5 Key Teachings: HOW TO DO NOTHING, by Jenny Odell

"The removal of economic security for working people dissolved these boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with twenty-four potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles. In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on 'nothing.' It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive." So writes Jenny Odell, in the stunning How to Do Nothing, which is a treatise on the attention economy and how we spend our time. May we do a better job of enjoying our time, rather than maximizing it; letting it pass idly rather than tracking every minute. (And yes, this book dovetails nicely with this week's podcast episode with Oliver Burkeman about the fallacy of time management, as well as my newsletter about the hunt for influence and followers.)

5 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. This is just beautiful.

Here’s Odell:

Nothing is harder to do than nothing. In a world where our value is determined by our productivity, many of us find our every last minute captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily.

2. What happens if productivity squeezes every ounce of magic—and every magician—out of culture.