Saving Time cover art

Saving Time

Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Saving Time

By: Jenny Odell
Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing.

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by--inspired by pre-industrial cultures, ecological, and geological time--that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.

In this dazzling, subversive, and deeply hopeful reframing of time, Jenny Odell takes us on a journey through other temporal habitats. As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days, alongside gardens growing, birds migrating, and cliffs eroding. The stretchy quality of waiting and desire, the way the present may suddenly feel marbled with childhood memory, the slow but sure procession of a pregnancy, or the time it takes to heal from injuries--physical or emotional. Odell urges us to become stewards of these different rhythms of life, to imagine a life, identity, and source of meaning outside of the world of work and profit, and to understand that the trajectory of our lives--or the life of the planet--is not a foregone conclusion. In that sense, "saving" time-recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature-could also mean that time saves us.

©2023 Jenny Odell (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Anthropology Career Success Ecology Nature & Ecology Outdoors & Nature Personal Development Politics & Government Science Time Management Time Management & Productivity Career

Listeners also enjoyed...

Henry at Work cover art
Abolish the Family cover art
The Long View cover art
Generations cover art
Maps of Meaning cover art
Warmth cover art
The Children of the Anthropocene cover art
Radical Intimacy cover art
Understanding Power cover art
The Demon-Haunted World cover art
Ishmael cover art
At Work in the Ruins cover art
Flourish cover art
From What Is to What If cover art
The Seventh Sense cover art
The Right Side of History cover art

Critic reviews

Saving Time is an exposé of our past, an antidote to our present, and a manifesto for the future. It is rigorous, compassionate, profound, and hopeful. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life
A revealing exploration of the forces that keep us locked in a shallow, commodified and adversarial relationship with time. But it is also a portal to a far richer alternative. To read it is to slip through the bars of our modern temporal prison and experience how freedom might feel
The rarest kind of intervention: it alters you immediately, and then it lasts ... Saving Time is an inimitable gift
A rare book that does more than meet the current moment, it defines it
Odell's journey to find the best way to use our limited time on earth is an eye-opening look at what it really means to be alive
It is in the gap between present and future, where outcomes are not yet determined, that Jenny Odell enters with her paradigm-destroying new book ... [A] grand, eclectic, wide-ranging work
Stunning ... Odell approaches time in a way I've only seen previously in science fiction [and] this expansiveness, both thematic and formal, is what makes Odell's writing so valuable and unique. ... It is, ultimately, an extraordinarily good thing that Odell's work exists in the world
Fiercely generous ... invites us to exit the superhighways and explore the scenic detours, byways, rebel camps, the other visions of who we can be while reminding us that slowness can yield more than speed
Odell has gifted us a way to move through this intertidal moment by reclaiming our more intuitive, felt experience of the passage of time. ... A beautiful, clarifying, and surprisingly reassuring literary triumph
Saving Time is about what it means to be on the clock, personally, politically and existentially. The book's writing glows. Reading this book is like being in the company of a particularly thoughtful friend: Odell shows you the truths of the structures you inhabit and then, warmly, attempts to protect you from your own nihilism
All stars
Most relevant
It is hard to describe how deeply this book has changed my view of the world. I have always struggled with time and felt trapped by the clock. Jenny’s beautiful writing helped me to comprehend the way that clock time is just a label, and true life is something that exists in many wider cycles, and moments of nature. Learning about the context of how our society currently functions, rushing around and measuring time, was truly eye opening. This book has forever changed the way I look at the world and I am very grateful to Jenny for that.

Truly life changing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I recommend this book for anyone trying to reshape their relationship with clock and calendar time

thoroughly informative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This challenged the way I look at time, I enjoyed it very much. Will give the author’s previous book a try on the back of this.

Thought provoking

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Really enjoyed 'How To Do Nothing' so was looking forward to this. Was disappointed - might have been something to do with the narrator (though her voice and performance seem fine out of context of the book) but I found it really hard to stay focused

Whole book felt like this this -

im at this specific place, the land is in despute, there a re flowers here that remind me of when i was a child, my friend who has just had a child is letting her child sleep under the nightsky, the moon pulls the sea, in the sea there are many important animals. the specific place i mention is hot today and i left my hat, there is no shade here because the trees have been coppiced. coppicing comes from the word cop-ice which means 2 trees..

No exagertating this is how the whole book felt to me. felt at times like a stream of conciousness though I dont think thats what was intended...

would be constantly thinking.. what is she trying to say here? Feels like there are interesting things in this book but for for reason (maybe its me being impatient) I was unable to get to it

Hard to follow due to constantly changing focus?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

It’s written like a stream of consciousness, and not a particular interesting one. The sentiment in the title and subtitle is promising but the book doesn’t really deliver on this.

Save your own time and avoid.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.