The more armed we are with information about the seduction of technology, the more we can build systems to better deal with it. I had no idea that I got a hit of dopamine, which is the pleasure hormone that also governs addiction, every time that little email bing goes off.

I think that was probably one of the biggest revelations, is leisure is really in the eyes of the beholder...

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.

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

Because this is how it feels to live my life: scattered, fragmented, and exhausting.

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.

As work weeks get longer and leisure time shrinks, people are becoming sicker, more distracted, absent, unproductive, and less innovative.