Introduction

📣 The Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby Award, the "Oscars of the Internet!" Please visit http://itsfreetime.com/webby to cast your vote for Free Time between now and Thursday, April 20! This nomination alone is a major achievement, putting us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered—thank you so much for being here and for your support!

What if time wasn’t something we had to hoard, protect, or chase? What if we could change our relationship to time—to life itself—expanding beyond the linear, grid-like units running out as we race against the clock, and toward a true sense of aliveness instead?

Today’s I’m trying an experimental format: diving deep into a book that relates to so much of what we talk about here, Jenny Odell’s Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. I haven’t landed an interview with her (yet!), but I also really appreciated her previous book, How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, so am happy to spotlight both.

A few caveats: This is not a book review where I critically examine the content (here are two from The New Yorker and the NYT), nor a comprehensive summary. Instead, I’m bringing you three big ideas from the book related to our Free Time universe, that sparked aha moments and mindset shifts for me. I hope these inspire similar paradigm shifts for you. As always, my goal is to help set even more of your time freeeeeee!

🌟 3 Key Takeaways:

• Notice the productivity paradigm that many of us are still operating under: seeing our days as a race against time, leading to an internal tyranny and guilt even if self-employed.
• Embrace the roads not taken: Step off the hedonic treadmill by allowing limits, and even deliberate mediocrity. Who gets to say what is mediocre in the first place?
• Cultivate abundance: “What if time [could] be gardened?” Jenny writes, “Then it's also possible to imagine its increase in ways other than individual hoarding.”

📝 Permission: To be tired in a good way, one that softens you; to be unproductive, to stop optimizing every micro moment of your day, to do less, to be free.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next: Be an observer as you go about your week; look for people and places that give you time, that expand your sense of aliveness.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Articles: The New Yorker—Why We Never Have Enough Time, NYT—Time Has Been Codified and Commoditized, WIRED—Jenny Odell Can Stretch Time and So Can You
• Community: BFF (apply promo code PODCAST)

📘Books Mentioned

• Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
• How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business
• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

🎧Related Episodes

• Interviews with Jenny on Saving Time: Jenny Odell Saves Time, and Herself, by Living Beyond the Clock, Making Sense of Time (Jenny Odell), Jenny Odell on Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
• Free Time:
• 141: Process, Permission Slips, and Business Pivots with Tara McMullin
• 027: Time Management for Mortals with Oliver Burkeman
• Pivot:
• 305: Is What You Are Wanting Actually What’s Best For You? With Luke Burgis

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