Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time Hardcover

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time Hardcover

by Brigid Schulte  (Author)

Can working parents in America—or anywhere—ever find true leisure time?
According to the Leisure Studies Department at the University of Iowa, true leisure is “that place in which we realize our humanity.” If that’s true, argues Brigid Schulte, then we’re doing dangerously little realizing of our humanity. In Overwhelmed, Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asks: Are our brains, our partners, our culture, and our bosses making it impossible for us to experience anything but “contaminated time”?
Schulte first asked this question in a 2010 feature for The Washington Post Magazine: “How did researchers compile this statistic that said we were rolling in leisure—over four hours a day? Did any of us feel that we actually had downtime? Was there anything useful in their research—anything we could do?”
Overwhelmed is a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds, and a look at how to put the pieces back together. Schulte speaks to neuroscientists, sociologists, and hundreds of working parents to tease out the factors contributing to our collective sense of being overwhelmed, seeking insights, answers, and inspiration. She investigates progressive offices trying to invent a new kind of workplace; she travels across Europe to get a sense of how other countries accommodate working parents; she finds younger couples who claim to have figured out an ideal division of chores, childcare, and meaningful paid work. Overwhelmed is the story of what she found out.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Schulte takes a purely practical and secular approach to a question that philosophers and spiritual teachers have debated for centuries–how to find meaningful work, connection, and joy–but her research is thorough and her conclusions fascinating, her personal narrative is charmingly honest, and the stakes are high: the “good life” pays off in ‘sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, [and] sound economies.'” – Publisher’s Weekly starred review

“Overwhelmed is a superb report from the front lines of the sputtering gender revolution. Brigid Schulte takes up the perennial problem of women’s ‘second shift’ with fresh energy and fascinating new data, effortlessly blending academic findings and mothers’ lived experiences, including her own often hilarious attempts to be both the perfect parent and a successful full-time journalist. … read this book!”  – Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“Overwhelmed is a time management book that’s not just about how to be more productive and effective–it’s about the broad and fascinating role time plays in our emotional satisfaction, our physical health, and even our notions of gender equality. The more overwhelmed you feel, the more crucial it is to take the time to read this important book.” – Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

“Every parent, every caregiver, every person who feels besieged by permanent busyness, must read this book. A new wave of research, experience, and insight is challenging deep assumptions about why we have to live and work the way we do. Overwhelmed is a wake-up call and an exhilarating prescription for change.” – Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation and author of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”

“Why is life so insanely busy? What happened to ‘leisure’ time? Tired of the modern hamster wheel, Brigid Schulte set out to find a better way to live. Her voice is delightful, her findings surprising and hopeful. Overwhelmed is a passionate, funny, very human book that reads like a detective story.” – William Powers, author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

“Schulte takes a purely practical and secular approach to a question that philosophers and spiritual teachers have debated for centuries–how to find meaningful work, connection, and joy–but her research is thorough and her conclusions fascinating, her personal narrative is charmingly honest, and the stakes are high: the “good life” pays off in ‘sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, [and] sound economies.'” —Publisher’s Weekly starred review

 

“This artful blend of memoir and cultural exploration asks hard questions about how to create a well-lived life… For Lean In fans, and everyone who feels overwhelmed.” —Booklist

 

“An eye-opening analysis of today’s hectic lifestyles coupled with valuable practical advice on how to make better use of each day.” —Kirkus

 

“Just reading the first chapter of Overwhelmed may be cathartic: as bad as it is… at least you’re not the only one… Overwhelmed is Schulte’s attempt to not merely survive but also unpack and analyze the quintessentially modern and increasingly universal experience of feeling utterly unable to cope. Putting her own crowded life (two children, thriving career) on the slab for dissection, Schulte tries to figure out how we got here and how we can get out of it.” —Time

 

“Overwhelmed is a superb report from the front lines of the sputtering gender revolution. Brigid Schulte takes up the perennial problem of women’s ‘second shift’ with fresh energy and fascinating new data, effortlessly blending academic findings and mothers’ lived experiences, including her own often hilarious attempts to be both the perfect parent and a successful full-time journalist. Before you embark on parenthood, before you volunteer to make cupcakes for a school party or stay up late to finish a fourth grader’s science project—and definitely before you pick up another copy of Martha Stewart Living—read this book!” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On(Not) Getting By in America

 

“Reflecting on her meticulous research, searching her feelings, and renegotiating the division of emotional labor with her husband, Tom, Brigid Schulte offers us a well-written and timely book, both witty and wise.” —Arlie Hochschild, author of The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home

“Beautifully written, with searing facts, engaging stories, illuminating history, and wry personal observations. A must-read by a truly perceptive author!” —John de Graaf, editor of Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America

“Why is life so insanely busy? What happened to ‘leisure’ time? Tired of the modern hamster wheel, Brigid Schulte set out to find a better way to live. Her voice is delightful, her findings surprising and hopeful. Overwhelmed is a passionate, funny, very human book that reads like a detective story.” —William Powers, author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age

 

“Overwhelmed is a time management book that’s not just about how to be more productive and effective—it’s about the broad and fascinating role time plays in our emotional satisfaction, our physical health, and even our notions of gender equality. The more overwhelmed you feel, the more crucial it is to take the time to read this important book.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

“Every parent, every caregiver, every person who feels besieged by permanent busyness, must read this book. A new wave of research, experience, and insight is challenging deep assumptions about why we have to live and work the way we do. Overwhelmed is a wake-up call and an exhilarating prescription for change.” —Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation and author of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”

From the Author

This is an accidental book, and surely friends who knew me growing up – and waited as I burst into places late, trailing shoes and socks or a toothbrush – guffawed heartily when they heard I was working on a book about time. It all started with a phone call. I was part of a group of journalists at the Washington Post asked to research why fewer and fewer women under the age of 50 were reading the newspaper. The journalists, all of us women, most of us caretakers of some kind – mothers, guardians for nieces and nephews, daughters of aging parents – figured women were just too busy. After all, we sometimes found it hard to find the uninterrupted time to read the very newspaper we worked for in the swirl of morning craziness. My assignment was to find the time study data to prove how busy women are. Knowing nothing about time research, I googled, “busy women time” and up popped someone by the name of John Robinson, one of the first and most eminent time-use researchers in the world. I called him up, expecting to find easy validation. Instead, he told me women like me had 30 hours of leisure time every week. And thus the journey began.

From the Inside Flap

“Once, my sister, Claire told me that when you smile, it releases some chemical in the brain and calms anxiety. I have tried smiling. At 4 A.M. In bed. In the dark.”

 

Overwhelmed is a book about time pressure and modern life. And it comes at the perfect moment: Amid debates about the toll of work and life demands on parents and our addiction to the daily grind, Overwhelmed is just what we need to address our questions about work, love, and play. Brigid Schulte, an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and a harried mother of two, began her journey to rediscover leisure when she realized her life was becoming “like the dream I keep having about trying to run a race wearing ski boots.” She goes from the depths of the “time confetti” of her days to an understanding of what the ancient Greeks knew was the point of living a good life: having time to refresh the soul in leisure. What Schulte finds is illuminating, perplexing, and maddening, but ultimately hopeful. Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time is a book with answers.

Taking the baton from such pathbreakers as Barbara Ehrenreich, Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift, and Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American, Schulte details not only the intensifying pressures on women, and increasingly on men, but also how feeling overwhelmed is affecting our health and even the size of our brains. At times, the author becomes her own subject, as when she sits in a Paris auditorium crammed with scholars, jet-lagged and hungry, and dozes off–until a speaker lamenting the toll of “role overload” on working parents snaps her awake.
She visits Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the renowned anthropologist, who presents hard evidence that women are not “wired” for child care–so a “natural” family arrangement might actually include heavy involvement on the father’s part. It’s a model that’s taken root not only among the hunter-gatherer tribes in the Kalahari Desert that Hrdy has studied, but also in Denmark, the world’s happiest country, where it’s possible to work short, productive, flexible hours and still be successful, committed workers and attentive parents–and have time for leisure. Overwhelmed is both a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds and a blueprint for how to put the pieces back together. What Schulte offers us is a revelatory, at times hilarious, and at heart optimistic view of how we can begin to find time for the things that matter most, and live more fulfilled lives.

About the Author

Brigid Schulte is an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and The Washington Post Magazine, and was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize. She is also a fellow at the New America Foundation. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband and their two children.