Saving Time summary

In 1998, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics made the controversial decision to require its researchers to clock in and out during their workday. The physicists working at the facility were outraged, stating that the decision was needlessly bureaucratic and conflicted with the ways that research was actually conducted.

This decision would go on to cause an uproar not only within the scientific community, but throughout the world. At the heart of the controversy was the question of what employers are entitled to when they pay their employees – or the concept of “time as money.” In other words, how much is our time actually worth?

In much of the modern world, there is a pervasive and ever-increasing mentality that work and productivity should be valued above all else. In the US especially, “hustle culture” leads us to believe that we should constantly be on the grind if we want to have any measure of success in life. 

The strongest proponents of this mindset are the “productivity bros” – a group of male content creators who constantly sell the idea that time management and personal policing are cure-all solutions to life’s biggest problems.

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered the ways that we perceive time, and our place in it. In the early days of lockdown, many people took to social media to vent their frustrations, posting memes and funny tweets about how “time means nothing anymore.”

Days blended together, weekdays and weekends became indistinguishable, and each hour seemed to blur into the next. For Odell, this ambiguity of time relates to the ideas that French philosopher Henri Bergson put forth in his 1907 book Creative Evolution.

When Odell was young, she came across one of her mom’s fairytale books from the 1970s. It was about a witch who gave a boy a ball of golden thread and told him that pulling the end would cause time to move faster.

Eager to meet each of life’s major milestones – finishing school, getting married, having a child – the boy impatiently pulled the thread. Soon, he found that he had reached the end of his life without truly experiencing any of it.

Living in a world that seems to change by the minute, it’s easy to get swept up in the concept of “saving time.” After all, modern demands for productivity can make it seem as if there are never enough hours in the day. Pair this with an ever-increasing sense of dread about the future, and it can get overwhelming. 

But there’s a solution.