Something to readWorkload & wellbeing
How to Do Nothing
A book about resisting the attention economy: taking your attention back from feeds and the push to make every hour productive
Why it’s worth your time
Your attention is what feeds and productivity culture are competing for, and this book argues it's worth taking some of it back. Jenny Odell, an Oakland artist and writer who taught at Stanford, makes the case for close, unhurried noticing of the people, places and birds around you, rather than escaping somewhere quieter. It reads more like a long essay than a how-to, which is part of its point.
How to take back your attention
The book · About 7 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read the book in a few sittings.
Watch for her distinction between doing nothing and doing something different with your attention; the rest of the book builds on it. It wanders on purpose, through art, birdwatching, old attempts to drop out of society, and the places around her in Oakland and the Bay Area, so let it.
- Take ten minutes with nothing to show for it.
Once this week, step away from your desk with no phone, no podcast and no goal, and notice what's around you, even if it's a parking lot. Afterward, write one line about what you noticed or found yourself thinking about.
Good moments for this: when your day is all inputsafter a week of constant notificationson a lunch break
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
The book treats the attention economy as a shared problem, not just a habit to fix. If you came for productivity tips, that can feel like a detour; it's also the point.
What might make this harder
Start at the edges: a lunch break, the commute, the first ten minutes after work. Small pockets of unclaimed attention still count.
Questions people ask
What is How to Do Nothing about?
Jenny Odell argues that our attention is being harvested by platforms and by pressure to make every hour productive, and that we can reclaim it by paying close attention to the places, people and nature around us. It's cultural criticism as much as self-help.
Is How to Do Nothing a digital detox book?
Not really. Odell is wary of simply escaping, and she doesn't treat social media as wholly bad. She argues for staying where you are and spending your attention differently.
What do reviews say about How to Do Nothing?
It was reviewed in LSE Review of Books and in The New York Times Book Review.
Who is Jenny Odell?
An artist and writer based in Oakland, California, who taught internet art and design at Stanford. Her later book, Saving Time, turns a similar lens on how we think about time.
What it says, and how it holds up
The pressure to make every hour produce something, and to hand every spare minute to a feed, is the subject of Jenny Odell's 2019 book. Odell, an artist whose work often reframes things that already exist, argues that this pressure isn't an accident. In her account, choosing where your attention goes is a quiet kind of refusal.
Her doing nothing isn't idleness. It means turning attention toward what's around you, and she draws on public art, birdwatching, the history of communes and protest, and the ecology of her own neighborhood to show what that looks like. She is skeptical of retreat, noting that many groups who dropped out broke with the very society they hoped to change, and would rather people stay put and engage where they live.
LSE Review of Books reviewed it. It also helps to notice who finds this easiest: people with some control over their hours and access to quiet places.
If what you need this month is a concrete plan to rein in your phone or your inbox, this book will give you reasons more than rules, and a simple structure, such as checking messages at set times, may help sooner. Come back to Odell for the larger question of what your attention is for.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.