I recently had an opportunity to interview Brigid Schulte, author of the new book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time. Author Brigid Schulte, an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post -and harried mother of two - began the journey quite by accident, after a time-use researcher insisted that she, like all American women, had 30hours of leisure each week. Stunned, she accepted his challenge to keep time diary and began a journey that would take her from the depths of what she described as the Time Confetti of her days to a conference in Paris with time researchers from around the world, to North Dakota, of all places, where academics are studying the modern love affair with busyness, to Yale, where neuroscientists are finding that feeling overwhelmed is actually shrinking our brains, to exploring new lawsuits uncovering unconscious bias in the workplace, why the US has no real family policy, and where states and cities are filling the federal vacuum.
In our discussion we covered a few topics that you will likely find interesting - take a listen to the following excerpts of our conversion.
We talked about the current dysfunctions of corporate culture - specifically automatic assumptions about our roles in business that create this culture of becoming face time warriors.
In her book Brigid gives the example of what the Department of Defense did to change this face time warrior mentality. She describes this in further detail:
Work has become a religion - that is the conclusion she comes to in this excerpt regarding poor leadership across the board and the role that fear has played in getting us to this place.
Our discussion about what men can learn from this book takes us to a place that concludes that "our workplaces are trapping us in lifestyles we don't want to live."
No comments:
Post a Comment