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104 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Invaluable Book of Useful and Usable Coping Strategies, and an Invitation to Personal Growth, March 31, 2006
We live in an addicted, overloaded society in which hypomanic behavior has become valued and rewarded. Is this something new, or a culmination of forces that have been acting upon us for centuries?
We have all been multitasking since before our ancestors came down from the trees, but our attention is now constantly being distracted by a host of new inputs: email, text messaging, instant messaging and a hundred other things. Just think of those news broadcasts that since 2001 have regularly had more than one item at a time on the screen. Many of us have learned to give only partial attention to the task before us. The downside of this is that the myth that we can all be competent multitaskers ("Look mom, I can do ten things at once!") is an illusion. If you are only working on a project with 10% of your attention, not only is it going to take much longer to get it done, but errors are far more likely to occur.
Edward Hallowell is well qualified to write this important book. He is a psychiatrist who tells us that he has also been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, and he has spent years working on practical solutions for his patients. He then realized that many of the strategies that he designed for sufferers of the disorder could also help people being overloaded by too many demands on their time and energy.
This is a well written book by someone with a personal interest in finding strategies that work, and who has test-driven and refined them in his practice for years. What I particularly like about his approach is that although he offers a number of suggestions for quick fixes, he also goes to the next step, and discusses how being busy, overloaded and forced into ineffective multitasking can present us with an opportunity. It is disappointing how few of those who give advice in books, magazines, on the Internet and on television, ever go beyond the psychological band-aid to developing long-term solutions. Dr. Hallowell spends a substantial amount of time on how to turn the challenge of being "CrazyBusy" into a source of creativity, ingenuity and inspiration. He goes through a series of simple steps that can help the busiest person unpack the causes and consequences of being caught up in a maelstrom of frustrating activity.
Some self-help books are frightfully impractical: a 300-page book on depression for someone suffering from the illness, who likely cannot read at all; a dense 250-page treatise on how to avoid being overly busy, aimed at people who don't have time to sit down to eat, and so on. This book does the difficult balancing act of providing plenty of "meat," while also getting down to practicalities that can indeed be incorporated into the day of a person whose life may have become unmanageable.
Dr. Hallowell has done us all an important service.
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31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Important Reading for Anyone in the Workforce, April 13, 2006
I've been down the CrazyBusy path, so I recognized myself in some of Hallowell's examples. Pushing myself harder, multi-tasking, addicted to incoming emails, overloaded with information, and feeling like it might all come crashing down around me at some point.
This book gives "ideas about monitoring your mood at work, being systematic about how you invest your time and pushing your brain's reset button." The subtitle (Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap!) certainly described my feelings and those of many workers today. The strategies in this book may save your life.
The author's previous work with attention deficit disorder gives him insight into coping with the information overload and the pulled-in-all-directions feeling that goes with it.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
If you are a mother of young kids, don't waste your time on this book, March 12, 2011
This review is from: CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life (Paperback)
Early on in this book it is clear that this book is written from the male perspective. The advice about prioritizing what is important, cutting out tasks and people that drain you, etc will not help you if like me, you are a working mother of small kids. We don't have the option of dropping the energy and time sucking tasks such as laundy, constant meal prep, driving kids around, rescheduling work meetings when our kids are sick, etc.. Unless all the housekeeping is what floats your boat...you will HAVE to spend a lot of time doing chores you can't stand over and over....maybe a book on how to embrace this crazy life and find peace and fullfillment doing all this mundane work would be more helpful.
The author's chapter on why women have it harder than men is exactly one and one quarter pages long and he gives his wife a lot of credit for managing his three kids, the house and himself. However he admits he has no idea how she does it all! Frankly, I doubt he would be willing to take on what she does. After all, it would probably cut into his book-writing time. What about the book SHE might want to write?
The section on scheduling sex was just funny...he says that by knowing you will have sex on A given day, we have all week to anticipate it. Okay, maybe if you are a man....but a lot of working moms I know see it as yet another chore. How do we change our lifestyles enough to actually enjoy things again instead of just finding time to squeeze them in? The only answer I can think of is to hire household help...and that is not an option for most of us.. I will go back and re- read Tolle's A New Earth so I can just learn to accept this stuff more easily.
Moms, skip this book and get in your car...baseball practice is in 15 minutes.
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