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

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

We live in a really crazy time when there is information coming at you, and there are so many demands on your time. It really comes down to choosing your own priorities and forgiving yourself a lot and checking your own expectations.

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

I was afraid that I would find out that I didn't work hard, that I wasn't a very good mother. I was feeling so inadequate in everything I did. I was afraid that I was going to come out being this crazy, disorganized, neurotic person. So it was revelatory that I worked more than 50 hours a week and I still spent a tonne of time with my kids. It was like, "Why do I feel one way when the reality is so different?"

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?

Even when men do more housework and child care, a lot of times it's still women in charge, delegating, so you have all that noise in your brain. You're on a bike ride or picnic with your family, and it looks like leisure, but on the inside you are keeping track of everybody's emotional temperature, and did I pack this, what are the directions, how much time are we going to be here, do we have anything for dinner? It's like a toilet running all the time.