#note/sourcereview/book ## What is the thesis? _Our linear view of time which is chunked into measurable minutes and hours which can be calculated as an exchange for money both limits our world and is a result of our contract with capitalism._ ## Am I convinced and why? #people/jennyodell has a wonderful way of writing and helping people [[cognitive reframing]] big ideas like rest (in [[How to do nothing]]) ## Summarize the argument We should redefine time, to be more than one thing, and dig ourselves out of our capitalist-derived minutes and hours based view of time. We need a more developed mental model, to determine what is orthogonal to the clock. ### Chapter 1: who’s time who’s money Frederick Winslow Taylor was an influential management as a science thinker in The 1800’s, coming after Catherine Beecher from the 1840’s - she focused on “efficiency” at the home for women. He focused on efficiency at work, and the reductionist philosophy that work could be reduced to a series of tiny steps, each of which could be measured and each of which could be timed and optimized. To the modern extension of this, we get the merging of work from humans to machines to humans as machines. Even white collar work is now subjected to the same de-skilling. There is a tradeoff here in over optimizing for one ability in that it makes your work depersonalized and fragile.  There is a tension between over training on tasks and making them more reproducible and training on teams and making them more flexible. Collective competence is at once the ability to train deeply and efficiently on one set of tasks as a unit, however it can also mean the ability to solve a broader range of problems.  The more optimized a team is for a certain set of tasks the less able it is to be flexible and adaptive? There is a feeling of being “factoried” when your work is reduced to measurable steps. This is well played out in the use of people as content moderation at scale. Each person must be able to do X amount of content moderation but they aren’t given the emotional time to deal with the strain.  Leaders have the job of simultaneously connecting people to the purpose of their job and getting the best productivity out of them, a challenge for the leaders because typically they are only rewarded on the productivity side.  So the big question here in who’s time and whose money is the tension around us starting to see our own time as money, and what that has done to our view of our lives.  The start of the chapter implies that this view of time is contemporary and contextual, when in earlier times the functional unit of the community had a series of tasks to be done, that community could do what needed to be done for their survival that day (weather, season, etc. dependent) then stop “working”. More akin to the healthy patterns of seasonality, one challenge is the continuous unrestricted pressure of no end to the work! The ER never gets todays work done and goes home to rest.  Seen in pizza shop on Market Days Hours: 11 am -> sold out ### Chapter 2: Self Timer - When and how is slowness a privilege that creates urgency in those unable to have it? - When does more "my time" make their time my time. When am I causing others to have to rush? Think Amazon prime here: my relaxation (I can just order a package from home and chill while it is sent to my house) causes stressful counting of moments by many others (Amazon fulfillment workers, delivery workers, pilots, etc.) - Lying Down [[Tang Ping]] as a movement ### Chapter 3 Can leisure exist? - What has been there all along that needs to re-emerge? - What is orthogonal to clock time? If clock time with it's productivity calculus is on the X/Y axis, what is on the Z axis? ### Chapter 4 _Putting time back in its place_ - Time is co-created, we can observe our participation in the process, or not - What is our responsibility to pay attention to our role in the view of time? ### Chapter 5 - Adding the moral calculus changes the ownership relationship of time (owner/owned minutes) from a technical optimization process to a moral conversation. - Are we asking the right questions? Can we add the moral element to the conversation? - For example: "Is the land who or what?" ### Chapter 6 The idea of [[🐓 Idea Farm/Backlog/chronodiversity]] is connected to [[zero-sum thinking]]. Can time exist in more than one concept at the same time? Meaning in the experience of time, can there be a diversity of the where is it exists? I'm thinking of an operation: these are caricatures to make a point, excuse the cultural compression taking place - the patient, under general anesthesia, has no experience of the time - the surgeon in deep focus, is in [[Flow]], time is passing with a merging of person and time - the medical student is having the seconds tock by with ever lengthening moments - the anesthesiologist is having a "time is money" experience All these experiences co-exist The story of beans, are beans the end, being created to be eaten? Or are they part of a cycle, able to be planted. Lettuce, if picked causes the plant to mature and create more lettuce. there is not a zero-sum relationship, when is time more than zero-sum? How do different forms of time interact to create more, better, or different? ### Chapter 7 Life extension. Being alive as a social, experienced, and dying, leaves it residue through the relationship, set that I loves the individual. Thus, while our life is finite (and should be acknowledged as such) the social resonance sings outward through time. Social death is when one is removed by violence from the process of living resonant to the society. This can happen during imprisonment in. You can extend your life by extending your social network, imagine your pebble dropping in the water of your communities. This is a real life extension as opposed to, the health trends of the 2020s. ### Chapter 8 The time between now and the future is in between time. [[Bioregionalism]] is a strong connection to a place with deep awareness. This is how indigenous people may have related to place. Could there be a "bioregionalism" about time? We are both constrained by the world view of time in which we live, as well as deeply aware and connected to it? Would that be "chronoregionalism?" Can we pass outside our limiting view? How can we live on the time scale of trees in our efforts at chronodiversity? "Timescales overlap and sometimes lie outside human perception" p. 265 "Things happen both quickly and slowly" p. 265 ## What is the other side of the argument? When you're on the clock, time IS money for someone, for you, for your peers, etc. [[getting paid is good data that you're valued]] ## What else do I wonder about? How else can we look at time? Let's see what the redwoods think on our summer trip to California. Let's think about tectonic fault lines, moving quickly and slowly, from the "Pale Blue Dot" perspective. ## Action Separate my paycheck from my hours, don't calculate what's compensated and what's not, ask if I made enough for my family, and if I'm living my values. ## When do I want to stumble across this? #on/time #on/flow #on/dei #on/life ## Source: Odell, J. (2023). _Saving time: Discovering a life beyond the clock_ (First Edition). Random House. %% ## References, Quotes, Ideas ```dataview table file.mtime.year + "-" + file.mtime.month + "-" + file.mtime.day as Modified from [[Saving Time]] and !outgoing([[Saving Time]]) sort file.mtime desc ```