‘Time is money’: How can you avoid burnout when we’re all on the clock?

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During lockdown time lost its shape. While beards sprouted beneath masks and seasons changed with more swagger against the diminished traffic, the weeks ran together. In response, I engineered a schedule that in sheer cruelty would have made Mark Wahlberg’s 3am starts reasonable. A cacophony of pre-dawn alarms from devices kept beyond reach, push-ups, cold showers, meditation and a creative writing regimen all before the day’s paid labour began. Then one day I could not get up.

In Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock we learn that burnout is the clash of two distinct modes of time. The first, which I had self-imposed, is time metered by the clock and geared for maximum output. The second, which I neglected to my psychological decline, is intuitive and nonlinear time, how 10 minutes in the dentist’s chair is longer than a Sunday afternoon.

In Saving Time, Jenny Odell suggests that doing nothing is, for those who can afford it, an act of rebellion.

We’re all on somebody’s clock. Whether employed, in the gig economy or owning a business, “time is money” is something you feel in your guts. With good reason. It’s been around long enough to become deeply ingrained. Time regularised into seconds was a tool of colonial extraction. Europe introduced the clock as a beacon of progress, deemed idleness a sin then used it to maximise output from slaves and native people who thought it as alien as overlaying a grid on land to make a map.
The literal limit of a colony’s power was the audible range of its church bells, chiming each hour.

Underpinning the first mode is fungibility: that each pristine hour is identical to any other. Honed during the industrial revolution and systematised through Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s famous monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, complex tasks of manufacturing were broken down into tiny repeatable and timed actions. Craftsmen became workers expected to behave less like artisans and more like machines. Innovation here continues in factories such as Foxconn and Amazon shipping facilities, with timed toilet breaks and workers’ movements captured as precisely as sensors allow, not just to surveil but to train their eventual robotic replacements.

While the knowledge economy has never timed thoughts as industry times actions, it has inherited its sense of time and drive for measuring and improvement. Software such as StaffCop uses AI to grade work into brackets of quality while pushback against the sanctity of the eight-hour day is belittled as “yuppie kvetching”.

After the unmonitored COVID years, management is poised to reassert control via time. See Elon Musk’s demand that Tesla staff come into the office for a “minimum of 40 hours per week” or “pretend to work somewhere else”. Behind every hoodied tech CEO with his medicinal marijuana card and break-room foosball skills lurks a monocled, moustachioed industrialist. The starch is gone, but the meter keeps on ticking.

Jenny Odell says workers’ movements are captured not just to surveil but to train their eventual robotic replacements.Credit: Bloomberg

What’s more, the author states, not everyone’s time is equal. The integrity of “24 shining hours” can survive intact only if the day’s lumpiness, its chores and countless interruptions are smoothed by those who have always done most of this “timeless” (and underpaid) labour: women and minorities.

Time management assumes the preserve of the privileged, with different experiences of time running along the strata of class, race and gender. Power relations resolve to “who is timing whom?” with anyone who rejects metered time banished to temporal purgatory. “Outside of time” they peer in but can’t participate.

Aside from work, capitalism creeps along the axis of regularised time into our leisure via the attention economy’s incessant notifications and psychological manipulation. Here, too, is the threat of disappearing “outside of time”, where non-participation equals social irrelevance. Where true rest exists it is only to recharge us for more work.

Odell suggests that doing nothing is, for those who can afford it, an act of rebellion. While depressingly passive, this speaks of our arrival in late-stage capitalism where traditional refugees from timed work such as mindfulness, community or unstructured socialising, have been ruthlessly commodified, leaving the only one action left: inaction.

What makes regularised time so difficult to shake is how deeply embedded it is in culture. The protestant work ethic, with its demand for constant striving, lives on despite the decline in religious observance. Many of us have internalised this virtue, extracting as much work as possible from ourselves. This mindset led to burnout during COVID because in the void of lockdown, instinctive work practices held firm, revealing an unsettling truth: follow the cracking whip and often you’ll find your own hand.

While on a mountaintop waiting for the sun to rise, the author states, the thing we’re waiting for is usually just over the horizon. Here is time’s ultimate false bargain: sell yours now to buy all you need later. When you get down to it, this is the meat of most self-help: run one’s life like a multinational and be your own boss, with the mumbled caveat that first you must become a tyrant and turn exploitation inward.

Saving Time runs deeper than a Marxist-style critique of today’s work. To this, the astounding diversity of literary, philosophical and political sources cohere early on but in later chapters things begin to disintegrate, the mosaic becoming kaleidoscopic, arresting but the argument failing to hold. Perhaps this is by design. The first mode of time is so deeply entrenched while the other mode can only be inferred anecdotally or understood through experience. Even so, the latter variety is still, by the end of the book, elusive and strange, a catch-all for any non-Western type.

So why does time actually matter? For one, it’s running short. The extractivist mode has exhausted our environment. Last month’s IPCC Sixth Assessment Report Synthesis Report contained its “final warning” on the climate crisis. Many solutions tabled exist in regularised time, they demand more striving, more growth but will always lead back to the same place, albeit by detour. As Odell explains, keeping the same car is better than buying an electric one. True change involves considering other, radically different sorts of time beyond the relentless commodified beat, before time of every sort runs out.

Saving Time by Jenny Odell is published by Bodley Head, $35.

Jenny Odell appears at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on May 22 (wheelercentre.com) and at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (swf.org.au) May 22-May28.

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