And the amount of good that is coming out of it that I could not have foreseen when we took that first step is enormous. And more things are going to happen that I'm not expecting. And that sense of possibility that once you actually begin to fight, avenues will open up in front of you that you never even thought were possible before is so cool. And it's something that I'm trying to remember. It's a little bit similar to when you also, another example of this is, went on vacation a little while ago and I was so stressed out because I had so much work to do. And I was like, I don't want to go on vacation.

I'm going to be stressed out the whole time. And I kept trying to remind myself when you're on vacation, you'll feel differently because you won't be at work and you'll, you'll have a capacity for other additional experiences that you don't have right now, you know, because you will be in a different place and you'll be experiencing something different. So I'm really resonating with everything you're saying yeah and i mean that's also i mean that continues outward too because i feel like they're i mean i was in australia and people knew about the register like they were excited about it you know and like and it it like that it matters for them too right it matters for people to see that yeah like that it matters to see that like the joy and just like the like these things that like no one could have predicted

you know like not that long ago um and it get like it sort of puts the seed in someone else's head right they're like oh well like this is possible like maybe like maybe i can also do this and then they start talking to other people right like yeah so it's really like, I don't know. I have, I have this like the unofficial motto of my book in the middle is that like time is not money. Time is beans. I have this whole thing about beans in the middle of the book. You have to expand. I'm sorry. What do you mean by this? Okay. So it's time is beans because no,

I, I, um, I talk about being in a garden with my friend who's in her 70s and she was planting these beans that she told me are descended from beans that she got 20 years ago. And she does not remember where she got them. And so she thinks maybe Home Depot. This is like decades ago. So she grew them at that time. She gave them to her friends. Her friends ate them.

Everyone agreed these were so delicious and amazing. They wanted more of them. But now they don't know where to get them. So her friends grew some of them to seed and gave them back to her. Wow. And then she gave them to some other friends. They gave them back to her. They gave them to other people.

So now she thinks that those beans exist all across the country um and that right and like and so and she knew what i was working on the book at the time so we were talking about it and we're like oh yeah like that's like it's kind of interesting how a bean has like both the past and the future in it right like it's descended from this line of beans, but it's also the potential for further beans. And I mentioned in the book that I like Googled, can you plant store-bought beans? And I was like so shocked that you can. Like I was like, what?

You know, like that they're not sort of like dead commodities. They're seeds. They're seeds. And so she and i were talking about you know what if you think about time in a in less than a zero sum transactional way where like if i give you some of my whatever abstract time cubes that i wake up with in the morning and i have less than you have more now um like what if instead of thinking that way we thought about it more in terms of like these like seeds right like something that you do for someone might like sort of bear

fruit like down the road maybe decades later maybe very soon um and it will continue to for a really long time and i feel like kind of like what you just described is like is that right it's like it starts from some it starts from a moment and then it that moment enables all these other moments and then that kind of like cascades and it and it will ultimately change i mean like it is about work and about value and time like it will change people's experience of time yeah like on a lived level. Yeah. Well, how do we, uh, man, I love talking to you because you have such a wonderful consciousness of all these other ways of, of being. And it feels like at least talking to you that you are holding it in your head, head and your being at all times.

I'm sure you don't always feel that way, but, uh, how do you, do you have any suggestions for folks who like me are get a little too productivity focused and a little bit too anxious about time, right? How do you suggest people go and, you know, participate in the sort of other forms of time that you're talking about? How do we, how do we make our time more like beans on a daily basis? How do we be beans? Jenny, how do we be beans? on a daily basis how do we be beans jenny how do we be beans um i um i guess like two things come to mind one is like i think anything and this is very similar to how to do nothing i mean like i think anything you can do to become more attentive to these kind of like concrete things that are happening in time

around you like i have a jeweler's loop that i carry around with me for looking at like moss or like very i don't know just very minute things a little magnifying glass yeah uh i think i i think just like maybe even more generally just the capacity to be like surprised is, is a really important kind of like antidote to that wish to control everything. Yeah. Um, so like this, yeah, this, um, uh, awareness and attentiveness to like things that are changing outside of you, um, is I think one way, I mean, you can't be there all the time, right.

But it, it, I do feel like it kind of counterbalances that um but I also think like maybe I know this is very abstract but like thinking in a less quantitative way like um I feel like at some point I switched from worrying about whether I was getting enough done in a day. Cause that's a quantitative question, right? Like did that's a, that's like enough work, um, enough, enough to-do list items or something like that to like, did I have one meaningful experience that day? And if I did, then I count that as a success. Yeah.

Cause I mean, and that sounds weird at first because I think like, you know, the to-do list is a very prominent way of thinking about a day's worth, you know, but actually it makes complete sense. Like if you just like zoom all the way out, like all the way out, all the way out, like I'm, I'm someone who's friends with a surprising number of people in their seventies. Like I'm, I'm someone who's friends with a surprising number of people in their seventies. Um, and I, and so like, I often am able to take their perspective on myself where they're like, they see all of this time stretching out in front of me and they just want me to like, enjoy the time that I'm in.

Um, versus like, I see myself as like at the, at the, like the edge of something where I'm like always trying to do the best in that particular moment or something. And so I think what, from their perspective and from that kind of like larger perspective of like, what do you want out of your life? Deciding to, to, you know, measure your day based on whether or not you had one meaningful experience actually makes a hundred percent sense. Right. It's very intuitive. not you had one meaningful experience actually makes 100 sense right it's very intuitive um and then like and just knowing that like if you had that then you can rest and and then ironically in that resting state you i find that i often get more done but that's not why i do it um right you know or or like maybe i don't get more done but it's like less painful because i'm not

doing i don't have this like this thing hovering over me all the time of like, are you going to get it done? And when you get it done, are you going to do other things? It's like, no, I did what I needed to do, which was have a moment where I was aware that I'm alive on earth, so I'm okay. Yeah. That really resonates with me. Yeah. Yeah. That really resonates with me. You know, in my, in my five-year journal, I, especially when I started it, I used to list all the stuff that I did that day. I would go recorded a podcast, did all my emails, give notes on this script,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, I think I got a lot done today or whatever, you know? And then I would read back that the following year and be like that's fucking sucks to read that why did why did i even write that down that's what i do every day yeah i know like yeah i i i mean this is ironic but like i um i kept a work log for my book not because not because i uh you know like i'm not not for the reasons that it sounds like basically i did it mostly because it was as a reference like i need to know like what day i was like reading this article or something um but it is this monstrous document because i would list things like um that wouldn't look like work to other people. Like I, I thought about X, you know, or something like that. That's good. That's work.

And that's the part of work that's often hard to do when you're a creative person is, is actually do the thinking, you know, it's easy to collect and read and whatever. But then the actual new thought is like hard to fit in sometimes between all the emails. Yeah, totally. Right. And if you're actually doing that kind of work, like, you know, that it just doesn't look that way to other people. But, um, but when I got to the end, I actually, um, I can't look at that document.

It's, it's, I don't, I don't know how to describe it. It's like, it's so, um, it makes me feel nauseous to look at it. And it's like, and actually I don't think it should be looked at. I think the product is the book, right? Like the product is the book and the way that like I think differently. And it's really interesting to compare that work log to, for example, my actual journal, which does, which only has kind of like what I'm thinking about and like something that I like changed my mind about.

Like, it's like a record of change, like kind of like, oh, I'm this person now. Okay. Like I learned this, but now I'm this person, right? Like that reads as like a coherent, meaningful document. The work log is just like, is just like sublimely terrifying. Yeah. What I was going to say is what I've tried to work into my journey after reading enough of those horrible entries. Now I try to write down like if I saw something beautiful or surprising or shocking or even just if me and my girlfriend laughed really hard at something that one or the other of us said. And I want to remember that phrase so that a year later I can be like, I this like meaningless bit you know yeah that's because that is the stuff that i don't know makes life worth living it's a cliche but that is yeah and i think actually going by like i as some i write about this in the book that i have had journals since i was old enough to write and I have all of them, which I don't know if anyone should have all the journals, but, um, but I, um, I, it means that I know a lot about

what I want to read in the future. You know, like when you're writing down like, oh, what am I going to want to read in the future? And it is what you just described. The thing that you want to read in the future is like the thing that you thought was funny. The, like the weird thing that like a stranger said to you, um, like,

like the, something that you were really surprised by, like a moment of like wonderment, you know, like you don't really want to hear about like how you had so much stuff to do and you didn't, don't feel like you have enough time to do it. Cause that, cause that's all the time.

You always have that, you know? Um, but it's like these kind of like the, the very easily overlooked kind of like textures of everyday life that you're so, um, you could so easily take for granted. Um, and I think knowing that and looking back and seeing that that's important is really helpful for not taking it for granted in the moment. You know, I also have those journals from, I have journals that I kept when I was like 11 all the way through like early college. And then in my twenties, I didn't, I didn't keep any kind of journal and I regret it. And part of the reason is when I look back at those old journals,

I'm like, sometimes I am like, this is boring. Like, I don't care about what I wrote here, but also I am looking at like, you know, a past version of myself dragged this pen across this paper and chose to write this stuff down. And I reveal things about myself that I did not realize I was revealing at the time. So even when I go, I'm sure 20 years from now, when I go back and look at the stuff that I wrote when I was really productivity craze, where I'm just like, I didn't get enough done today. I'm like, wow, my past self was like really fucking obsessed with work when I was, you know, 35 or whatever. Um, and I think even that, even that is valuable because it's what I really appreciate is not just, Oh, what do I want to

remember in the future? It's just the reason I love the five-year journal is I'm experiencing the change. I'm looking back at it and saying, oh, here's how I was differently a year ago. Here's how I am now. And it's like, I'm sort of observing my own internal clock. As you say, we have our own internal clocks and I'm, I'm witnessing it and it helps me experience time in a, in a different way. So I guess just going out and looking for those other timescales and observing them and witnessing them and sort of being present for them is like a pretty good antidote by itself. Yeah. I think, yeah.

Anything that can get you, I mean, I think when I think about like the, if I try to like imaginatively put myself in the moment that feels the most like, you know, punishingly time is money, um, like clock watching, it's typically very isolated,

like in all, in all senses, right? Like I'm only thinking about me and how like I need to do this. And I think frequently in that equation, you imagine that everyone else is just like happily achieving their tasks. Like, right. Or they're going, why isn't Jenny getting us the thing we need?

That's all they're thinking about. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. And so like, you're kind of isolated in that. And then I'm typically not thinking about like where I am. I'm not thinking about what time of day it is, what time of year it is, what historical moment I'm in. None of those things. It's extremely narrow. And so I think that that's part of the reason why any movement in that direction, in any of those directions already, I think, starts to loosen that up a little bit. Even just thinking about other people. even just thinking about other people just simply thinking

about other people right like thinking about like whose time like enabled you to experience your time or like um thinking about like helping someone else or like just i don't know any anything that kind of like breaks you out of that like i i'm it's me and the clock and we're like alone and i'm racing it. Yeah. It's helpful. That's just doing it with other people. You know, that's part of what makes this try. I'm going to go to the picket line later today. And the reason I'm excited to go is because of the other people who I'll be doing it there with.

We're all taking time out of our day to walk back and forth to the sign. And no one's going like, we need to get this done quicker. All right. The point is that we're going to go do it every day as long as we have to. Yeah. And, and on top of that too, I think like that's such a, I mean, I brought it up in one of the events that I was doing in Sydney as an example of, you know, like the limits of individual, individualistic ways of thinking about time and not having enough time, not having control over your time.

Like there's a woman that I interviewed for the book, who's a admin for a Facebook group for working moms. And we were talking about like time management specifically aimed at like working, working women. And she confirmed my suspicion that she as a reader felt insulted by that kind of advice. And she was like, I personally think it would be more useful for me to get six other moms together and each one of us would make dinner for everyone else one night of the week. Already, she just intuitively sees past this supposed path of managing your time better.

You can only get so far. And those books never talk about your job they never talk about why women being expected to do more like those structural things are usually not part of of those books which you know i don't really blame them but like but that means that there's like a limit right and i think that like the writer's strike is just like a beautiful illustration of like that recognition where it's like the worst case scenario is when everyone is very isolated and competitive and not talking about their experiences and how much they've been devalued. And then the best case scenario is when everyone realizes that they have this in common and they realize how much is possible if they do it together. Yeah. It's impossible to solve the problems that we're trying to solve on an individual basis with better use of, by being more efficient or,

or whatever we have to do. Like more, more employable, like, yeah. Yeah. And everybody recognizes that even the, even the people who are most successful at doing that.

And that's why we do it together. Jenny, we have to wrap it up. I could talk to you for a thousand years. Speaking of time. So I really hope you'll come back and be with us again. It's just always a delight talking to you. The name of the book is Saving Time.

People can pick it up at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books, which will not just support the show, but also your local bookstore. Jenny, where else can people find your work? Uh, Jenny Odell.com. There you go. There you go.

Oh, the internet age it's, it's upon us. Uh, thank you so much for being here. I love having you. Oh, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much. Well, thank you once again to Jenny Odell for coming on the show. And an especially big thank you to everyone who makes this show possible by supporting us on Patreon. I especially want to thank everyone who supports at the $15 a month level.

Most recently at that level, I want to thank Nicholas Ratterman, Sajer Matre, Nick Frazier, Transient Astronomer, Ken Runner, and Rebecca Beyea. If you want to join them and support the show, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Once again, five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free, and you can join our community Discord. We even do a live book club over Zoom. It's so much fun. Hope to see you there. And of course, if you want to come see me do stand-up comedy, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. Thank you, as always, to Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman for producing the show with me and everybody here at HeadGum. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time on Factually. Fun. Hope to see you there. And of course, if you want to come see

me do stand-up comedy, head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. Thank you as always to Tony Wilson and Sam Roudman for producing the show with me and everybody here at HeadGum. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time on Factually.