Unplugging from the Attention Economy and Reclaiming Your Time with Jenny Odell

If you find yourself feeling chronically overwhelmed, with a to-do list you can’t ever get to the bottom of, and a nagging feeling that you’re never quite doing enough, this episode is for you. Joining me is Jenny Odell, the acclaimed author of the books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture. An artist and educator based in Oakland, California, Jenny’s work shines a light on how we can reclaim our attention in an increasingly digital world, while escaping from the clutches of productivity culture.  I also share my personal story of how a recent vacation followed by COVID has caused me to rethink my own attention economy – and how this has been shifting my nervous system – and perspectives – on ‘what’s enough.”

Join us as we explore insights on the importance of rest, reflection, and mindful living as part of taking back our lives, power, and mental well-being including: 

• What the attention economy is and how it’s impacting our mental well-being
• The compare and despair impact of social media on women’s health
• The misconception of “doing nothing” and its true meaning.
• The anxiety and irritability that comes from constantly racing the clock
• Chronodiversity and the power of nature for expanding time
• Strategies for reclaiming our attention by focusing on what truly matters.
• The importance of rest and reflection in maintaining overall well-being.
• Practical tips for incorporating mindful practices into daily life.
• How to start making small changes toward a more intentional and fulfilling life.

Resources:

More from Jenny Odell

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy 
• Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture
• Jenny's website

The Adrenal Thyroid Revolution : Dr. Aviva’s book on taking back your health – while nourishing your adrenals and supporting your thyroid

Jenny Odell: The Interview Transcript

Aviva: Hello, everybody, and it's really nice to be back with you with the On Health Podcast on Health for Women. I had no idea that I was going to be taking an extended break for a couple of extra weeks, and what happened was I went on a two-week incredible trip to Europe with my partner. He and I were celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary. It just still sounds and feels so crazy to say that out loud. We went to Paris for a week, Mallorca for a few days, and Barcelona for a few days. We had an amazing trip. We walked over 120 miles during that two weeks and just took in the sights and wandered, and I had an amazing experience too.

I went to this restaurant in Paris called Comice. First time we ever went to a Michelin-star restaurant, but it was like this farm-to-table vibe, and it looked really special, and we decided to do that for our Paris anniversary dinner. And we get sat down at our table, and this beautiful woman comes up to me and she brings over two glasses of champagne. And she said, “I saw on the reservation that it was your anniversary and I don't want to interrupt, but I just wanted to tell you, Aviva, that I know who you are and I love your work, and I've been following you for years and I have your book.” And it was pretty amazing to be in Paris, let alone a Michelin-star restaurant, and have that happen and just realize sometimes how global the work is. But also for me, those moments where I have my own insecurities or issues around am I accomplishing enough or doing enough? And then that happened, and it was just one of those beautiful moments. And also she was just a stunning human being, and punchline, she was the owner of the restaurant with her husband. So amazing. We had just a beautiful, beautiful journey.

Then, the night before we were leaving Barcelona, I got sick, and I had Covid, and it was my first time having Covid. I masked up and had to fly back across the Atlantic, a nine-hour flight, and then a two-and-a-half-hour drive home from New York City up to the mountains where I live. It was a very long, long day, after which I spent five days in bed with aching pain and fever. My husband got Covid the day after I got it. He had had it previously and had a milder case, but we both got pretty much taken out by this Flirt variant. And the recovery was then another couple of weeks really, and so that's why I have been silent on the podcast for the last few weeks. I had episodes ready to go while I was traveling.

It was a really powerful lesson for me because, okay, there are people who have small symptoms and blow them up into how sick they are. And then there are people like me who have this opposite weird thing. So when we are sick, we're like, “Oh, maybe I'm exaggerating it to myself. Maybe I'm overreacting.” I was literally feverish and unable to get up and unable to eat for five days and still have no sense of smell or taste, which is great. I lost all taste for coffee and chocolate. So easy way to take a break on both of those in my life. Yeah, but I was convincing myself, am I just being lazy? Especially in the week and two weeks after when I was more tired. As I said, we had walked 120 miles while we were traveling, and then it was just like an effort. It felt like moving through quicksand to go uphill on my country road, which I walk up all the time with no problem. It was a deep moment for me, though, because in the two weeks of vacation followed by a week of Covid and essentially two more weeks of rest, it really was a deep, deep reset of my nervous system.

One thing about being post-Covid, and thankfully I'm not having any long-haul symptoms, it seems to be completely resolving itself, but is that I don't have the bandwidth for my nervous system getting amped up. I don't have the bandwidth for a lot of drama or tension or to be overworking. And so I'm really having to reset my expectations for myself, and it feels really good. It actually feels a little like postpartum because, in a way, going through the fever and kind of just burning out energy and burning out and sweating reminded me of labor in the sense of you're working really hard and you're sweating and your body is just kind of clearing out and cleansing and eliminating and doing all those things during labor and then those sweats postpartum. And then when you're postpartum, for those of you who do have kiddos, you have to reset your expectations. You only have two hands. You have one baby, maybe two babies. You can't do all the things right away at the same pace. For me, I know when I became a mom, there was something really beautiful in that step back, in that permission to pause and be really present and really in the moment. And our culture is always driving us into urgency, like what we have to get done, what we need to get done, more and more and more and more. And always driving us into a sense of inadequacy. We're not doing enough and could always be doing more. And this has been really dramatic for me.

This happened to me once before many, many years ago where I was shifting jobs, and I had this moment of pause in between things, and it was as if when you're in a storm and the electricity goes out in your house and all of a sudden it's so, so quiet and you didn't even realize how often you're hearing the background hum of your refrigerator or things like that. So when I came back, I rested a lot, and I'm still in a much slower pace of reevaluating how much I get done in a day and what I've been pressuring myself to do. And it's almost like multiplying by subtracting what can I actually take away to have greater peace and greater quality of life right now? And then I got back, and I was getting ready to edit this particular next episode of the podcast, which happens to be in the queue, the one that you're receiving today with Jenny Odell. Our conversation was moving and relaxing and gentle and also very poignant in which we talk exactly about urgency culture, the rush, the pressure, the pressure to always produce and be more productive all the time. So I hope that even in the busiest moments of your life, you're remembering that you also get to be a human being, not just a human doing. And the critical importance of this for our healthy nervous systems to allow ourselves to reset and it literally it'll reset your cortisol levels, your adrenaline levels, your sleep, your hormones, your blood sugar, all the things that come along with that, your stress levels, not wishing Covid on anyone as an opportunity. I'm not seeing the cloud with the silver lining here. It just happened to be that it was two weeks of vacation and two weeks of Covid, so it was like a very extended period of rest.

The other thing I just want to really encourage you is that when you need to rest, rest, don't fight against it, right? I was literally fighting against my body's need to rest with my mind by saying should I be doing more? Should I be pushing myself and my body's going, but babe, you can't. And I had to let that be and settle into it. And there's been a real beauty that has a risen for me in this pace reset. And I'm just wishing that time for introspection and reflection so that you can also look at areas where maybe you're pushing yourself harder than you need to. Saying yes to more things than you see need to say yes to or want to say yes to and allowing yourself deep times to pause, deep times to just be, deep times to just walk in the woods, play with a child, read a book. I give you now the conversation with me and Jenny. I hope it's deeply nourishing and I look forward to seeing you next time on health overwhelm, stress, a never-ending to-do list, a bottomless inbox and a sense of disconnect from self or nostalgia for the time before we were wedded to devices. These are pretty endemic feelings and I know them too and at least for many of my patients and the women I know, they're also the kinds of things that make us feel like our days are going by in a blur and then they're keeping us up at night. My hope is that today's conversation helps you realize one, that you're not alone and it gives you some insight into why we're all struggling with this modern predicament and brings you some gems that might help you find your way a little bit closer to a life lived by your internal rhythms, perhaps nature's rhythms rather than just this relentless juggle that's imposed on us by what's called the attention economy, which you'll learn all about.

My guest today is Jenny Odell, a multidisciplinary artist and author whose work challenges our digital era norms. Her New York Times bestselling debut How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy is a revolutionary call to reclaim our attention from the clutches of productivity and constant digital engagement into more meaningful interactions beyond the digital landscape. And her follow-up Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture explores our social obsession with time efficiency. Her book invites us to reimagine time influenced by natural rhythms and broader life experiences, advocating for a life where value is not dictated by efficiency. Jenny's writings are often featured in publications and the New York Times, and her work is a beacon for all of us seeking deeper connection and purpose in this fast-paced modern world, emphasizing the richness of experience over productivity. And Jenny, I'm delighted to have you here with us today. Thank you for the gift of your time and your attention for this hour.

Jenny: Thanks. I'm super happy to be here.

Aviva: Oh my gosh, I followed your work for quite some time right now, and I'm just super, super excited about this conversation. I've looked forward to it for a long time. Time is a word we use a lot.

For listeners who aren't familiar with it, could you start by simply unpacking what the attention economy actually means?

Jenny: Yeah, so I have my kind of own definition. I think it depends a little bit on who you ask. For me, the attention economy is just any economy where the currency is attention. So I think for a lot of people, the most obvious example would be something like social media, where things are set up for you as a user to want to get as much engagement and attention as you possibly can. The app itself is designed for you to give it as much attention and time as it possibly can get you to, but there's also older things like advertising. I would also include in the attention economy. It's just anything where attention is what it's being optimized for and what's being sought.

Aviva: And attention is such a generous word because attention can be such a positive thing. We are present with people; we're giving them our attention. That's such a gift. But this kind of attention feels often like a negative time suck. Like wait a minute, I just went on to post my social post for today, and it's 45 minutes later. What happened?

Jenny: Yeah, I think that there's, for me anyway, I feel like there are different, maybe not necessarily forms of attention, but maybe qualities of attention. And I think we intuitively know that when you've had an experience where you just paid really high-quality attention to something, for me, that could be a live theater performance is often that for me or an in-person conversation with a friend on a walk that had a lot of sensory details where you really got to the bottom of something and felt very connected to someone. These are moments for me where I felt like I had sustained high-quality attention, whereas the attention that I'm giving to something like social media or the infinite scroll does not feel high-quality. It feels kind of almost like the lowest common denominator of attention.

Aviva: And it rewards you. I didn't even know this, but someone recently said to me, yeah, I mean, social media, Instagram particularly rewards people in a time algorithm. So the more time you spend in there, not just posting but answering comments and doing direct messages. And I mean, I want to engage with my audience, but social media is not what I was born to do or went to medical school for, but it becomes this sort of necessary almost or perceived necessary part of where we do put our time and attention, but it also takes away from other really meaningful things that I want to make sure we get to. So before we do though, how has this attention economy evolved to become one so dominant? I mean, it drives economy; it drives so many things. For so many people, it's also really overwhelming. How did it get this larger-than-life attention?

Jenny: It's a bit hard to say. I always wonder with things like this; obviously, things were different in the past, but they were almost so different. It becomes difficult to compare. So I don't know. It's hard to make broad statements, but I do think one thing that's obviously very different is the technology and the fact that the technology is in your pocket. For me, that's the biggest kind of factor in how much it permeates the everyday. In *How to Do Nothing*, I talk about how long I held off getting a smartphone because I recognized I was working basically at a corporate desk job at the time that I would be answerable to certain people in theory at any time and I just didn't accept this. And so I was kind of a holdout. And I still think about that now because when you think about the ease and convenience of accessing these things, how close it is to you all the time physically close to you and then you add to that the kind of ubiquity. Something that I've noticed when I've made intentional efforts to use my phone less is that I become very aware of how much everyone around me is using their phone.

Aviva: Yes, it's interesting that happens with us on the weekend because first of all, I tend to be a little bit more analog and my nervous system is happier when I'm more analog. So I was also a holdout not just to getting a smartphone but to social media. And in a way, I've paid some consequences for that, if you will, in that I don't have some of the robust Instagram and I'm barely on TikTok. I mean, it's not where I choose to put my attention, not because I don't love the engagement with my community, but there are other places like seeing human patients or writing books. But I do find that even on the weekend, for example, when I'll encourage my partner to go analog with me, when he gets out his phone to do anything, it could even be working on Duolingo Spanish. I feel pulled to get out my phone. It's very bizarre.

Jenny: Also, I'm doing Duolingo Spanish, so I really relate to this. That's difficult. And also if anyone out there uses Duolingo, that's an example of something where the design is actually quite similar to social media where it has all those sort of evil techniques of getting you to engage more, but it's for a good cause. So I never know how I feel about it. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, Duolingo is amazing.

Aviva: We have the same thing. I actually was the one that got it to accelerate my Spanish learning, but we decided to do it together. But I was feeling so irritated by the extra time that I had to spend on my phone to do it. And that suck in of like, oh, just a little more, a little more that I actually put it down. So we've been having this discussion at home, what is that balance of the things that we do want to do on our device? Even things like Wordle or Spelling Bee, which are really fun and brain-enhancing, I find almost addictive. And I wonder what you think about that. Why do you think the attention economy hooks us so deeply? Is it that it exploits our kind of nervous system's desire for novelty? Is it our need for connectivity? Do we have with social media some inherent human desire to compare ourselves, or is it something else? What is the hook?

Jenny: I think it's honestly all of those things. I think for me it's a really big or a powerful combination of people working really, really hard for a lot of money to design something that is really addictive that's what you're up against, but it's also exploiting things about human beings the fact that we get bored, the fact that we get lonely, the fact that it's really hard to sit with an uncomfortable sensation, for example, physical or emotional. I mean, I remember having this experience a couple of weeks ago where it was the end of a long day, and I had been walking around the city a lot, and I was in a cab and I had been, my phone habits had been pretty good, and I felt more strongly than usual the urge to sort of look at meaningless stuff on my phone. And luckily I kind of caught myself and I was like, oh, you know what? It's that my back hurts. I'm in pain right now.

Aviva: So you were self-distracting?

Jenny: Yeah, but I think the danger is that that loop becomes so small that you never actually have the opportunity to realize, oh, my back hurts, or I'm feeling socially isolated, or I'm nervous about something, or whatever it is. There are a lot of factors I think that explain why it's so effective as sort of hooking people. But for me, those are the two that are really important. It's like it's designed in a certain way by very smart people, and then it's exploiting things about us that are just kind of inherent, I think, human qualities.

Aviva: I think what you said is so interesting that you just sort of found yourself reaching for your phone. I am a really highly focused person. I went to med school with four kids at home and was writing a book. I can get a lot done, and this was when things were still more analog than they are now. We had a flip phone and there wasn't as much going on social. There was no social media back then. It was just like the things we did were a little bit of research and maybe some email, and it was just not what it is now. But recently I was working on something on my computer. I was typing and then I was like, oh, let me just check my email. Oh, then let me just go and check my socials and let me go and order this thing that I've been meaning to order. And I actually felt like my brain had become behaviorally ADD. That isn't my inherent nature. Maybe menopause can trigger that a little bit. I mean, there's some data about that. But the fact that I was pulled almost by some hidden strings to go look at this and then go look at that and go look at that and then all of a sudden an hour's gone and I'm starting to catch myself. But it is disconcerting to realize that those impulses have almost become embedded in me. And again, I tend to be more of an analog person. So I'm imagining for people who aren't as conscious of it, it's just a constant pinging back and forth. And what do you find with that?

Jenny: I wonder about it a lot because, for example, where I'm sitting right now, it's like this is where I do this is where I wrote my second book. This is where I sit a lot of the time. And I have noticed that sometimes I will have an impulse what you're describing, but it actually feels the same as, and I try to do this instead. There's a window right here, and outside the window there's a power line that goes from my apartment building to this pole in the street, and there's always a bird, and there's so many birds in my neighborhood, so it could be one out of eight or nine birds will sit perfectly as if it's for me. And I feel like sometimes when you're working, if you're doing something very focused, you actually, I think maybe you need, I'm speaking for myself, I need to look away for a second. I need to just kind of take a mini break, not like I'm going to get up and walk around. And that looking and seeing something that's completely unrelated, you could call that a distraction. I'm looking at a bird, but then the bird goes away, and I go back to my thing, and I'm feeling refreshed, and I sort of wonder if the problem actually is not with that, it's with when you go to your phone to take that little mini break, which is a totally understandable impulse that it then sucks you in, and then you start doing all these things that you didn't want to do, and then you never return to the original task. And also, you probably feel a lot more, I mean, I just feel like the more time I look at my phone, the higher my general just fight-or-flight feeling is in life, the more I feel just agitated. And so now I am not able to do my work or think critically or whatever. And so I think I've been trying to be really aware of or trying to separate the phone and everything that's on the phone from the impulses that would lead us there, which in themselves could be answered by other things.

Aviva: I think too the act of looking up from a computer to look out the window is very different. It is a different nervous system refresh than then looking at your computer screen and then looking at your computer screen more and more, but for four different things. And those things may not be replenishing you or nourishing you the way looking up and looking at an expansive sky or green or birds may on a different deeper, I think evolutionary biological level, provide a little bit of a palate cleanser to our brains.

Jenny: Yeah, definitely. And as you said, it's sort of a wider context for me. It's like I talk in my second book about pointing a camera on a tripod at the sky and taking photos throughout the day. Just even right now, we've had these crazy storms here in the Bay area. The sky is very striking right now. It's this super dark gray, it's super light gray contrast that I'm like I don't remember having seen in more than a year. And so there's going to be something out there that not only is different, but it is larger than me as an individual or an ego. I feel like. Whereas if I look at my phone, especially something like social media, one of my biggest problems with social media is that it's constantly reminding you that you're an individual, you're an individual, you're being evaluated. And it really actually feels like ultimately I feel cut off socially, ironically, from looking at social media versus looking out the window and realizing that oh yeah, I live at the bottom of this hill and there's all these other beings that live here and the rain is coming, the rain is going, that feels a lot more sustainable.

Aviva: You're part of a bigger context when you expand. And I feel like social gets us to contract into this or devices get us to contract in this narrower and narrower a little space. What are some of the other ways that you feel the attention economy is harmful or potentially harmful to us, especially in the context of mental health and social wellbeing, which are already so fragile for so many people? And to that, are there any ways that you think it might be specifically harmful to women to be sucked into the attention economy?

Jenny: Yeah, I think I have so many problems with it, but I think a lot about time perception in particular because my second book is about time and how for me, social media encourages you to check it a lot. So you're checking in with something. And if you think about, I mean, Twitter's not so big anymore, but when you think about the heyday of Twitter, the pace of that, that there's always something new. Someone could have posted something at any time at any place in the world in any time zone. If you wanted new information, you could at any moment check in. And once you check in, now you're plugged into this kind of global clock that is just going so fast all the time just never slows down. And I find that I use this word in the book it's entrainment, which comes from it's a scientific word for aligning activity with some kind of cycle. I think it came out of more biological science, but then it got used in social science where you could have, for example, you could be entrained to a bus schedule where you're a mother who has to get your kid. Yes

Aviva: I talk about it with circadian rhythm and all ultradian rhythms in articles and episodes.

Jenny: So if you think about what it means to be entrained to at the Twitter clock, you could kind of see that there's a problem with that, not only in and of itself because it's just so fast and so intense, but I think it then is breaking up your temporal experience of your actual day. So something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is what a moment is. I went on a really long walk with a friend a year ago in a park, and we got back to the bus stop and at the end he said, “I think that whole walk was one moment.”

Aviva: That's beautiful.

Jenny: So moments can be really small. They can be really big if they are allowed to be whole and uninterrupted. When I try to imagine the opposite of what it feels like to have a day of very toxic engagement with social media, it's a day where there were discrete moments that had beginnings and endings. I entered and exited them. There were sort of transitions between them that made sense and they weren't chopped up into all these little pieces. And so I think for me, just currently, because I'm thinking about time, that's one of the more harmful aspects is this chopping up of the temporal experience and the shortening of your temporal horizon. So now I feel like it encourages next moment anxiety versus thinking broadly into the future into the past remembering that you have a past, the empathy that you have when you remember the rest of your life. I feel like all of that just goes out the window when you're in this kind of social media time world. And I mean, I think that's probably horrible for everyone. Women in particular, I mean, they're already, I think women have to switch tasks more than men typically because of childcare and things like this and are just asked to do a lot more. I mean, I write about it in the second book, but women in the workplace are asked to do a lot more maintenance type work or the administrative work that no one really wants to do. So women are already, I think, at a higher risk of having those kinds of moments or experiences of time cut up into little pieces. And then you add the social media aspect and also the social comparison that comes with that. And I think that's not good.

Aviva: It's interesting too, I find, as I was listening to you, the term urgency culture came into mind when you were talking about Twitter. And it could be whatever, nine o'clock at night and you're called to read it by that impulse. But then also, let's say you're a journalist or you're whatever, now you also feel this urgency to respond to it. Or if you have a social media account, there's this urgency to keep up with it. Or if you are a social media follower and you see somebody doing something, maybe they're doing something new with their kids, or there's something new going on in the trauma world, all these worlds on social media, you feel an urgency to engage with that or keep up with it or make a change in your life based on it. And that creates its own, I think, anxiety and also a sense of a relentlessness.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's almost like a positive feedback loop in the negative sense of positive, right? I know what I mean. Yeah, because more, I think the more you get entangled in that, the less time you have to step back and reflect on whether that's really what you want to be doing in the long run, especially, are those really the things that you want to be engaging in? But it's really hard. And I do think that also in creative professions or jobs where you have to have some kind of presence, I do think women probably feel that more, that sort of the worry that you're going to become irrelevant. And I think that women are also expected to offer more of themselves, regardless of if you're even writers, right? It's like you're expected to offer a level of access into your life to audiences that I don't think that's asked of men. And obviously, most of that happens on social media.

Aviva: Your journey to How to Do Nothing began in a rose garden after the 2016 election. Can you share with listeners how that period of time led to the insights that became that particular book?

Jenny: I was teaching at Sanford at the time twice a week. So that meant the other three days I was here in my neighborhood. And after the 2016 election, it was a combination of that and also a warehouse fire that happened here in Oakland, that a lot of artists were in that warehouse. And so it was just kind of, basically it was a traumatic time, and I found myself going to this rose garden, which is about a 10-minute walk from my apartment without really, I just kind of started going there as a default. I don't really remember specifically planning that out and spending as much time as I possibly could there. And I noticed also that I didn't really understand what I was doing until later. I realized that I was basically recovering from something. I was trying to let my mind recover from something. As I mentioned in the introduction of the book, I was asked to give a talk the following year at a conference that I was familiar with. It had a lot of artists in the audience, and they were like, you can talk about whatever you want. And I was so at a loss at that time that I just wrote how to do nothing for my talk title. And as I was kind of sitting there in the rose garden and as much as possible, I was thinking about that, what to say, what do you even say in a time like that? And combined with why do I keep coming here and sitting here, over time, I think I started to notice the difference between how I felt when I was there and how I felt when I was online.

I mean, being online was such a nightmare. I mean, it's always a nightmare, but I think it had sort of reached new heights for me at that point. And I think just because I was there, the garden started to turn into this metaphor for a space that is designed for a different way of being and thinking. So it's kind of like a public works era 1930s garden. And so the way that it's even just architecturally laid out, it's not big, but it's very dense, and it has these areas that are almost like a labyrinth, but you can spend a lot of time there, basically. And it's an extremely inviting place. It's very open. It has roses, but it also has a lot of oak trees and native species and a lot of birds. It's right in the middle of town. This is not some remote park. It's right off of a main drag. And just even observing other people, seeing people show up, use the park for all different kinds of things. Sometimes people would just wander around literally smell the roses you'd see people having these long conversations. It was just being there and sort of over time seeing how different that felt and how much that had to do with the space and how it was designed and what it was designed for really started to make that contrast very apparent to me.

Aviva: Can we talk more about this sense of recovery? It sounds like I don't want to assume that you were in burnout, but it sounds like there was some level of social media or online fatigue and that you really needed some step back and some healing. So what did that look like?

Jenny: I think some of it is just slow. I mean, I almost hate the phrase slowing down because it gets thrown around so much and it gets also commodified. But some of it was just a very basic, you go to this place and you're not bombarding yourself with information. The pace and type of information coming in, even sensory experience and information is slower. And I think a big part of it for me was remembering that I am in a body.

Aviva: Yes, thank you.

Jenny: Which is something that I tried to describe the smells. I'm so into smells. I have an obsession with smells so obviously that's a rose garden. I actually was just there two days ago and I noticed that they have updated the little signs that say what type of rose this is with nose icons. Some of them have one nose and then some of them have two noses. And I think that I don't know because winter right now so they're not flowering. But I think that those are the extra good smelling ones. And I'm kind of like I liked going around and finding out for myself but that's fine. So yeah just kind of being there and sitting in the sun, feeling the sun, hearing the birds, feeling the air, looking around a much broader area than this tiny rectangle or this tiny screen, noticing my breathing or noticing that I hadn't been breathing. And just that there was much more to myself and my experience of myself than a verbal existence being on something like Twitter it's words or images but images that are almost functioning more like words. It's very quick communication and there's all these other forms of communication and information that are in the world like body language or smell or these other things. And I felt like that all kind of came back to me in those moments.

Aviva: I feel like there's so much in a way, on the one hand, one type of sensory overstimulation with our devices, and as you said, remembering that we're in a body to drop in. I felt like Covid with all the Zooms and all the online stuff, we were kind of reduced to this space between our shoulders and the tops of our heads as human beings.

Jenny: Totally.

Aviva: It's like all voice. It's all talking and it's all listening and everyone was feeling so fatigued from it. And when I think back, I don't want to romanticize more traditional times, if you will, but as human beings, we did a lot more things with a variety of senses, whether it was sewing, gardening, crafts, cooking, singing, dancing. We weren't just sitting in one place mostly using our eyes, our ears, and our voices. And I think that on an evolutionary basis, our nervous system, at least for me, I mean speaking for myself, my nervous system needs to do tactile things. I need to do physical things and I need to step away from the boxes, the devices, the narrow focus to different kinds of sensory, neural, and creative experiences that just don't happen in this sphere.

Jenny: Definitely, I feel the same way. And I think that it's also the body is the medium through which I was mentioning earlier, my back hurting, the things that you are needing arise often not in your head necessarily. I feel like I've become a lot better in recent years at noticing when my shoulders are up by my ears because I'm so uncomfortable in some situation, or I am sort of gripping around my stomach area and I haven't really been breathing, or just all these messages that you get from your body that I think they just were going unheard because I was in this state of just only interacting in this way that you were just describing where it's just very verbal and visual and it's I think it's still going for me this expansion kind of back into a more sensory more sensorially rich experience with the smells. And I've been getting into cooking. I live near a spice shop, so it's really and I just learned how to darn a sock. Oh, wow. That's awesome. And I was actually thinking about it while I had a long time to think about it. It took me a long time about how I was still very visually focused on a small area when I was during this sock, but it was so different because I was looking at a physical sock, and at some point it got very meta where I was thinking about when would you ever look that closely at your socks except for when you're darning them. And then I hadn't really known that much about darning, but you're essentially weaving your own fabric from thread across the hole.

Aviva: Yeah, you're picking the stitches back up.

Jenny: And I was just like this is so incredible and makes me feel like I relate differently to just even objects in my home. And I still felt very embodied in that because I was using my hand. And so yeah, I've been really trying to do more things like that which I think are doubly beneficial. I kind of think that anything that's not looking at your phone is already good by virtue of you're not looking at your phone. And then on top of that, it provides all these other sort of lovely feelings or just interesting sensations.

Aviva: So I know you're not prescriptive in your work, but I'm curious with where you have been evolving to in terms of, I mean you are a writer, which means you also have to research, you have to be, I'm saying have to, you choose to, but it's part of your work to do events like this to keep up with things like Twitter/X. How are you finding yourself pacing? So one of it sounds like one piece of it sounds really just paying more attention to your body and when you need to step away, how do you balance or integrate the very real demands which could be eight or 10 hours a day? I'm imagining if you're working on a book or teaching lectures and creating those on devices

Jenny: The first step of it is honestly just looking at the whole situation and seeing what is the absolute minimum I can get away with. So for example, I don't keep up with Twitter. That is just gone from my life. I was like I can get by without looking at this. This is not worth it. And so I just cut that out. Same thing with Facebook. And then I treat other things like I think Instagram is a health hazard for me. And so even if I have to have it, I treat it with a certain amount of, I mean respect is the wrong word, but maybe I have respect for what it does to me after a certain amount of time, and I don't sort of take that lightly. I have this, I don't really know what to call it, this knitted thing that you can put your phone in that was made by some young children, the children of a friend of a friend who learned how to knit. These are two boys, they learned how to knit and they started making these things that you could put your phone in because they wanted their parents to put their phone away and pay attention to them.

Aviva: Well, moms and dads, if you're listening, cover your ears. And certainly, this isn't what those kids would… let's just call it a phone condom. It protects you. Yeah.

Jenny: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what it feels like when I put it. I love they used rainbow yarn. It's so amazing. And so I put it in there every night, but when I put it in there, I do feel like I'm being protected from something. That's how I feel. And so I feel like that object sort of embodies my attitude towards things like that where it's like I might engage with something, but I'm not going to just walk into it with sort of no hesitation whatsoever. I'm going to treat this the thing that it is and try to minimize it. And it's the same thing with sitting at a computer. I mean, literally sitting at a computer is a health hazard. So I try to be very intentional about how long that's going to be in a day and then having breaks and having a lot of things before that and after that because I'm old enough at least that I have the experience, I know what happens. So I'm just taking that and trying to adjust. And I'm really lucky that I think different folks write in different ways, but for me, a lot of, I think what someone would call writing doesn't happen at the desk for me. So I go for a walk every morning. I have this tiny, tiny notebook that I bought specifically because it's the size of a phone. So if you can put a phone in your pocket, you can put this notebook in your pocket, and then it has a tiny expandable pen and I just walk around my neighborhood and inevitably during that walk some idea will fall out of the sky and I'll write it down. And that's usually what I end up working with later in the day.

Aviva: I love that. I used to carry index cards around with me on a little hook. They had a little hole in them, and I could write notes that way. I've actually written whole books on index cards and then all my ideas, and then I amalgamate them in the computer at the end of the day. I keep a lot of notebooks too. I don't get notifications on my phone other than when my phone needs to be updated. I don't get email on my phone. What I find is that I have a compare and despair relationship with social media in that professionally there are people in my sphere who have millions of Instagram followers, millions of TikTok followers. I don't actually fully know how to get into my own TikTok, but I do find that I have, and I'm accomplished in my life, but sometimes when I'm on socials, I have a sense of failure, or I'm not doing enough or I'm not posting enough. And it's interesting, I was on the phone this weekend with a friend of mine who is a world's leading neuroscientist and has a book coming out and she's like, “Aviva, I just don't want to do social media. I don't want to do Instagram.” And I said, “Okay, well your last two books were hugely successful and you weren't on Instagram. So how would you feel if you just let it go?” And was like, oh, you can just feel the relief in her.

And she made the decision to do that. I said, let the rest of us post about you. Let the people you love post about you. But I do think it's hard professionally, and I am trying to find that I have a healthier relationship with all the other devices. I'm good at hitting pause when I need to on my phone. I don't use my phone a ton other than for posting, but this sort of obligatory sense that I should always be doing more and giving more and that if I don't somehow that my personal economy, which I know is a big topic of your second book, is tied up with that attention economy. So how do you navigate that as a professional whose work is, you have to get books out there? How do you navigate that part of it?

Jenny: That's definitely a hard question. And I mean, I feel like it's really hard for anyone to come up with one strategy because you'll try something for a while and then it won't work. So it's not always been the same for me. But this is another case where I try to do the absolute bare minimum and by doing the absolute bare minimum I'm definitely making some sacrifices. And I did think about that when my second book came out. I think thinking about it in terms of maybe sacrifice isn't the best word to use, but kind of just like choices or trade-offs where I think maybe trade-offs feel like sacrifices are losses if you haven't thought about them that very directly. But if you actually sat down, I mean, this is what I love about books like 4000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, this kind of mentality of you can't have everything. And his book is very like, you're not going to live forever. And no one wants to think about that. But then if you actually sit down and think, okay, I'm not going to live forever, then the next question is what is important to me? What can I not live without? And then cascading downwards from there. And it turns out that as a kind of filter where it's like I do need these things. I don't need these things or these things would be nice, but if it means having to give up this other thing that I really value, then no. I think when you frame it that way it's sort of like, well yeah, you could be, there's definitely things you're losing out on by not engaging with this platform, but are they worth the way? I feel so much better when I don't engage with it.

Aviva: Yes, that's how I feel too.

Jenny: And then again, thinking longer term, if I think about it in terms of the months after your book comes out that timeframe, you're like, yes, absolutely. I should be on Instagram all the time posting, I should be in everyone's feet. If I think about trying to write books for the rest of my life and being healthy enough to do that and not getting totally cynical and burned out, then no, I should not be doing that.

Aviva: That's exactly the place I'm coming to. It's like, which content can I spend time? It's not even spending my time. I don't love to think about time as money that way. Let's jump into that. But what am I enjoying doing, and what am I enjoying creating? And as you said, we can't have it or do it all, and certainly not at once. So for me, it's like I want to write books. I want to write content and curriculum that I teach people, and I can't be in all the places at one time. So for me, I find myself increasingly just paying attention to when am I in a zone of flow that feels really good and what am I doing and how do I want to feel? It's really the kind of the bottom line question, how do I want to feel and am I feeling that way doing this versus doing this?

Jenny: Yeah, totally. But that definitely requires a little bit, at least, of stepping back and getting out of those cycles for just a minute to even think about that.

Aviva: Absolutely. And it requires, at least for me, and clearly for this woman I was speaking with on the weekend, getting out of what we should be doing or what we're told we should be doing and getting to what is it that I can do and want to do? We're not talking about whether we just choose to feed our children dinner or not. We're talking about these added things that have now become kind of socially obligatory.

One of the things that, in addition to how we're experiencing the joy of our time, that you talk about is this ubiquitous presence of time management tools. And I love how you talk about productivity bros. I'm always talking about the biohacking bros. I think we're talking about the same, maybe flip side of the same coin or maybe some of the people and a lot of those productivity bros. I once heard that the person who wrote the four-hour work week actually is a total workaholic. It does not work a four-hour work week from a friend of it. I was like, I'm not casting dispersions. I'm just saying sometimes what we see and are being sold is the idea. It's not even necessarily what the person is doing, but can we talk about time management? This is something that I think a lot of women I hear, oh, I just have to better manage my time better. I can get more done. So talk about these productivity bros, and you have this great quote that someone said to you that the advice of the productivity bros is equivalent to the financial advice of just don't buy the damn latte as that's going to fix your financial problems. So what are these productivity bros? What is wrong with all this time management? And also, how is it a total disconnect for women too?

Jenny: I was surprised when looking back through the history of time management how there's this pretty consistent through line starting from pretty upsetting origins and plantation labor and factory labor and Taylorism and all that stuff. And historically, why would we even need a system for measuring the amount of work per amount of time and trying to constantly increase that. And then at some point you get this kind of translation of those ideas and those methods over into a more personal context, but the language and the methods remain very similar. So if you look at, for example, Factory Magazine from 1913, which is a magazine for factory owners who are trying to get more labor out of their workers, you will find very similar language to that which is used in time management for a person buying it to sort of get more work out of themselves. Oftentimes you'll see advice do a time audit, here's a grid fill in the grid, how are you using your hours?

And I'm not necessarily saying that that's bad advice for doing certain types of work for a certain part of your day, but I think when you look at that history and sort of the broader history of seeing time as money, the problem is that it really reinforces this notion of everyone wakes up with 24 hours a day, you get 24 hours every day. I almost imagine them as cubes or something of material. And then your job is to run them through your factory, your personal factory in order to get as much value as possible out of them. If you feel that you don't have enough time, basically you're a failure because you haven't figured out the best way to sort of run your factory. And the most, I think, egregious thing about this for women is that it is not true that everyone has 24 hours in a day. Women will be the first to tell you that instead of 24 hours a day, what we have is a world in which time feels different for any particular person based on their obligations and their demands. So who is on your clock and whose clock are you on are two really interesting questions to ask to get away from that sort of everyone has 24 hours in a day and so some people have more support, some people have to wait on other people. Some people have to live on the schedules of other people. As I was saying earlier with the workplace example, some people are asked to do sort of more menial work tasks than others, and that work's not going to get you promoted. There's all these kinds of shades of power basically that we exist within, and women are typically very disempowered in that. So women's time is just not valued.

Aviva: We also have so many people on our time or we're on so many people, our parents, our children. If we're caretaking at both ends, there's so many external obligations that can leave women feeling like most women I know at the end of the day feeling like I have no time. I had no time today. And when you ask, well, can you fit in a half hour for self-care? Like what does that even mean?

Jenny: Yeah, right. It's like the woman that I interviewed for that chapter who's the admin for a Facebook group for working moms is like, yeah, sure. When I get home, I have 10 extra minutes. She's like, those 10 minutes don't feel relaxing to me because I'm thinking about all of the things that I just did and all the things that I have to do. And so it's absolutely not true that psychologically one minute is equal to any other minute. It absolutely has to do with pressure. And then even if you went with the idea that time is money and it's very literal, we still have a huge wage gap. So women's time literally valued less talking to anyone who has caretaking duties or has to do types of work that are not waged or not valued, that's where you really start to see that idea of the 24 hours a day breakdown.

Aviva: And that 24 hours assumes what is basically not sleeping because we don't be up for 24 hours. So many of our listeners right now I know are so eager to escape this just incessant buzz of attention economy and this really relentless modern pace but also face the challenge of balancing this really deep need for quiet reflective time or time in nature. Just time to hit pause, stop and smell the roses with the real demands of families, caring for children, meeting all the responsibilities. What are some of the insights that you've gained on how we can reframe our relationship to time and actually maybe expand our time a little bit so that we can feel healthier.

Jenny: I think for me, the insights kind of fall into two different categories is kind of like the individual and the collective and how much is in one or the other depends on the position that you're in individually. I think to go back to the idea of trade-offs, I think it can be really helpful to set some boundaries while knowing that it's going to feel uncomfortable. I'm thinking about a friend of mine who does the Digital Sabbath thing every Sunday. He's not on his phone. That's

Aviva: Exactly what I said to my friend the other day. I said, everyone's entitled to one day off. Think of it as a digital Sabbath. And I didn't know that was a term.

Jenny: Oh, yeah, there's Tiffany Lan wrote a great book about that. So it's definitely a thing that you can, if that's something that anyone is interested in, there's plenty of writing and people sort of experimenting with that. But the thing that he told me was he was worried about it because a person who's doing Digital Sabbath was going to affect your communications with other people. He was kind of worried that people he knew were going to put up a lot of resistance to this. And he said that there was initially a little bit of resistance, but then he was very surprised by how accommodating everyone else was. And so that idea of accommodation, right. People are going to accommodate this thing that you've chosen to do that's a little bit different. Or I have a friend who has a light phone, which is one of those new, a dumb phone or whatever you want to call it

Aviva: Without all the apps and all the internet access.

Jenny: Yeah. I don't communicate with her in the same way that I communicate with my other friends. I'm fine with that. I'm willing to accommodate her. So I think sometimes, especially if you're a person, if you're a people pleaser, or which women often are, you kind of forget that you can ask for things. You can ask a partner, I need some alone time or I need this number of hours a week for something, right? And this is assuming that you can get away with these things, but I think sometimes we don't ask. So there's some low fruit.

Aviva: Yes, I agree. And that martyrdom of us constantly giving and serving in that trope that we're expected to do or the actual cultural reality that is imposed on us I think keeps us thinking we can't get that time. And I'm not saying everyone can get an equal amount, but I don't know. For me, my mental health critically requires me to take some alone time on a regular basis, sometime where I'm quiet, reflective, not talking, but also not beholden to anyone else's demands and expectations. And one of the things that I have found about setting boundaries around my workday with people on my team or my digital time off is that sometimes it inspires other people. They're like, oh, I can do that too. Or, “No, we're not going to do this in the evening because it's not healthy for us. Let's not do that.”

Jenny: Right. Absolutely. And I think to do that, you have to believe in some sense that you're worth it. And I would say to anyone who has a problem with that, because I have in the past, if you feel guilty about that, if it helps you to reframe it by thinking about the people in your life that you're close to that you want to them to also experience the best version of you, you want to be present with others. It's not just about you if that helps you. I think for some people, they kind of need to think about it that way in order to do something that appears selfish.

Aviva: Absolutely. I say that to moms all the time. Okay, so what would this be like if you were just doing it as an example to your daughters, and then they're like, oh, I can do that. Not for myself, but I can do it as an example

Jenny: For my daughter. And I think, yeah, just being also, there's a lot of cultural norms around busyness that I think you have to be aware of and really willing to know you're going to come up against them. I always think about this woman that I know who's an older woman who's an artist, and every Wednesday she goes on a really long walk from her studio, and she said one day she ran into a friend, and the friend was like, oh, what are you doing right now? And she was like, nothing. She was like, every Wednesday I do nothing. And the friend was so judgy about it, she was like, oh no. What she said was you must have a lot of time. That's the kind of the result. And I think you just have to be prepared for that, that some people are going to feel a certain way about it. But ultimately, that just speaks to how culturally entrenched busyness is. And then if

Aviva: We reflect on the ways that we are using uptime that don't feel healthy, where you could get lost in a social media scroll for 40 minutes or end up in some situation that you don't need to be in and how can we be cognizant of setting those boundaries so we can carve out the little bits? You said some of these things are culturally driven. And it really got me thinking too. I've spent some time in Europe the past couple of years. In fact, I took a month in Portugal. It was a remote work situation and I spent some time in Italy. And what is just really staggeringly significant to me is people aren't, and I don't think I'm making a generalization. I mean, this is real. People are not on their phones at dinners, kids aren't on their devices. People aren't pulling out their devices and looking at them. And people take true break times during the afternoons and on the weekends. There's more respect for downtime and leisure and in-person social time than we have. So sometimes I have to remind myself that this is also very much driven by an assembly line, time-for-money culture and that other cultures are still thriving and they don't live. People don't live the way we live.

Jenny: Absolutely. And those kids that I mentioned who made the knitted phone thing, that

 actually, they had that idea after that family went to Italy and the kids saw that way of being interesting.

Aviva: Yeah

Jenny: I think it's important. And knowing that you can sort of be more strategic. I mean, to go back to the Rose Garden, part of the reason I was going there without realizing it was that place embodied this other way. This less common in the US way of existing. And so I think maybe just again, just staying with the individual, trying to spend more, find those places, find those contexts, spend more time in them even if that's not, unfortunately not the default. And then I would say there's kind of an overlap between these two. But on the more collective side of things, I think a lot about what that woman that I interviewed told me about after she had said that conventional time management didn't really work for her, and she finds it insulting. She said that she wanted to get six other moms together and they would each make dinner for everyone else one night of the week. And what I really love about that example is that it's both practical, but you can also kind of see the spectrum between something like that and a union where it's just this acknowledgement that for you yourself, you have some amount of latitude. Maybe I can get away with asking for this amount of time. Maybe you can't. Maybe now you have to demand that. Or if you make that demand, you'll get fired or something like that. You can see the point at which you've run up against what you're able to do as an individual. I think there's both informal, the dinner example is very informal, and then there's more formal examples. But they're all to me represent that moment of moving beyond the self and seeing, okay, well, I can't push, I can't change the way the time feels for me by myself, but maybe if six of us or a hundred of us or whatever get together and try to change things, then that's what would actually really open up some time.

Aviva: I also think that there are experiences that do feel like time expanders or time less, and then there are things that we're just feeling like we're up against the clock. And for me, I find myself focusing lately more on what are the rhythms of things as opposed to just the clock. And that really helps me. So for example, I work from home now, but I see patients, those are things that are time blocks. I write, I have different demands that are very real work demands, but how can I do those in ways? For example, you mentioned task switching, how people are tasked with switching so often and women particularly. So how can I block things together that allow me more extended periods of time on one thing without jumping from one thing to another? That makes me feel like I'm always racing the clock, and I don't like that feeling. It makes me feel very anxious and agitated. And then I try to do things that get me out of regular time, especially on the weekends, just taking longer periods of time to read a book, and my kids are grown, but we did this when our kids were little too, just having analog time where everyone had a book or a coloring book or paper and pens, and parents could read, kids could engage with something. And those things I feel or just getting out in nature I feel like for me, getting out in nature it just expands time automatically.

Jenny: Yeah. I use the word in the book Krono diversity to sort of get at this acknowledgement that time is full of difference like actual time, not clock time. And in the book I get into that whole history of why we even have something like standardized clock time, and that it's this fiction that an hour is an hour anywhere, but the truth of time both psychologically and ecologically is that no moment is the same. And so you have longer things like seasons, right? But even within a day, things feel different. Your body feels different. And I really love seasonal festivals for this reason. Right? In Northern California, there's a Marbled Godwit Festival, which is a whole festival just for this one migratory bird that shows up, or fall festival, the pumpkins and these celebrations that, yes, not all time is the same. We're celebrating the return of this time that only comes once a year. Just that acknowledgement and embrace of that, I think on the small scale and on the large scale is a really nice way to, that's what I meant by the subtitle, the Life Beyond Productivity Culture is what is happening out that can't be captured by this grid.

Aviva: I love where you talk in the book about the quad, the space of postpartum, the period of time in Latin American cultures and many cultures. We have this Japan, we have this many, many, many, so many cultures that some of us call first 40 days. But that suspension of time where, and of course, not all women can do this, right? Especially in the US where we have a bounce back culture and a back to work culture so fast. But that ability to hit pause and be in that almost altered reality of that newborn time, and women who have experienced that, people who have experienced that, really know that is such a different kind of time. Right.

Jenny: Yeah. My friend who I quote at length in that part of the book who did that after her son was born, the way she describes that time is so kind of strange and beautiful and almost like alien. I don't remember if it's in the part that I quoted, but I just remember her saying something about there being sort of odd corners of the night, being awake at 3:00 AM, but not because you're at the club or something. It's a different kind of awake at 3:00 AM and that she kind of finds herself oddly nostalgic for that, how that was such a distinct and identifiable feeling about time that never really happened again.

Aviva: Absolutely. It's such a slowing and an expansion and a completely different pace. And I think we see that with our kids too as they grow and those natural demarcations of time that happen that are different than clock time or work time. Jenny, I love your work. It's beautiful. I love the meta of it. I love the personalness of it and just the reminder that we are humans in bodies, in nature, in seasons. Thank you so much for the beauty and the thoughtfulness and the reminders that you bring to all of us.

Jenny: Well, thank you.

Aviva: You have a question, if you don't mind, before we go. I ask all my guests, and this is if you could tell your younger self anything about what you've learned or a word of guidance, what age would she be and what would you tell her?

Jenny: I have an answer unusually at the ready for this because I think about it a lot. So I would tell my 17-year-old self two things. One is don't rush, and the other one is you're onto something. Because I just had this almost spooky experience recently where I went to the Saratoga Library, which is the library that I used to go to as a 17-year-old all the time. And I used to sit in this chair, this armchair that was facing the mountains, and I have these journal entries from when I was sitting there where I'm like, I'm looking at these mountains, and I feel like I'm looking at something important, and I don't know what it is. And I just have this feeling that there's this idea that I'm trying to articulate, and I keep coming back to it in these journals, but I just kind of can't articulate it. And then recently, I went back to that library. The book that I just wrote is maybe 10 feet from the chair that I was sitting in. And in the book, I am describing something called it, which is how I used to describe it in my journals. I'm looking at the mountains, I'm getting this feeling, I would call it it. And I have this whole chapter about what it means, which is basically the essence of time. That time is change. It creates mountains. It's a very active creative force. It's not this thing that's a bunch of squares on your, that's what it was. I was just kind of seeing the very beginning of it. But I just remember being, I was 17, I was so unsure. I was like, I don't even know what I'm trying to articulate. And this was in between me complaining about all the other things I have to do and how much work I have to do for school and am I doing things right and all that kind of self-criticism that unfortunately I don't think you can really get away from at that age. But that's kind of what I wish I could say.

Aviva: Wow, this is a whole other conversation and maybe the seed of a book for you but the amazing number of people who I have encountered in my life who had a seed or an inkling of something when they were very young that did become this through line that they didn't even know was going to become a through line but became it was almost like a harbinger or a foreshadowing of their work. That's beautiful. And it sounds like you're a journaler, which is a whole other kind of time. Journaling time is a really special kind of time.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank

Aviva: You for sharing that. So we'll put all the contact information for you in the show notes, but for people who are just going to listen and then hop and not look at the show notes, what's the very best place that everyone can find you?

Jenny: So I'm like, should I say Instagram? I don't. I do have an Instagram. I rarely post on it, but I do have a website. It's jenny O'Dell dot com, and on the about page, you can subscribe

 to a mailing list, which is kind of more likely where I would send out information about upcoming events and things like that. So I would say there.

Aviva: Perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time with me today. I loved being with you.

Jenny: Yeah, thank you for having me. This was a really nice conversation.

Aviva: Thank you, Jenny. I'll talk with you soon. Bye, everyone.

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