Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery

Buy new:

$9.99

List Price: $26.99

Save: $17.00 (63%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery August 14 - 19 on orders shipped by Amazon over $25

Or fastest delivery August 7 - 12

Select delivery location

[{"displayPrice":"$9.99","priceAmount":9.99,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"9","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"FAx%2FN4Yvc5wiszkVGwdf3GePHSnMIWUbkDqpPVQFZkXxFFEtDpG15%2FYHhTVyos85mqV%2FTodU6w0DDUU45m%2FxlhDBa2956YvvJtv7ZJCQIld1Ui7LnET7r6jKM7gimhmQA2wzpPxP9r5g0E3BumYGlw%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]

$$9.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Payment

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Details

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$10.50
+ $4.25 shipping

Sold by: gamesters3

Added

Not added

$15.40
FREE Shipping on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Sold by: UBERTY.LLC

Added

Not added

$16.01
& FREE Shipping

Sold by: BAYE TRADING

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Hardcover – April 9, 2019

by Jenny Odell (Author)

4.1 2,978 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$11.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$9.99

$6.27

Paperback

"Please retry"

$16.68

$11.63

$6.92

Audio CD, MP3 Audio, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$27.29

—

Kindle
$11.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your Audible trial
Hardcover
$9.99

60 Used from $6.27 29 New from $9.99
Paperback
$16.68

64 Used from $6.92 48 New from $11.63
Audio CD
$27.29

1 New from $27.29

Purchase options and add-ons

** A New York Times Bestseller **

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library

"A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review

One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019"
Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year

In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.

Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Melville House
Publication date

April 9, 2019
Dimensions

5.78 x 0.93 x 8.53 inches
ISBN-10

1612197493
ISBN-13

978-1612197494
See all details

Frequently bought together

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

$9.99

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

$20.50

Get it as soon as Friday, Jul 28

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$19.49

Get it as soon as Friday, Jul 28

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Lowest Pricein this set of productsThis item:
Jenny Odell
2,978
Hardcover
$9.99
Highest ratedin this set of products
Jenny Odell
7
Paperback
$15.30
Most purchasedin this set of products
James Clear
111,756
Hardcover
in Personal Transformation Self-Help
$14.89
Jia Tolentino
3,131
Paperback
$13.49
Jenny Odell
111
Hardcover
$20.50
64
Paperback
$15.00
118,479
in Toilet Paper
$27.76
Bonnie Garmus
187,991
Hardcover
$15.41
Hanya Yanagihara
62,058
Paperback
$12.32
Peter Attia MD
4,505
Hardcover
in Aging Medical Conditions & Diseases
$18.99

Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.
Highlighted by 5,552 Kindle readers
What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?
Highlighted by 3,995 Kindle readers
“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”
Highlighted by 2,528 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

"She struck a hopeful nerve of possibility that I hadn’t felt in a long time."—Jia Tolentino, THE NEW YORKER

"How to Do Nothing is genuinely instructive, elaborating a practical philosophy to help us slow down and temporarily sidestep the forces aligned against both our mental health and long-term human survival. You can knock the hustle — and you should."—Akiva Gottlieb, LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Approachable and incisive. . . . The book is clearly the work of a socially conscious artist and writer who considers careful attention to the rich variety of the world an antidote to the addictive products and platforms that technology provides. . . . [Odell] sails with capable ease between the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivity and arid theory with the relatable humanity of her vision."—Nicholas Cannariato, THE WASHINGTON POST

"The sentiment behind How to Do Nothing is one of defiance.”—Casey Schwartz, THE NEW YORK TIMES

"An erudite and thoughtful narrative about the importance of interiority and taking time to pay close attention to the spaces around us."—Annie Vainshtein, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"An eloquent argument against the cult of efficiency, and I felt both consoled and invigorated by it."—Jennifer Szalai, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

"The path to freedom lies within the covers of this book."—Lauren Goode, WIRED

"How to Do Nothing mimics the experience of walking with a perceptive and sensitive friend, the kind of person who makes you feel, in your bones, that it’s a miraculous gift to be alive."—Katie Bloom, THE SEATTLE TIMES

"Odell’s great strength as a writer is her ability to convey art’s unique power without overestimating or misstating its social impact. . . . Ultimately, what sets her book apart from self-help is not a less quixotic set of demands but a more life-affirming endgame."—Megan Marz, THE BAFFLER

"Thoughtful, compelling, and practical."—Clay Skipper, GQ

“This is a potentially subversive book. Affirming that we should take more time offline for nurturing our own thoughts (and so our own being) does not sound that new, but here it is so gracefully articulated in irresistible arguments.”—Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural

"Jenny Odell’s brilliant How to Do Nothing is the book we all need to read now. With wonderful precision, passion, and artfulness, Odell finds the language to meet this cultural moment. She has written a joyful manifesto about resistance that is also an eccentric and practical handbook on how to reclaim your colonized and monetized attention."—Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others

“Self-help for the collectively minded, How to Do Nothing is as thoughtful and morally serious as it is fun to read. This book will change how you see the world.”—Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days

“Your chaotic, fraught internal weather isn't an accident, it's a business-model, and while 'thoughtful resistance' isn't 'productive,' Odell proves that it is utterly necessary.”—Cory Doctorow, author of Radicalized and Walkaway

“In a media and tech ecosystem simultaneously obsessed with "digital detox" and building personal brands, How to Do Nothing is a breath of fresh air grounding readers in the complex, interdependent actual ecosystems of the physical world. Jenny Odell writes with remarkable clarity and compassion. Each chapter reads like going on a fascinating walk through a park in conversation with an old friend (who happens to also be able to tell you about every single bird in the park, which is awesome). It's a book I already know I'll be returning to and referencing for a long time.”—Ingrid Burrington, author of Networks of New York

“In How to do Nothing Jenny Odell breaks through the invisible yoke that binds 21st century first-worlders to our app-driven devices. With a thoughtful look at the attention economy, Odell’s book is a self-help guide for re-learning how to look at the world. The book braids threads of ancient philosophy together with contemporary visual and technological culture, and weaves an original route to re-wilding the mind. Wide-ranging and erudite, this book is also entertaining, and brings the reader along with enthusiasm to Odell's philosophy of “manifest dismantling.” —Megan Prelinger, author of Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age

"Odell introduces the idea that within our world there are endless other worlds; many of the alternatives sound much better. We need only pay attention."—VICE'S Broadly

About the Author

Jenny Odell is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford and has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, among others. She lives in Oakland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Chapter 2 The Impossibility of Retreat

A lot of people withdraw from society, as an experiment…So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you’re supposed to do is stay in the midst of life.

–AGNES MARTIN

If doing nothing requires space and time away from the unforgiving landscape of productivity, we might be tempted to conclude that the answer is to turn our backs to the world, temporarily or for good. But this response would be shortsighted. All too often, things like digital detox retreats are marketed as a kind of “life hack” for increasing productivity upon our return to work. And the impulse to say goodbye to it all, permanently, doesn’t just neglect our responsibility to the world that we live in; it is largely unfeasible, and for good reason.

Last summer, I accidentally staged my own digital detox retreat. I was on a solitary trip to the Sierra Nevada to work on a project about the Mokelumne River, and the cabin I had booked had no cell reception and no Wi-Fi. Because I hadn’t expected this to be the case, I was also unprepared: I hadn’t told people I would be offline for the next few days, hadn’t answered important emails, hadn’t downloaded music. Alone in the cabin, it took me about twenty minutes to stop freaking out about how abruptly disconnected I felt.

But after that brief spell of panic, I was surprised to find how quickly I stopped caring. Not only that, I was fascinated with how inert my phone appeared as an object; it was no longer a portal to a thousand other places, a machine charged with dread and potentiality, or even a communication device. It was just a black metal rectangle, lying there as silently and matter-of-factly as a sweater or a book. Its only use was as a flashlight and a timer. With newfound peace of mind, I worked on my project unperturbed by the information and interruptions that would have otherwise lit up that tiny screen every few minutes. To be sure, it gave me a valuable new perspective on how I use technology. But as easy as it was to romanticize giving everything up and living like a hermit in this isolated cabin, I knew I eventually needed to return home, where the world waited and the real work remained to be done.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Melville House (April 9, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1612197493
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1612197494
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.78 x 0.93 x 8.53 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #15,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #25 in Environmentalism
- #68 in Political Commentary & Opinion

Customer Reviews:
4.1 2,978 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

Important information

To report an issue with this product, click here.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Jenny Odell

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based artist, writer, and educator. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney's, and Sierra Magazine. Her visual work has been exhibited internationally, including as a mural on the side of a Google data center in rural Oklahoma. Odell has been an artist in residence at the Internet Archive, the San Francisco Planning Department, and Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump). She is a lecturer in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

2,978 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all customer images

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Katherine Cameron

REPAIR IS OF GREATER VALUE THAN INNOVATION

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 15, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book's most unusual and significant message is that repair and nurture (traditional purview of women) are needed far more than innovation and productivity (traditional male values) - for the planet to survive. To repair and restore, we have to pay attention to the world around us, not the constant demands of media and social media.

In exploring this suggestion, the author grounds many of her examples in the Bay Area, and East-Bay in particular: Oakland's oldest tree, the Oakland Rose Garden, etc. If you, like I, live in the East Bay, this makes the book particularly interesting. Another very unique chapter looks back at Utopian communities from the Greeks to the l960s communes - and concludes that withdrawal from the world around us does not lead to well-being any better than full-tilt focus on the world's problems , as found in media and social media.

This book has a lot of points to make, but a thread that runs throughout is to find balance, and to be careful what we spend our attention on. We should take our gaze away from the constant lure of media and social media, but also refrain from withdrawal to focus on self. Find BALANCE that involves helping build community, knowing neighbors, and attending to the natural world around us.

I have one rather minor criticism of the book which is otherwise absolutely five stars: verbosity. This is a writer who loves words , and sometimes she uses modern lingo in a way I found off-putting. When I read the book aloud for a while to my spouse, he complained about this very feature.

But the content is very very important and urgent and well explained. So I urge those of you who might also find it wordy, to plug along. The book sings often enough to keep you going, and you will be happy you did.

33 people found this helpful

Helpful

An essential, relevant and important book for our times

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

A week ago I found myself in a two day free-to-attend ‘festival’ hosted by the Malaysian Ministry of Finance and organized in collaboration with the Central Bank of the country – Bank Negara Malaysia. Titled LIFT, an acronym whose expansion stood for Literacy in Financial Technology and Living in Future Times, the event purported to showcase the burgeoning developments in the digital world of finance and technology. In between the short time before one speaker concluded her talk and the next one was preparing to take the podium, the emcee, with a view to eliciting participation from an otherwise reticent but polite crowd, asked as to how many people upon waking up every morning reached out for their smartphones instead of turning towards their spouse. More than 75% of the hands instinctively shot up prompting a burst of spontaneous laughter.

While I am yet to share my bed with a spouse, this question by the Emcee triggered a bout of introspection. I would be lying through my teeth if I was to deny the fact that the first thing grabbing my attention every morning is a rectangular instrument that furnishes me with an unending ticker tape of likes, notifications, comments and mentions. Every other tangible object and intangible element does not stand a chance in so far as vying for attention is concerned. It is almost as if I have divided myself into fractals with each fractal being enslaved by its favourite social media outlet. This in spite of me having read, and reviewed the social recluse Jaron Lanier’s influential book, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.”

So how does one disentangle oneself from the addictive, if not downright pernicious grip of social media? Does one go ‘dissipati peribunt’ by deactivating every social media account and retreating to the hills, or does one adopt an outside-in approach by remaining detached in spite of putting on a veneer of attachment? Jennifer Odell, an American artist, writer and educator based in Oakland, California tackles this very question in her extremely thought provoking, timely and tantalizing work, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.” Fully concurring with Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert’s assertion that “every age needs a Diogenes”, Ms. Odell emphasizes the necessity of possessing the singularly peculiar mind set of this eccentric Greek Philosopher, who once ordered Alexander The Great to move aside since the Emperor was blocking the philosopher’s sun! Odell also takes refuge in one of the most hardboiled, provocative and enduring refuseniks of all time, Mr. Bartleby, Herman Melville’s fictional character who drives his employer to the wall by just sticking to his stock phrase “I would prefer not to” and exactly adhering to it.

An avid bird watcher, a la, Jonathan Franzen, Ms. Odell confesses her obsession towards watching birds in action This obsession in turn enables her to perceive in a more purposeful and aesthetic manner, nature that surrounds her. Bio-regionalism – a concept dealing with an awareness not only of the many life-forms of each place, but how they are interrelated, including with humans – first articulated by the environmentalist Peter Berg in the 1970s and the works of John Muir goad Ms. Odell on further nurturing her ornithological fascination. Borrowing from Donna Haraway and Martin Buber, Ms. Odell, exhorts us to concentrate upon where we are now, to acquaint ourselves with the world as it currently stands, and not go about imposing our will and subjectivity on it.

Drawing from a plethora of empirical research, Ms. Odell strives to imprint upon us the need to look beyond the periphery of our restrained boundaries of attention. The genesis underlying the coining of the term “inattentional blindness” by Berkeley researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in the 1990s while studying the drastic difference in our ability to perceive something if it lies outside our field of visual attention, finds a detailed mention in Ms. Odell’s book.

Ms. Odell does not expect us to emulate Thomas Merton in escaping to the hills thereby engaging in a life of contemptus mundi, or to retreat to the woods, Thoreau-fashion thereby enjoying our own personalized Walden. “I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention” she writes, “what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.” Instead, the secret is to occupy what Ms. Odell terms is the “third space” in the attention economy. This represents inculcating the requisite will power not only to withdraw attention, but to transpose it elsewhere, so that it stands enlarged, proliferated and improved in so far as its acuity is concerned. This according to Ms. Odell means introspecting across variegated timescales when “the mediascape would have us think in 24-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gas lighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.”

Thus doing nothing is the diametric opposite of assuming the stillness of a mendicant (at least in so far as physical movement is concerned) or severing the relationship with social media cold turkey and vanishing into oblivion like a fading mist. In the opinion of Ms. Odell, the act of doing nothing is an art that has a three-point perfection:

It is art of a dropping out;
Developing a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and
Moving downward into place.
My only reservation with the ideas propagated and proposed by Ms. Odell is the aspect of implementation. In a world that brooks no exception and where bucking the trend is more a fortunate – and perhaps in a few exceptional cases courageous – exception than the norm, it is more than just a gamble to dissociate oneself from the everyday hustle and bustle, thereby paying paeans or obeisance to the lives of either Diogenes or Epicurus. Also it would be far-fetched if not downright idiotic to expect society to accord either the same patience or magnanimity towards the goings on of a resurrected Diogenes. Hence, unless there exists a secure financial backing or an assured avenue for leading a life filled with fundamental essentials, let alone luxurious accompaniments, it would be next to impossible to assimilate either Berg’s bioregionalism or Muir’s naturalist wanderings, as the core of one’s existence.

But having said that “How to do nothing” provides a handy channel to plan a much needed escape from the clutches of an unrelenting and remorseless form of capitalism.

43 people found this helpful

Helpful

Robert Walker

Gorgeously written, expertly paced

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 24, 2021

Verified Purchase

Every time a tangent risked incoherence, Odell brought it back to her thesis: How to challenge monoculture. In 200 or so quite well-written -- albeit sometimes digressive -- pages, the author engages in a wide range of cultural analyses. From Chinese philosophy, to the "unplugging" movements of the 1960s, to contemporary libertarian fever-dreams of Westworld-style technocracy, 'How To Do Nothing' gives us the tools to confront social media's sequestration of its users into digital silos. Without being explicitly instructive, Odell uses historical and modern day analogies to proffer ways to economize our attention in a world that seeks to monetize and monopolize it. Chief among these is the practice of bio-regionalism. (You may do well to look this up on your own if you decide not to read this book.) Basically, 'How To Do Nothing' is an extended think-piece from a very intelligent artist who's trying to figure out how to reclaim her attention from social-media algorithms. And how to redirect it toward her own, infinitely more relevant, physical reality. This analogy especially for city-dwellers: Jenny peels away the concrete beneath your feet, revealing underneath the same earth that always existed. Never gone — only yet to be rediscovered.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Higuel Noroes

O que fazer, então?

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on October 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

O livro possui muitas frentes. São vários assuntos em aberto, tentando se encaixar um com o outro. A linguagem é difícil e travada, principalmente pela quantidade de citações. A autora não sabe exatamente que mensagem ela quer passar - mas deixa avisado desde o início. No final, após todos os ramblings e informações desconexas, há um tentativa de recorte-e-cole para elaborar alguma conclusão coerente.

De certa forma há essa coerência. Mas não espere um livro de auto-ajuda com frases feitas e passo a passos. A coerência vem com esforço, eu não sei se me esforcei o suficiente. Muitas ideias se sobressaem: biorregionalismo e o problema da economia da atenção, principalmente - para mim. O Brasil é muito, muito rico culturalmente. Moro no Rio de Janeiro, e o tanto de facetas do povo, da história, da ecologia, da cidade... É desesperador pensar que ainda me pego fixado em questões alienígenas do que focar no meu próprio berço. "Como não fazer nada" é na verdade um convite a como boicotar as tecnologias viciantes e perceber o espaço em que vive, e no tempo que seja necessário para que se perceba essa espaço.

O mundo físico, o contato olho no olho com outras pessoas, sentir a natureza, observar a ecologia em que estamos inseridos. Esse é o convite do livro, é o seu fazer nada.

19 people found this helpful

Translate review to English

Lomaharshana

Impressively deep, disappointingly leftist meditation on attention

Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on September 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

This is a beautiful book.

There has been a lot of discussion in recent times of the fragmentation of our attention, a destruction of our attention spans, by the internet and smartphones. The effect of these technologies on children and knowledge workers has been well-documented. But it is more wide-spread than that. Walk anywhere in India and you will find everyone with their faces stuck in their smartphones. I have seen shopkeepers service me without even turning to face me, while watching videos on their phone. I have been in taxies in which the driver had a smartphone on their car’s dashboard. I have witnessed carpenters do their work semi-distracted by their phones.

The default response to this situation has been things like the digital detox or digital minimalism. Proponents of these ideas say that you should move away from your phone in order to do what matters: develop your careers, produce meaningful results, live a productive life. Jenny Odell, the author of “How to Do Nothing”, and an American artist, takes this a few steps farther and a few fathoms deeper. She argues, very compellingly, we should save our attention not because that would save our productivity, but because it doing so is the only way to live a good life.

Odell discusses the impossibility of renouncing our smartphones, and then comes up with the refreshing idea of a “third space”. She then talks about how attentive communication brings in a spatial and temporal context to conversation. These two ideas she presents in a breathtakingly poetic language. (Read the last two paragraphs of chapter 6 to see what I mean.)

My only quibble is that Odell’s rants against capitalism and the Western civilisation are unnecessary. These are often couched in typical leftist gobbledygook. It seems to me that it would have been so much nicer if Odell’s case were presented with in a spiritual language. Instead of poor, oppressed people needing to protect their attention from devious capitalists, we are all humans trying to pull our attention from a mad world and our unruly senses to our real, peaceful, inner selves. After all, attention management has been a topic of discussion in a India millennia before the arrival of capitalism (see Arjuna’s question to Krishna in Gita 6.33 and 6.34, and Krishna’s response). Odell also seems unaware of Gandhi’s experiments with slow reading. Buddha does feature in her story, but she is ignorant of other important Indian thinkers in this field. This limits her work.

Still, there is much that is positive in Odell. And we are in need of thinkers like her. This book is therefore strongly recommended.

15 people found this helpful

TheDude

Thought provoking - but ultimately futile?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

Full of stimulating ideas. I’ve passed it on to a friend who’s an executive coach.
I think one can relate more to the book (and some of the examples) if one is familiar with California.

The work was a little contradictory at times about our relationship with our ‘app-driven devices’. And, I found a mention of the author ‘killing time’ simply bizarre given the underlying emphasis on what might be seen as ‘mindfulness’.
Perhaps this was just a figure of speech? That said, I did find the author’s prose style rather clumsy at times. Is this because she writes in American English and I’m a British English writer? Or it might be generational?

I’ve got a background in computing going back to the late 1960s, and was involved with AI work in the mid 1980s. Even then, some of the problematic aspects of technology were evident - if only in embryo.
Jenny Odell offers lots of suggestions for resisting but I see little evidence that her impassioned pleas will have much impact on most of those trapped in the ‘Attention Economy’. If one does want to resist (perhaps even ‘drop out’ to some degree) opportunities to do so seem very dependant on how much personal autonomy one enjoys. This is, to be fair, something she recognises.

The one, overwhelming depressing aspect of the book is the assertion that there’s ‘hundreds of designers and engineers predict(ing) and plan(planing) for our every move on these platforms’. In other words, getting us to ‘click’ for reasons that are essentially about generating income for these corporations.
In a world facing a myriad of problems from climate change to a global refugee crisis, it’s more than a pity that these talented people can’t find something more constructive to do with their time and energy.

42 people found this helpful

Hande Z

Nothing is great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2020

Verified Purchase

What has Facebook, Twitter, and even WhatsApp, done to us? This book is a reminder that the view under the sea might be fantastic, but we need to come up for air; not just from time to time, but often. Doing nothing, as Odell tells us, is not just ‘doing nothing’. Michael Caine, in one of his own books, recalls a story in which he commented to the director that his role merely required him to ‘just stand there and do nothing’. “You’re not doing not nothing’ the director said, ‘You’re watching, and listening’.

That is the crux of Odell’s book. We should look up, look up, and look around from our daily routine engrossed at work and around our computers and cellphones. It is a book that nudges us to appreciate the diversity around us that we ignore because we are always in a hurry, and locked in by our routines, too pre-occupied with an ultimate objective – getting that promotion, securing a deal, inventing the product we dreamt about, and so on.

Odell tells us plenty of nice stories of how life can be enjoyed, and in the process, learn not just to appreciate nature, but how we can do our part to preserve it. We learn the joy of actually noticing not just the birds in our garden or neighbourhood, but the different songs they make, and their habits. Odell has a way of spinning such stories that not only inspires ‘aha’ moments, but actually, creates lots of warm feelings about our surroundings and ourselves.

The CD version is well produced and read by Rebecca Gibel over 8 hours. Very clear production, and Gibel has a warm and soothing way of reading.

12 people found this helpful

JC

Not what I expected, but I loved it

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 27, 2021

Verified Purchase

I was looking for some guidance trying to escape from the constant striving, the constant want. The book is not a how to book or even anything close to self-help, and that made it all the better. It is an exploration, through the eyes of an artist, of some deep philosophical ideas, drawing inspiration from art, philosophy and the wilderness.

The only parts that didn’t resonate well with me were the parts about bioregionalism, developing a closet connection to the land we inhabit. While I do agree in principle, it felt like it was sometimes fetishising native and aboriginal cultures for their connection to the land, and some other times the arguments weren’t strong enough to convey something more than “natural is better.” It even contradicts itself when talking about building an I-Thou relationship with nature by using the names and categories we created to organise the natural world to our benefit.

All in all it’s an excellent book, even with those small flaws. I’m looking forward to reading it again in a few years to see how it affects me then, and I’m not someone who re-reads books.

5 people found this helpful

See more reviews

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	6pm Score deals on fashion brands	AbeBooks Books, art & collectibles	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Sell on Amazon Start a Selling Account

Amazon Business Everything For Your Business	Amazon Fresh Groceries & More Right To Your Door	AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally	Home Services Experienced Pros Happiness Guarantee	Amazon Ignite Sell your original Digital Educational Resources	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Listen to Books & Original Audio Performances	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Box Office Mojo Find Movie Box Office Data	ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics	DPReview Digital Photography	Fabric Sewing, Quilting & Knitting

Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Prime Video Direct Video Distribution Made Easy

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on Quality Used Products	Whole Foods Market America’s Healthiest Grocery Store	Woot! Deals and Shenanigans	Zappos Shoes & Clothing	Ring Smart Home Security Systems

eero WiFi Stream 4K Video in Every Room	Blink Smart Security for Every Home	Neighbors App Real-Time Crime & Safety Alerts	Amazon Subscription Boxes Top subscription boxes – right to your door	PillPack Pharmacy Simplified	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust

Amazon Prime includes:

Buy new: $9.99

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Hardcover – April 9, 2019

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

What do customers buy after viewing this item?

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

Important information

About the author

Jenny Odell

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$9.99