Busyness has become such a social value that we will even create it, we will create that sense of breathlessness because we think that's how we show status and importance. That is a really interesting and troubling finding. We've taken this notion of hard work to a crazy degree.

Busyness has become such a social value that we will even create it, we will create that sense of breathlessness because we think that's how we show status and importance. That is a really interesting and troubling finding. We've taken this notion of hard work to a crazy degree.

I have trashed the to-do list. To help my brain...

What's happening now with technology is we live with very porous boundaries. All those little interruptions fragment our time and attention and make us feel like work never ends. It makes us feel like we don't ever have that sacred time for family or to breathe or meditate or for leisure. Time is contaminated for everyone. I'm hoping that as we get used to these technologies we'll get smarter about how we use them and also how to shut them off.

What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? And what if both men and women became responsible for raising children and managing the home, sharing work, love, and play? Could everyone then live whole lives?

If you had the perception that you are very stressed out then your grey matter was fully 20 per cent smaller in volume than people who did not have that same feeling. This is the grey matter in your prefrontal cortex: It controls thinking, learning, planning, decision-making. That matters because when we are feeling more stressed, that is when we are at our most vulnerable in our inability to think our way out of it.

A gift, like a good friend drawing a personal road map out of the crazy busy swirl of our overloaded lives.