Time Management Tuesday: Blogging The Overwhelm, Part Two

I've been reading Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time by Brigid Schulte and began blogging about it last week. This week I bring you up to speed with my reading.

What is Overwhelmed Actually About?

Overwhelmed is not a time management book. The "overwhelm" is Schulte's term for that feeling of being buried with things to do. Her book, so far at least, is not about how to deal with the overwhelm but how it comes about, particularly for women. How does the workplace contribute to this? How do perceptions of what mothers should be contribute to it? Are there workplaces/countries where things are different?

Writers Have Some Experience With Working At Home

Schulte writes of companies that put performance and production before "face time," having to be in the office where managers and co-workers can see you. These particular employers allow their employees to work from home, where parents can

Many writers work in that way. What many of them find, though, is that without the external structure of an office and "traditional" hierarchy, "the boundary between professional and personal time is very thin and very wobbly. It is all too easy for personal time to bleed into work time." What I'm talking about ends up being a lot like the overwhelm, it's just that now you're working at home.

That's not to say there isn't a way of dealing with this situation--bringing some kind of childcare into the home where parents are working might be a huge help, for instance. But if writers' experience is any indicator, just shifting work from an office building to a home isn't necessarily going to solve the overwhelm problem.