Saving Time is not supposed to be a typical self-help that tells you how to fix your schedule, says Alexis Burling in the San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook. Instead, Burling says, 'it's a meticulously researched, mentally stimulating scurry down the time-and-space rabbit hole.' The author's 'rehashing of these often debated topics doesn't make the book any less constructive or worthy of readers' attention,' Burling writes.

The author argues that a 'capitalist, Western notion of profit and efficiency has stamped out other, more salutary and less linear measures of time,' Parul Sehgal writes in The New Yorker, 'as she draws passionately if vaguely on Indigenous conceptions of time.' While Sehgal admits the author addresses these issues 'with acute sensitivity and feeling,' he wonders why 'a book so concerned with the looming issues of our day' felt like a 'time sink.' 'It is not an unusual experience to feel that one's time has been misused by a book,' Sehgal adds, 'but it is novel, and particularly vexing, to feel that one's time has been misused by a passionate denunciation of the misuse of time.' One of the issues with Saving Time is that the author 'is working with ideas that demand careful, persuasive articulation.' Instead, readers 'receive a relentless synthesis of other people's work,' Sehgal asserts. While acknowledging people have unequal access to free time, Quinn says Odell 'makes the case for a time that belongs to all of us, and the trick is to 'be more alive in any given moment' - and to see and answer the life in each other.' 'Making time strange to us is one of Odell's tricks,' She attempts to show that our relationship to 'clock-time' is an avoidable phenomenon. Odell's 'subtle, itinerant study of time feels like an attempt to break through the language of power and find something approaching coexistence,' opined The Boston Globe's Annalisa Quinn. The phenomena of 'individual time pressure and climate dread,' Odell asserts, 'share a set of deep roots, and they have more in common than just fear.' Her 'narrative logic is purposefully meandering and elliptical,' Schlossberg notes, 'a formal underline of the book's arguments against a linear understanding of time.' Saving Time 'is loosely structured around a daylong trip in the San Francisco Bay Area,' intermingled with discussions of various time scales that ' in perspective the asynchronicity of human and planetary time,' Schlossberg continues in the Times.

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