After the 2016 US election, the artist Jenny Odell began spending more time in a rose garden near her home. Oakland's Morcom Rose Garden was only a few minutes away on foot, a public place she already visited when she wanted a break from her computer. Now she went more often. As she sat watching birds and plants, she also wondered whether she had any business being there. With so much happening outside the garden, was this really an acceptable way to spend her time?
That uneasiness gives How to Do Nothing its force. Few people need convincing that rest is necessary. The difficulty is allowing ourselves to rest without feeling that we owe something in return. There is unfinished work, an unanswered message, someone else acquiring a useful new skill. Even a break can come with a promise: we will return refreshed and work better afterward. Rest has to earn its place by improving what follows it.
Odell makes clear early on that this is not the advice she intends to give. Nor, despite its title, is her book a step-by-step plan for breaking a phone habit. Published in 2019, it is an extended essay that draws on art, local life, and ecological observation to ask how we pay attention and what deserves our attention. Its invitation to do nothing begins with the possibility that time without an output need not be time wasted.
Neither a customer nor a performer
In an interview, Odell explained that part of the public garden's appeal was the freedom to be neither a customer nor a performer. That distinction helps make sense of her repeated visits. A shop generally welcomes us in the hope that we will buy something; a social platform invites us to speak while displaying how many people are watching. In the garden, neither purchase nor performance is required. We can be there without demonstrating that we deserve an audience.
An afternoon in a park will not remove the pressure to earn a living. It can, however, provide a small part of the day in which we are not required to behave in those ways. Even leisure can become another project: choose an experience, pay for it, photograph it, share it. We may be so occupied with completing the excursion that we scarcely notice whether it has offered any rest.
Odell's interest in birds suggests a different possibility. Speaking about the crows around her home, she describes them as neighbors. They have lives of their own, continuing alongside the news and messages that otherwise fill her day. Watching them does not solve the problems reported on a screen, but it makes apparent how much the screen leaves out.
Attention, in this account, is more than a choice between concentration and distraction. Carefully tracking other people's responses and carefully hearing someone out both demand concentration. So do cultivating a public image and learning to recognize the birds nearby. Yet they can leave us with very different relationships to the world. Consider a place we pass on the way to work. If it remains no more than a backdrop, changes there may mean little to us. Once we know some of its people and plants, news of redevelopment may feel different.
Following Odell's argument, stopping for a while need not mean withdrawing from public concerns. Paying attention can give those concerns a particular place and object: something nearby worth protecting, rather than an abstract agreement that nature matters. This is not a reason to assign ourselves birdwatching as another duty. Counting species to meet a personal improvement target could bring back precisely the anxiety we hoped to leave behind.
Someone keeps the garden open
A garden that allows one person to sit quietly requires other people to work. Odell notices its volunteers and the labor of weeding and tending plants. Leisure and maintenance occupy the same space; what looks like a pause from one perspective is sustained effort from another.
This takes the argument beyond the need for a break. Odell also wants to draw attention to work that keeps things going without necessarily producing anything new. Caring for someone who is ill, repairing a leak, or cleaning a public space may leave things much as they were before the problem arose. A reckoning concerned only with what has been added will miss much of their value. When this work is done well, it becomes particularly easy to overlook.
In the 2017 talk that helped lead to the book, Odell discussed Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist whose work has long attended to maintenance. For Touch Sanitation, in 1979–80, Ukeles spent eleven months shaking hands with approximately 8,500 New York sanitation workers and thanking them for keeping the city going.
A handshake did not clear the rubbish, and recognition cannot replace wages or labor protections. What the artwork changed was whom people were being asked to notice. A clean street rarely prompts an inquiry about who cleaned it. A dirty one makes the absence of the work immediately apparent. By approaching the workers themselves, Ukeles connected a service taken for granted with the people providing it.
Back in the rose garden, sitting quietly now has another implication. We can value time that does not have to produce a result while also asking who makes that time possible. If one person's ease depends on another doing all the housework and care, telling the first person to let go will not be enough. The division of the work matters, as does whether those doing it ever get to rest.
Not everyone can simply log off
For some readers, the practical objection will be immediate: what happens at work tomorrow? A person required to answer messages promptly may not be checking a phone because it is irresistibly entertaining. A manager is waiting, a customer may go elsewhere, or the next job may depend on keeping a public account active. Being able not to respond is partly a matter of how much room one's circumstances allow.
The individual Amazon and Goodreads reviews consulted for this introduction register several different expectations. Some readers appreciate an expansive work of cultural criticism; others wanted usable instructions and finish unsure what to do next. The range of artistic and intellectual references is stimulating to some and a detour to others. Still others admire the argument but wonder how much freedom it offers someone without financial security. These are particular responses, not evidence of a platform-wide consensus.
The last objection especially should not be dismissed as a failure to understand the book. Resisting the demand for constant availability can take time and involve real losses. A person already exhausted by that demand hardly needs another rebuke for failing to rest properly.
It would be equally unfair to say that Odell overlooks these differences altogether. In considering refusal, she takes precarious circumstances seriously. Her interviews also acknowledge the needs of journalists and the friendships people maintain online. She is not asking everyone to leave the internet. For people whose friends or communities are geographically scattered, online contact can be essential support, not a lesser substitute for a supposedly more authentic life.
Maintaining those relationships is different from following a platform's preferred rhythm of posting, refreshing, and checking reactions. Replying to a friend and repeatedly looking at the response to a public statement may involve the same device without amounting to the same activity. Odell's criticism of how commercial platforms capture attention does not require denying that technology can help people talk, learn, and find one another.
This is a harder question than whether to reduce daily screen time by an hour, but it is closer to the conditions in which people actually live. Being offline does not automatically make someone free; being online does not automatically make them a dupe. We need to ask what a connection means to a particular person and how much say they have in the terms of participating. A book can help establish those distinctions without being able to change the conditions of everybody's employment.
Change does not always need an announcement
There is another pressure beyond the question of whether to stay online. We can begin to feel that we should always know who we are, what interests us, and what we believe, and be ready to explain it. An account maintained over time attracts expectations. If a position or an image has brought attention, changing direction can become a public difficulty as well as a private uncertainty.
Odell has discussed how being watched can encourage us to hold ourselves in place, even though learning often requires a period in which things remain unsettled. We need not publish a view before we have worked it out, or announce a new direction in life at the first sign of an interest. Experiencing a change need not be accompanied at every stage by an explanation of it.
This does not make silence invariably the right choice. Promises to other people require an answer, and matters affecting a shared life cannot always be set aside in the name of privacy. But fulfilling those obligations differs from continuously accounting for oneself to an audience whose identity may be uncertain. Keeping the distinction allows responsibility and room for reconsideration to coexist.
The book's particular appeal lies in the importance it restores to apparently minor activities: sitting for a while, noticing a bird, listening, caring for what already exists. Its questions are not remote. Is a crowded day full of things we consider worth doing, or are we afraid that stopping would leave us unable to explain our value? That question need not become another test. Being busy does not discredit someone's work, and enjoying quiet does not make another person wiser.
Return, finally, to the rose garden. Its value does not depend on the fact that Odell eventually wrote a book about her time there. Had the book never appeared, those afternoons would still have belonged to her. Publication was not what gave her a reason to sit down.