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

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

Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to, Burnett says, or risk being outcasts.

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?

Our perception of time is indeed our reality.

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

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.