Captive to the corporate clock? Here’s an alternative way to look at your time

Our view of time has for many been shaped by work. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw.

Flexible work should spell the end of clockwatching, right?

Not so, according to artist and author Jenny Odell, who sees little shift in the way we like to parcel out our time.

In Australia to promote her new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, the 37-year-old American talks of how our view of time has in many ways been created by the world of work, with the clock operating as a powerful tool for driving ­efficiency and productivity.

That old adage, that time is money, doesn’t wash with Odell, who urges us to reflect on the “different rhythms of life” that have little to do with clock time. And it’s not just about taking time off, because we often feel the need to be busy and productive even during leisure time.

Says Odell: “As humans, we’ve always needed ways to observe and measure time, and we’ve had many different ways of doing that. The clock is just one of them.

“When you look at any of those systems of reckoning time, they usually have some kind of goal in mind. The history of clock time is also a history of measuring the work of other people, of being able to measure it and allocate it, as ­opposed to systems of time that are more concerned with, for example, specific plants flowering or specific animals arriving … which is how time was thought of for a long time before we got to abstract clock time.”

Odell’s critique of how we are captive to the clock falls into a receptive space: Covid-19 and the disruptions to business have generated much debate about what we are all doing with our lives.

Jenny Odell has published a new book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Picture: Supplied

Odell knows what she is doing with hers. Eight years teaching digital art at Stanford University, mainly to students doing liberal studies as an add-on to their engineering and similar courses, revealed many found it hard to value any activity that lacked a material value. It set her on a journey that has involved art projects, essay writing and a 2019 New York Times-listed bestseller, How to do Nothing; Resisting the Attention Economy.

“Stanford has an association with achievement, culture and ­efficiency, and a lot of these students were coming from outside the humanities – engineering, product design, things like that,” she says. “It might have been the first or only art class they took and being in that kind of position, trying to articulate the value of something that wasn’t as obviously useful, just doing that year after year, probably influenced my thinking quite a bit.”

Did the undergraduates find her approach to time inimical to efficiency? “I don’t think so. Ironically, part of the reason they were asked to take that class was because Stanford was finding people were coming out of programs overly ­focused on specific ways of doing things. It was part of a larger effort to get them to think in more flexible ways.”

Odell’s warnings about “clock time” do not lead her to an advice industry that focuses on trying to manage time by working better and smarter. Nor does she advocate slowing down, arguing this is often a way of encouraging people to recover so they can return to work and be more productive.

Odell concedes we’re not going to escape the clock anytime soon but says there’s a potential for clock time not to be the sole way we conceive of time. Sounds like a good idea, but surely that’s not possible for an office worker on a 38-hour week?

In response, Odell offers the example of an engineering firm where a sociologist instituted a study of “quiet time, a couple of hours, maybe once or twice a week, where people were not allowed to email each other or bother each other”.

Unsurprisingly, she says, workers loved it and reoriented their work schedules. Then the sociologist left, the study ended, but “everybody wanted to keep (the system)”. Sadly, the company did not agree. Odell sees it as an example of how the task of shifting attitudes around time needs to involve employers and colleagues: there’s only so much an individual can do about eschewing the clock.

Ms Odell is promoting her book at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Sunday.

Sceptics might see her efforts to reimagine time as anti-­efficiency but Odell, the daughter of an engineer, says “people can be quite creative in terms of making things more efficient”.

“I think the problem is when ­efficiency becomes a goal in and of itself,” she says. ­“Efficiency is helpful when it helps us do what we ­really want, collectively, as distinguished from let’s say, a company that just wants to become more efficient at getting value out of their workers. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with efficiency, I just think it’s very easily a glorified end in and of itself.”

One example of how our approach to time can distort our understanding of human needs is the way we think of burnout as caused by an individual working too hard.

Says Odell: “(This view) doesn’t necessarily acknowledge the larger reasons why (people) might feel ‘burned out’, which is that maybe they just feel powerless, they feel they don’t have control over their time. And maybe also larger things – just witnessing suffering around us and not being supported.”

What’s the solution?

“I think it’s really important for us to be allowed to have a conception of ourselves that is something more than a person who produces or a person who consumes,” she says.

“Currently a lot of work and what is called leisure still falls into one or both of those buckets. In the book, I describe a lot of ­moments I found personally enlivening that don’t really fit into ­either one of those categories, that moment where you realise you’re a human being on Earth. That’s an incredible thing in and of itself.”

The point is that even our leisure is seen as a category of time, one that can’t exist without the category of work time, she says. Pre-industrial societies didn’t make a distinction between work and leisure and Odell argues our creation of “leisure time” is intertwined with consumption. It’s been developed as a way “to get people to work in order to buy something”.

“Consumerism and work have had this long relationship with each other,” she says.

“One of the modern day manifestations of this notion of leisure is as an opportunity for physical and economic self-optimisation, like retreats, where you have all your biometric data analysed and get specific foods and make yourself a more smoothly running machine for work.”

Surprisingly, remote work does not automatically encourage people to a different relationship with the “clock”. Odell says the increased pressure to juggle work and domestic duties can mean we are never “off the clock”.

Jenny Odell will appear at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, at Carriageworks in Eveleigh, at 11am on Sunday.