In 2019, Jenny Odell renegotiated our understanding of attention with How to Do Nothing, invoking the perennial self-help bogeyman of social-media distraction to lure readers into a deftly researched and beautifully written manifesto for our collective reorientation towards nature and community. Four years later, Odell is back with the masterful Saving Time, performing a similar reversal with the same erudition and style. In this new work, she takes the common question, ‘How can I make more time in the day?’ and instead asks, ‘What kind of time do I want more of?’.

To answer this, Odell goes far beyond morning routines and motivation journals to instead trace ‘time’ through history and across cultures, defamiliarising the dominant idea of time as a succession of infinitely divisible and endlessly productive labour hours by presenting all the other ways we could understand time. From the fluid ecological time of the sun and the tides to the chronologies of Indigenous communities, Odell breaks time free from its conceptual cage and, in doing so, saves it in a way much more meaningful than just pinching hours from the clock.

There is a stunning foundation of research supporting Odell’s prose, with the depth to produce a six-page bibliography and the breadth to allow The Simpsons and Das Capital to occupy that list together with a myriad of contemporary writers. I found myself wanting to follow each and every thread to its source, which is a testament to Odell’s ability to do justice to the many works from which this book draws its ideas whilst still maintaining her own voice.

Saving Time is so many things at once: a history of time, an ecological travelogue, a self-described ‘panoramic assault against nihilism’ and a rallying cry for climate hope. It is also a self-help book, but only in the sense that helping the self is only truly possible if we help the world too.