This interesting book review came out this morning on slate.com:

In her new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte calls this cultural epidemic the “overwhelm,” and it will be immediately recognizable to most working adults. “Always behind and always late, with one more thing and one more thing and one more thing to do before rushing out the door.”

I haven’t read the book and I probably won’t. But I certainly recognize the condition. 

I also like the title on the Slate piece, which you can see in the illustration, and you probably can’t see the subtitle there, which is:

Also, by talking about it so much, you’re wasting time.

Exploring the book, post author Hanna Rosin discovers:

busyness of a certain kind—meaning not the work-three-menial-jobs-and-put-your-kids-in-precarious-day-care-by-necessity kind—became a mark of social status, that somewhere in the drudgery of checklists and the crumpled heaps one could detect a hint of glamour. 

And I liked this thought too:

The answer to feeling oppressively busy, he says, is to stop telling yourself that you’re oppressively busy, because the truth is that we are all much less busy than we think we are. And our consistent insistence that we are busy has created a host of personal and social ills which Schulte reports on in great detail in her book—unnecessary stress, exhaustion, bad decision-making, and, on a bigger level, a conviction that the ideal worker is one who is available at all times because he or she is grateful to be “busy,” and that we should all aspire to the insane schedules of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Last Sunday was a particularly gorgeous Spring day like we don’t often get this time of year in rainy Western Oregon. About mid morning I sat down with a really good cup of coffee and a really good computer looking forward to writing, editing some video, revising a website, and at some point taking a good walk through the university campus. I paused, thought about how I had multiple interesting rewarding things to do, but trouble choosing.

And it occurred to me, at that moment, that having too much to do is a blessing, not a curse.