Three essential reads for reclaiming your time
Right now there's a multitude of excellent books publishing that smartly explore our current cultural moment. Employing an accessible blend of sociology and psychology, below are three of our top recommendations for books to help you better understand why your time, attention and creativity are being diverted and what – individually and collectively – we may be able to do about it.
Hanging Out by Sheila Liming
Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time makes an intelligent case for the importance of this most casual of social structures, and shows us how just getting together can be a potent act of resistance all on its own.
Starting with the assumption that play is to children as hanging out is to adults, Liming makes a brilliant case for the necessity of unstructured social time as a key element of our cultural vitality. The book asks questions like what is hanging out? why is it important? why do we do it? how do we do it? and examines the various ways we hang out - in groups, online, at parties, at work.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by.
Saving Time is a radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities.
Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
Why have we lost our ability to focus? What are the causes? And, most importantly, how do we get it back?
We think our inability to focus is a personal failing – a flaw in each one of us. It is not. This has been done to all of us by powerful external forces. Our focus has been stolen. Johann discovered there are twelve deep cases of this crisis, all of which have robbed some of our attention. He shows us how in a thrilling journey that ranges from Silicon Valley dissidents, to a favela in Rio where attention vanished, to an office in New Zealand that found a remarkable way to restore our attention. Crucially, he learned how – as individuals, and as a society – we can get our focus back, if we are determined to fight for it.