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Brigid Schulte

Overwhelmed

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In her attempts to juggle work and family life, Brigid Schulte has baked cakes until 2 a.m., frantically (but surreptitiously) sent important emails during school trips and then worked long into the night after her children were in bed. Realising she had become someone who constantly burst in late, trailing shoes and schoolbooks and biscuit crumbs, she began to question, like so many of us, whether it is possible to be anything you want to be, have a family and still have time to breathe.
So when Schulte met an eminent sociologist who studies time and he told her she enjoyed thirty hours of leisure each week, she thought her head was going to pop off.
What followed was a trip down the rabbit hole of busy-ness, a journey to discover why so many of us ?nd it near-impossible to press the 'pause' button on life and what got us here in the ?rst place.
Overwhelmed maps the individual, historical, biological and societal stresses that have ripped working mothers' and fathers' leisure to shreds, and asks how it might be possible for us to put the pieces back together.
Seeking insights, answers and inspiration, Schulte explores everything from the wiring of the brain and why workplaces are becoming increasingly demanding, to worldwide differences in family policy, how cultural norms shape our experiences at work, our unequal division of labour at home and why it's so hard for everyone — but women especially — to feel they deserve an elusive moment of peace.
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497 printed pages
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • Leenahas quoted5 years ago
    ideal worker doesn’t get interrupted by repeated calls from the school because a child is acting out, like Rivelli’s, or daily 3 p.m. calls from kids begging for playdates instead of the scheduled after-school program, like mine. The ideal worker never has to think about researching good assisted care facilities for Mom or Dad as they get older, whether they’re getting the best treatment in ICU, or how to get his sister to her next chemotherapy appointment. It’s simply not his job.
  • Leenahas quoted5 years ago
    Though Gallina put in the grueling 2,200 or more “billable hours” a year required of most lawyers at big law firms,40 she deviated from the norm by working some of those hours at home to make time for her family.

    While other associates stayed at their desks, eating the take-out meals ordered by the firm, Gallina tried to leave the office at 6:30 most nights to make it home for dinner and bedtime. Then she went back to work on her laptop, often taking client calls from the West Coast long after 11 p.m. She was always available; her BlackBerry was always on.

    Her problems started, she said, when she put a photo of her two-year-old daughter on her desk. The partner she worked for had a wife at home and never saw his kids, she told me. “His perspective was, if I can’t see my kids, why should you see yours?”
  • Leenahas quoted5 years ago
    Unlike Sandberg, Keefer discovered that it was virtually impossible to walk out the door at 5:30. With a workaholic boss and often pointless meetings called at the last minute in the late afternoon, or projects dumped on her desk just as she was trying to get out the door, and being married to another techie who regularly worked until 2 a.m. for a start-up, life in the high-tech world was simply incompatible with having a family.

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