Overwhelmed is one of those books that I came across by accident. I was visiting the new library@haborfront when I saw this being displayed. I’ve been feeling tired lately and the thought that it might because of I’m overwhelmed rather than being in a depressive state was a nice one (jury’s still out on which it is though). What I didn’t expect was for the book to impact me so deeply.

Subtitled: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Overwhelmed is the story of Brigid Schulte’s quest to find out what happened to our time. It starts when she hears that working women have 30 hours of leisure time – something that she finds hard to believe, given how hectic her life is. After keeping a time diary, she realises that her definition of leisure and the academic’s definition of leisure is different (her leisure time is contaminated) and she starts to look more deeply in how we treat the concept of time and how that is affecting us.

The book is divided into four parts:

Part One is titled “Time Confetti” and it’s basically about how Americans treat time (this is an American-centric book, but it is applicable to Singaporeans too). One quote sums it up this way:

Being busy makes them feel productive and important, they say. Admitting you take time for yourself is tantamount to a show of weakness. The thought of leisure time makes them feel … guilty.

In other words, culture has glamorised being busy. It is admirable and even ideal to pack your day full of things until you have no more time.

This idea that being busy is good has carried into work culture (the topic of Part 2), which basically morphed into “hustle culture”. The New York Times has a great piece called on it called Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? But if you want a summary of what happened, I think this quote sums it up quite nicely:

Just as Ben Hunnicutt told me that leisure has been lost because work now answers the religious questions of who we are and how we find meaning, Williams said that the total work devotion of the ideal worker has become a religion itself.

Unfortunately, this idea of busyness and the myth of the ideal worker who’s totally devoted to their company has not only impacted our work lives, it’s impacted relationships. Which is Part 3 of the book, titled ‘love’. To summarise: outdated notions of the man working full-time and the women staying at home full-time have made it difficult for mothers to work and have a family – and this same system penalises the men who want to spend more time with their family too. It is a system that is no longer suited to modern lifestyles and will require a lot of time to change. While there is a focus on women, men are not left out and I finished this section realising just how hard it is for both genders to have a healthy work-life balance.

I liked that this part of the book doesn’t just talk about what’s wrong, but also dedicated a chapter for talking about companies and people that have been doing it right. It shows that there is hope for change and that there are models we can learn from.

The last section, Part 4, is titled “Play” and it focuses on the importance of play and the author’s quest to find it. It starts off by looking at a country that has done it right – Denmark – and then moves on to the author’s own attempts to play. If you’re wondering why leisure and play is important, it’s because “in the purest sense, leisure is not about being slothful, idle, or frivolous. It is […] simply being open to the wonder and marvel of the present” and active play is “timeless, like flow, and crucial to humans from the moment of birth to the last breath. Play is also a state of mind, an attitude of lightness, curiosity, wonder that can infuse any situation.”

On the 8th of March, the third most popular thread on GirlsChannel is about how 70% of married men in Japan would like their wives to go back to work. I read through about three pages of replies (there were over 2500 comments when I checked) and they were overwhelmingly opposed to such things happening. You would think it strange, but to these women, they are already doing all the housework, taking care of the kids and it’s a full-time job. It’s very much like the outdated structure that Americans are still influenced by – only Japanese women know that if they work, they would not have the best of both worlds and so they don’t even want to try. It struck me that although the book focuses on America and their concept of time, it has applications for many other places (apart from Japan, Singapore comes to mind).

This was a great read. I thought it was going to be just about time, but it was so much more than that. After reading this, I get it – we all have the same amount of time in a day and the way we think of time is going to influence the way we spend it, which in turn will influence our health and relationships. I really enjoyed how this book balanced Schulte’s quest to find balance with the research she uncovers, and that at the end of the book, she puts some practical steps that we can take to stop feeling so overwhelmed. I don’t think all the steps will work for me, but I see a few that can, and I think everyone will be able to find something that they’ll want to try.