For “Routine Excellence,” GQ asks creative, successful people about the practices and habits that get them through their day.

Over the course of her first two books, the writer and artist Jenny Odell has examined two of the more vexing complications of the modern condition: having too much to do, and not enough time to do it. Her 2019 book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, became a New York Times bestseller by offering up fresh ideas on how to escape our cultural obsession with productivity. In her newest work, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Odell follows a similar line of questioning to examine our relationship to the clock, particularly the capitalist, corporate idea that “time is money.” Thinking deeply about things like time management and how to get things done—the ways in which those practices can help us, and the ways in which they can trap us—has left Odell with some ideas about her own routines and habits. “I have something that's kind of the exact middle point between having a daily routine and complete chaos,” she says. 

GQ: When you wake up, how do you figure out what you're going to do that day?

Jenny Odell: I try to figure it out the night before. I've started to appreciate the act of not making decisions in the time that those decisions are affecting me. The night before, I can patiently figure out where things are gonna go, and then write it down. When I wake up in the morning, it's like, “Okay, I'm just gonna follow this thing that yesterday me very nicely did for today me.”  

It’s making me think of this thing I remember Jerry Seinfeld saying about the brain being like a puppy, how it needs structure and can't be allowed to do whatever it wants. But I sometimes find when I do that type of night before planning, I often drastically overestimate how much I can do in a day. 

Definitely. I've kept a journal since I was a kid. It’s helpful to have mountains of evidence of how you can over-schedule yourself. I have pages and pages of my entire late twenties and early thirties being like, “I have too much to do right now.” That makes it a little bit easier for me to imagine not doing that. And in terms of reacting to the feeling of being over-extended, I used to get more and more mired in that feeling and make it worse by checking things a lot, or trying to do five things at once because there are five things and I want them all to be done. Now, I'm a little bit better at being like, “You know what? There is actually just too much here. It will not all happen today, logically speaking. Also, I need to go for a walk around the block because I'm losing perspective and starting to freak out.”

That is a lesson I've had to learn over and over and over again. Every time I’m spiraling, it’s so hard to convince myself to take a break, and then every time I do it, I'm like, how did you forget that lesson again?

I sometimes compare myself to that guy from Memento who had to tattoo stuff on himself. I don’t necessarily believe in literal multiple selves, but I do believe in different expressions of the same self. There’s Jenny stressed out at her desk, Jenny sitting on a rock on a mountain, Jenny with her best friends. Sometimes, I feel like I'm writing letters from one of them to the other. There's this one beach that I go to sometimes and it's so big and open and expansive. It's a beach that I was taken to as a baby. I get there maybe twice a year, but when I do, sometimes I literally write a letter to myself—but “myself” is understood as the self that is extremely in the weeds and has no perspective. I'm like, “Look, I know where you are right now, I know what's going on, here are some things that you need to do that are important. You're not gonna feel like they're important and you're not gonna want to do them, you're not gonna think any of this makes sense.” Number one on the list is, “Try to come back here. You need to come back here.” Then I get there and I'm like, “Oh, right.”

One of the things that interests me about you is that you speak and write so thoughtfully about the space you need to leave to allow ideas to germinate subconsciously—space that I think culturally we label as “unproductive.” But you also seem to get so much done. Are you relentless about meeting deadlines? Or can you be flexible about that? 

I had more time to write Saving Time than How to Do Nothing. To me, it's a more ambitious book. So I was more worried about getting to the end by the deadline. I wrote this thing that looked like a syllabus. That’s always the advice, right? “Break down a really big task into a smaller task.” I did that and then I missed all of those deadlines. Because my type of writing, and also for something that long, the way it gets written is just not linear. 

Honestly, it reminds me of a tree: it’s dormant for a big part of the year and then, suddenly, the buds open. Two weeks later, the leaves are totally open. It doesn't seem like it's moving at all and then it moves really fast, and then it moves really slow again. It’s funny that I forgot about my process and thought that I was gonna have this very measured, industrial organization where all work is figured the same: work is work. “How many words do you write in an hour?” kind of thing. I can't write like that. 

The majority of what I consider writing happens when I'm not in front of my computer anyway, so I consider the part where I'm sitting down to write as transcription. So that writing part, the part where the ideas are becoming organized and congealing, that's like gardening. You can have some sense of the shape of that process, the ingredients that you might need, and the conditions. I know what those are, but I cannot make that proceed in a way that I want to. It has its own rhythm. Really, the most important ingredient is time. I'm extremely fortunate that I am in a line of work where that's accepted. 

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What’s something you changed about your practices or habits, routines as a result of all the thinking you were doing while or writing this book? How did thinking about time change the structure of your day? 

It taught me patience. I got a little bit better at making long, long, long-term plans—or at least thinking more long-term. I wrote Saving Time in two years, so, especially at the beginning, you're thinking about a point that's two years away. I remember that was hard to get used to, because social media in particular can get you used to instant gratification and feedback: I did something today and it's recognized. For this book, there was a part of the process where I would work so hard and it felt like it was just going into a hole. It’s only now that people are reading it that I'm like, “oh, it didn't go into a hole.” 

In those moments where you felt like, oh this is just going into a hole, was there a way that you gave that feedback to yourself? Or what would you say to somebody who doesn't want to get caught in that trap of feeling like I'm not busy, so I'm not valuable?

I kept a work log for myself. It's just the date and what I researched that day. I was reading so many things and if I was like, “Oh, what was that thing I was reading last week?” I needed that kind of information. But as the months wore on, that was a place where I was recording that I had read some stuff. Sometimes the thing that went on the work log was just like, “I thought about this thing.” I didn't even have to have a breakthrough or anything. It's just what I thought about it because, in the end, that actually is the work. 

More generally, I've been trying to put more of an emphasis on learning than busyness. And learning in a way that sometimes feels additive, but isn't always. I’ve been thinking about learning in a way that's more like alchemy. For instance, there's learning where you're reading a popular non-fiction book written by a journalist and you get information that you didn't have before and it adds to your knowledge. But there's these other kind of moments—for me, it's often in a conversation or just walking around—and a couple of different experiences that you've had and things that you've read kind of come together all of a sudden. I would describe that as growth, but it feels like it's happening in a different register to just adding information, where something really clicks into place, and then as it clicks into place, you realize that nothing looks the same anymore. I find that to be the most exciting kind  of moment. When you bear that in mind—the notion of something shifting instead of necessarily being added—it makes it easier to let go of that idea that you didn't do something that day. Because you did. You did live a day. You will not be the same. 

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People in time management—the “productivity bros” you bring up in your book—love to say that everyone has the same 24 hours. I’m curious how you react to that idea.

I think it's incredible that that sentiment still exists. Okay, you have 24 hours, but where are you on earth? What circumstances are you in? What do you have access to? I don't even think you have to try very hard to pick it apart. But it’s interesting to me how pervasive it is. It's not just the idea that everyone has the same 24 hours, it's that hours are the same, that they're interchangeable. That's an incredibly culturally-specific idea that doesn't really square with human experience. I read a bunch of sociology papers on time, but you don't need to read a bunch of papers on the sociology of time to know that that framing of time doesn't make sense. All you need to do is just have a body and just interrogate what your experience is.

Can you say more about that? I don't know if I quite follow you there. 

We have a cultural language for time. We have a seven-day week and we have minutes and hours, and those feel really real, because they have to, because we have to live by them. But just think about your own lived experience, or how time feels to you, or observe a tree in your local park. The tree doesn't know what “November” is. That pushes against what is otherwise very much accepted as what time is. 

Why do you think the 24 hours myth has such sticking power? 

I would guess that it's for the same reason as a lot of other, similar ideologies. In the U.S., we love to put the emphasis on individual responsibility. It's an appealing idea for someone who wants to lean hard on the notion that someone's experiences in their life are entirely their own responsibility, and not the effects of relationships with other people or with power. It's an easy idea. It's not even an oversimplification. It's a distortion. But it sounds simple, certainly simpler than having to think about people as nodes in a network where everyone is differential, and affected by all of these different overlapping power structures. It’s tragic the idea that someone would see something that's happening to them as their own individual pathology, and then go on YouTube and watch like a productivity bro video and be like, “I just need to get my life together.” 

You write about your dreams in the book. Do you have any practices or routines around your dreams?

I don't write them down because they’re too long and detailed. There've been several points in my life where I've tried but I'm like, “This is gonna take an hour every day.” I do pay attention to the more general patterns. I think the types of stress streams that people have are really telling. I consider it like free therapy. Mine are always about running out of time. They've always been since I was a kid. I’m always rushing to check out of the hotel room. I have that dream all the time. I had that dream last night! It’s like your stuff is everywhere and the hotel staff is knocking on the door and it's 11:15, and you're nowhere near being packed. It's really annoying because it combines running out of time with not wanting to offend people. So when I was thinking about writing Saving Time, that was probably part of my motivation. I understood that this is a big thing in my psyche, this relationship to time. 

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We live in a world where it's easy to ask for other people's time and people are not always the most thoughtful about it—but also protecting your time as a finite source also buys into that zero-sum capitalist idea of “time is money,” which also has its complications. I’m curious how this book changed how you think about asking for others’ time.

I’m more sensitive to asking for other people's time, but at the same time, I feel like I have gotten less selfish about my time. There's this hoarding mentality that you can get if you subscribe to the idea of time as money: You have your time and I have my time. That's actually quite isolating and lonely in my experience. People also associate time with energy. Like, “I don't have time for that” means “I don't have energy for that.” But I have found recently that sometimes I actually need to give my time to someone else to feel that I have some energy. 

I had COVID over New Year’s, and I was quarantined in my room and my boyfriend did everything. He cooked, he did all the dishes. And then he just got really sick last week. So we switched. He kept being like, “I feel so bad, I wanna help.” I didn't know how to convey that I'm happy to do this. It's not a zero-sum game. This is not a subtraction from my life. We were talking about how that transactional view of time—*you have your time and I have my time—*makes it harder for you to accept the gift that someone is giving you when you are sick. 

I have this hopeful vision of like that yes, there was a quantitative difference for us, in time given at New Year's and then this past week, but it exists in this much larger overall relationship and agreement that there's going to be give and take. What you would want ideally in a society is an equitable network, where time does average out in a humane way, where the same people aren't always taking on more and not ever being able to be cared for. I'm not a mom, but a lot of my friends have kids and I'm always asking, who takes care of the moms? They’re getting sick, too. They're tired. Who does that? Who mothers the mom? 

If you could go back 10 years, what's something you'd spend more time on and what's something you'd spend less time on? 

I would spend more time with friends, and also talking to people who were outside of my discipline. I was pretty much just doing art stuff at that time. I think 2013 was the year that I transitioned from my corporate job to Stanford. And I would spend less time working because I just saw a physical therapist and I'm basically crooked now because of all the years that I spent Photoshopping. My left shoulder, or arm bone is turned in from hovering over the keyboard to do keyboard shortcuts. I would've dialed down the intensity. 

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Is there one thought or quote or idea from either of your books, or in other work you've done, about routine or productivity that you find yourself coming back to most frequently? 

There’s a quote from Richard Sennett, a sociologist: “Routine can demean, but it can also protect; routine can decompose labour, but it can also compose a life.” I've been thinking about that one a lot lately, because some people have asked me what's the difference between a productivity bro’s punishing routine, where you're just surveilling yourself, and a meaningful routine? Because it's true that people use routines and quantified self-technology to achieve goals that are true to what they want. I love that idea that routine can be any of these things. I like to think of it as something that you use. It’s a tool, but you always maintain your relationship to it as a tool that is supposed to help you do what you want. Which means throwing it away when it's not working anymore. That’s the hard part. Because it can get really sticky through habit, but it can also get associated with self-worth in a Protestant work ethic kind of way, where you're no longer living up to the routine, instead of the other way around. 

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

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