Our relationship with time is complicated, to say the least. Like, take weekends as an example. Weekends fly by faster than bullets but Monday creeps on slower than a slug. Time becomes enemy #1 when you try to keep a healthy schedule. Want to get 8 hours of sleep? Spend quality time with friends and family? Work out? Have hobbies? Attend events? Good luck squeezing it all in. There's just never sufficient time for everything in a day. Right? Wrong!! That's what we have become trained to think. See, we've fallen into the trap of thinking we need to jam-pack every minute to get it all done. But, what if we tell you that to gain more time, all you need is a different approach? 

In her thought-provoking book "Saving Time", author Jenny Odell offers this different approach. Rather than rushing into the typical time management hacks for hyper-productivity, Odell takes readers on a thoughtful exploration of how time has been perceived throughout history and examines interesting ideas from philosophy. Odell also shows how today's lifestyle has programmed us to live like we are in a Fast And Furious movie. By offering a deeper comprehension of time's rich realities, this insightful book aims to empower readers to reconsider their own mental frameworks. In doing so, we can potentially save time not by cramming more into each hour, but by learning to fully inhabit the present moment instead of feeling chained to the tyranny of the clock.

Our deep dive begins at the beginning, so jump in the time machine to see when humanity began clocking the minutes.

Ever think about how weird it is that we all agree on what time it is? Cause time is such a weird concept, right? It's not even real! But we act like minutes and hours are the law.  But it wasn't always this standardized - for most of human history people didn't even track exact hours. Back in the day stuff was way less scheduled. The rising and setting of the sun told a farmer when to sow and when to reap, but the hour? Total mystery.  That all started to change as society became more organized and complex. One of the major developments that led to standardized timekeeping was by the Catholic Church in the 6th century. Saint Benedict's Rule specified eight prayer times for monks during the day and night. So monasteries developed bells and early clockworks to help the monks stay on schedule - they basically invented the concept of being "on time"! While these canonical hours were not equal intervals, it spread to cities and towns. Merchants needed to coordinate deals so public clocks became a thing. That's also when factories started up during the Industrial Revolution. Factories needed workers to start and finish at set times each day. With that, things got really strict - bosses imposed standardized timekeeping to maximize productivity. They developed mechanized clocks to make sure laborers didn't slack off! The clocks helped structure the working day and signal its end. Unlike monastery bells, this mechanized version divided hours uniformly for all. Over time this led to our modern schedules and obsession with minutes. While timekeeping began with practical needs, it evolved into a way for nations to assert authority over faraway lands. European imperialism saw an advantage in controlling time systems. When Britain rose to maritime dominance in the 1700s, their invention of marine chronometers facilitated navigation and trade networks. Also, they came up with Master clocks and Slave clocks. Master clocks used to send Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to “slave clocks” located elsewhere in the country, via electrical pulses, allowing railroads to link schedules.But to truly standardize time across long distances, one man had a radical idea. Sandford Fleming's "Cosmic Day" created global coordination by dividing Earth into 24 meridians, each marking an hour region and declared the Prime Meridian to run through Greenwich, England essentially dictating where “time began.” This system won acceptance at the 1884 International Meridian Conference....

Ever wonder what your minutes and hours are really worth in cold hard cash? Most of us have never stopped to seriously consider the value we assign to our time. Is an hour of our free time worth the same as an hour of our work time? How much would it cost someone else to purchase an hour of our leisure? And who really "owns" our time - ourselves or others who demand it from us?  We keep saying "time is money" but does that really add up? Is the concept of fungible time really something to live by? Side note: Allen Bluedorn's concept of Fungible time explains time as a standard commodity that can be exploited for productivity and profit. As if time is some raw material that could be purchased from workers and squeezed for maximum value.For a long time now, that's how we've been living. Workers have limited influence over how, where, and when they sell their time. They have little say in determining its value relative to contributions to company profits. The issue came into stark focus in 1998, when researchers at an institute in Italy were mandated to clock in and out of their labs like "normal" employees. Could employers dictate use of time just because they’d “purchased" it from their employees? Obviously, the scientists were not in favor of such rules which disconnected them from their fluid, creative process like a switch! And now the recent shift to remote work has cast this paradigm in a new light. Remote "always-on" work cultures eliminate boundaries between job and personal life. Bosses suddenly wanted to monitor every move, as if they owned every minute of their employers' days.  Apps that track our computer usage, programs that take screenshots without asking - it's getting creepy! The point we're trying to make is that the mentality that employers own their workers' waking hours has proven stubborn. On that note, have you seen Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times? In a scene, his character is strapped unwillingly into "The Billows Feeding Machine"—an invention meant to save employers time by letting employees eat on the job, eliminating lunch breaks. But when the machine malfunctions, causing food to assault his face at high speed, Chaplin turns agony into comedy. This is a perfect example of capitalism's relentless drive to extract maximum productivity from each moment paid for.  It's stuff like this that makes...

Remember the concept of fungible time? About how everyone's got the same 24 hours in a day. That whole idea that time can be treated like money - spent, saved, wasted, invested - it's the foundation of all those modern time management tricks. Keep it in mind, cause we're gonna be picking at it in a moment. Now, imagine this scenario. John is a single guy with no kids. Obviously, it's easy for him to pull late nights getting work done. But for Sarah with two young children, finding even an extra 30 minutes is a struggle. Doesn't it seem weird that they're expected to accomplish the same despite such different circumstances? See the flaw in fungible time theory?  A lot of self-help gurus, like Productivity Bros act like time management is the key to success. FYI, The Productivity Bros are a group of guys on YouTube aiming to help their viewers maximize efficiency with proper time-use and self-control. But, don't expect their time management hacks to solve ALL your problems - that's not how it works! They preach things like "we all have 24 hours in a day" as if that makes everything equal. But have you ever tried to juggle a sick parent and full-time job? It's not so simple!Philosophy professor Robert E. Goodin calls the idea of equal time availability a "cruel joke". Some people clearly have more on their plate than others. Why should they be held to the same standards of productivity? This brings into doubt the whole "bootstrapping" mentality and what the US calls "hustle culture." Ironically, bootstrapping denoted something unfeasible, not a formula. And yet, our culture promotes this myth that success stems purely from grit and determination. That's so not true! Life shapes the degree of control we have over our share of '24 hours'. Again, John and Sarah example! And let's not overlook the fact that what we can earn for our time depends on stuff we can't control. Society treats people differently based on age, gender, and socioeconomic status, y'know! Odell found time management is less about strictly optimizing each hour and more about where you fall in the "temporal worth economy". Kind of a mouthful, we know, but it's a big word for the idea that different groups in society have varying levels of power and control - not just over their own use of time but also over...

Time. It's one of the few constants in our lives that we can always rely on, right? The hours always pass at the same rate, days come and go, and years inevitably roll by one after another. Or do they? In our rapidly changing world, our perception and experience of time is shifting in some surprising ways that require us to re-examine how we think about that intangible fourth dimension.The philosopher Henri Bergson distinguished between how we think of time and how it actually is. In his book Creative Evolution, Bergson said trying to chop time into concrete chunks is stupid. We often think of time as being made up of separate measurable units - seconds, minutes, hours, days etc. Nonsense! Instead, time flows continuously. It is not made up of separate sliced up pieces. Odell uses the example of lava to explain this idea. Imagine flowing lava. The front tip of the lava is new lava that is flowing forward. This is like the present moment. Behind the flowing lava tip, you can see a long trail where the lava has already flowed over. This solidified lava is the past. In front of the lava tip is empty space where the lava has not reached yet. This is the future. So lava shows how the present moment is always flowing out of the past and into the future. Time is not just distinct segments - it flows continuously like lava, get it? Bergson calls this flowing nature of time "duration." Duration is the real essence of time for Bergson, not separate measurable units.  Time flows, overlaps, and creates, more like lava than distinct dots on a ruler. Remember those strange early pandemic days when time seemed to lose all meaning? Weekdays blurred into weekends as we stayed home in sweatpants. Hours stretched on endlessly without commute or holiday markers. We laughed online about how "time is a construct!" But really, our usual ways of thinking about time had shattered. Bergson had predicted this over 100 years ago! Bergson would likely nod at how crazy time felt during lockdown. With our normal routines thrown out the window, we got more intimate with time's fluid force. Climate change is another factor bending our perception of time's passage. Scientists warn we are rapidly approaching irreversible tipping points for global warming. Yet this urgent crisis unfolds slowly over years and decades, over a...

Can you relate to that panicky sensation of time relentlessly marching on, no matter how desperately you long for it to slow down or reverse? The way we clutch at time management hacks or magic pills promising elongated lifespans shows that deep down, we yearn for more time. With our new perspective on time being flexible and self-determined, the question arises - can we achieve this? Can we 'get more time'?Here's the thing. All this clock-watching is gonna backfire. Haven't you noticed how focusing on time makes it feel fleeting? Author Oliver Burkeman says just this: monitoring time actually heightens awareness of how little we have left. Talk about irony! Meanwhile, the wellness industry cashes in on our fears. From elaborate procedures to customized nutrient packs, they sell the fantasy that enough effort can help us transcend mortality. And of course, money. If you ain't filthy rich, you can die! Besides, no app or green juice can alter genetic destiny. When we pretend anyone can biohack their lifespan given enough grit, we ignore reality. Time always wins in the end.So if we can't manufacture more minutes, how else might we expand time? Remember  Peter and The Magic Thread? Young Odell came across it in one of her mom’s fairytale books from the 1970s, and it stuck with her all these years. The story goes something like this: given a ball of golden thread that sped up time, Peter hurried through life’s milestones, only to end up old and unfulfilled. Constantly chasing longer life strips us of present-moment living. Now on the contrary, picture little kids immersed in play - mud pies, make-believe, building block towers - unaware of minutes passing. What powers that time distortion? Full absorption in the present moment. Focused attention stretches subjective time perception. The more engrossed we get in an activity, the more time dilates.  That's the hack! Ancient Greeks identified two types of time: chronos and kairos. Chronos represents the linear time - seconds ticking into minutes, hours, days and years in orderly progression. It's time as fixed duration. We can't speed it up or slow it down. Kairos, on the other hand, symbolizes those subjectively expansive moments brimming with meaning, aka "deep time." Think peak memorable experiences that absorb all our attention - falling in love, the birth of a child, artistic breakthroughs, blissful relaxation. In those heightened nows when we lose self-consciousness, kairos stretches...

The nonstop busyness of modern life makes us crazed over saving time. But no life hack can manufacture meaning! Instead, collective action to fairly distribute time's resources (minimizing the effect of socioeconomic and other factors) and recognizing that our anxieties are communal is a better solution. And know this: time's not money to bank. It's moments to inhabit fully alive. When we relax racing the clock to soak up now, life feels less rushed. Less rushed, more enough.