Customer Reviews

CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life

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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.

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.

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.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a close relative of Dr. Ned Hallowell and I have read with biased interest everything he has ever published, even things that have not been published. With this same full disclosure, I will say that this is the first time I have ever written an Amazonian review of anything he's written. I found "CrazyBusy" compelling not for any great or unexpected insights it has into human behavior, but for almost the opposite reason. Dr. Ned Hallowell is direct and unabashed enough to point out what is obvious but what is also so often overlooked: stop to smell the roses, carpe diem...chose your favorite cliché, but know that these have become truisms because they are in fact so true. What is particularly refreshing about this book (and much of his other writing too, for that matter) is that Dr. Hallowell is not trying to be provocative or clever. He simply points out with clarity, humor and zeal the importance of not letting the conveniences of new technology lure one into thinking that one is being more efficient, effective, or even happy. In fact he makes a serious case that just the opposite is true.

I am someone who is not one bit "crazybusy." I drive under the speed limit. I read books word by word. But I appreciated Hallowell's new book because it so accurately describes many people I know, people who need help. In other words, I consider this a great gift book. I'm sure that those who need to read "CrazyBusy" the most will be the ones most likely never to hear of it, so I urge the widows, widowers and friends of those lost to their cell phones, BlackBerrys and Treos to send them this book as a highly readable reminder to "Call home."

I bought this book on faith alone, and it turned out to be a good purchase. I am one of those people who, over the years, has grown into a "crazy busy" lifestyle. It really happened when I entered grad school (10 years after undergrad) and found a passion for computer science. I figured out a way to occupy my every waking moment with some level of academic thought. I was and have been unable to "fix" that persistent focus even now nearly 10 years after earning my Masters. This book helped to point out the wacky behavior that I exhibit. Sometimes, you need to be told or shown that "being on" all the time is not normal. This book helped me to see that I am overly busy in ways that I thought were OK. Changing my behavior isn't going to be easy, but I have succeeded in the first step - to know I am in need of some healthy change.

It's worth the money and the time to read this book.

After seeing all of the positive reviews for this book, I was stunned when I began to read it. The first several chapters are repetitive, reminding us of what we already know; Everyone is too busy.
Later, a worksheet is given to help rate those things that are most (and least) important in your life, and how much time you spend on them now, in order to give you a real view of where your time is spent.
Then the reader is advised to spend time on the more imortant things, and less time on the less important items. Common sense time saving tips such as closing your office door to limit destractions, and not spending unneccessary time on a computer are provided. That's really the entire book.
I suggest you make your own worksheet, decide what is important, do more of that, and do less of what is unimportant. This may or may not change your life, but you will accomplish as much by reading this review as you would if you had read the entire book.
As the title of my review states, this truly is the first book I have ever returned. I have felt taken advantage of before, but never to this extent. As an adult with ADD, I was considering purchasing some of the author's other books, but this experience has ensured that will not happen.

This is a simple book but very helpful. I now see why I have, subconciously, resisted carrying a cell phone. My psyche always knew below the surface that it would be a bad thing to do. I do carry one now occasionally to tell time and for outgoing calls only. It is very easy to get trapped in this busy routine and even if one thinks they are aware of the traps it still happens. Recommended.

I am familiar with Hollowell, and I have appreciated his previous writing on ADD. This book, however, is not about clinical ADD. It addresses a phenomenon that Hollowell (a psychiatrist) began to notice in the mid 90s, which was an exponential increase in people coming to him exhibiting ADD characteristics who did not have clinical ADD.

Hollowell's hypothesis is that the modern world is so crazybusy (with the increased speed, stimulation, and demands) that it is causing many people to suffer ADD symptoms. People trying to keep up with the pace and problems of our modern society are suffering from distractibility, inability to filter information, forgetfulness, high anxiety, etc.

The book does an excellent job, diagnosing how modern society is creating this problem. In a bit gimmicky but effective chapter he coins terms for issues that he believes are new to our society. E.g. "Gigagilt -Computer technology has directly and indirectly so extended the number of items a person must keep track of...this brings with it guilt, lots of guilt...Gigagilt refers to the guilt a person feels over missing something or disappointing someone, even while knowing that keeping track of everything is impossible and having enough time to please everyone is equally impossible."

He examines the problems that the above issues create in our lives and particularly our work. Although a bit cutesy, I have actually picked up a couple of these terms myself to describe the hitherto indescribable experiences of technological life. I am currently screensucking:) Name it and claim it.


Hollowell then offers solutions (strategies and alternate perspectives) for people who are experiencing this. Many of these fall along the same lines as those you might see in books designed for those with clinical ADD, but that doesn't mean they won't be infinitely helpful. The book is both insightful and encouraging. I didn't agree with all of his proposed solutions, but there is an enormous amount of insight and wisdom in this book that I think would be helpful to many.

I just finished this book and was curious to see how others had reviewed it because I found it so bad that it's hard to believe that it was published. Frankly, I am shocked that it received such positive reviews. It is extremely repetitive and basically just commonsense. This book would have made a great magazine article entitled "3 Tips for Better Time Management--Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize". The book consists of 35 very short chapters, so no idea is really developed. Some of the advice was laughable, like "buy lots of wastebaskets" and "wear seatbelts". I paid a dollar for this book at Dollar Tree, but I will never get the time that I spent reading it back.

Everyone I know is busy, "CrazyBusy." We are all overloaded and overstimulated with too many distractions and too many pieces of paper. Hallowell does an excellent job at providing real tips and strategies about how to cope with our lives. I read it once and then read parts of it again; taking notes to read BEFORE I start my day and go to my computer.

This book has given me concrete steps on how to prioritize and deal with multi-tasking. I especially appreciate that it has helped me to find find practical ways to tap into my own creativity and manage the unmanageable. I think this is a MUST READ for everyone trying to cope the demands of our "CrazyBusy" world. Hallowell's insights are priceless.