Hello Reader,

I picked up Overwhelmed by Brigit Shulte around the time it came out in 2014, and upon this re-read, I realized it may well have influenced my journey to become a Time Creation Coach! So I knew I wanted to finish it this time, and share a review/summary with you of the important parts.

If you don't have time to read the full review below, let alone the actual book, the TL;DR summary is: grab this book from the library and just read the 7 page appendix at the back for the key tips, techniques, and examples the author spent the prior 278 pages detailing.

Overwhelmed by Brigit Shulte is an overwhelming book. It’s full of depressing stats about how rushed our lives are, about how little household duties–split along gender lines–have changed in decades.

Nearly any woman who reads this book will instantly understand, empathize, and perhaps even see herself in the stories Shulte tells about her own chaotic, messy, frustrating life of trying to balance work, family, and …honestly that’s about it. There’s simply no time left for anything else.

Shulte & every woman she interviews for the book notes the same pattern: home duties are split fairly evenly between married couples…until the first child comes along. Then somehow everyone still defaults to mom being the “she-fault” parent (a term from a book on nearly the same topic: Fair Play.)

There are so many quotable stats and stories I felt like I could have photographed & posted nearly the entire book to my friends or social media. The book was written in 2014, but is still incredibly resonant even today, nearly a decade later. That is in fact my biggest gripe with the book: we all now know that the 2020 pandemic & lockdown experience was a seismic shift. So did things get better? Or worse? Or not change at all after that? None of that can be addressed in this book that was written years before that crisis.

(I have since seen some stats & news that indicate things have either stayed basically the same…or even in some cases gone backwards. It’s seriously depressing.)

Shulte tries to keep the book from being a relentless downer by including “bright spots” or counter examples of people and organizations that are bucking trends, from software companies trying ROWE (results-only work environment) to the Department of Defense that now has an enviable & trailblazing “Alternative Work Schedule” that allows both men & women time for life, family, and leisure.

But the seemingly impossible to kill stereotypes of the “Ideal Worker” (read: men, or anyone who can be butt-in-seat for long hours and nearly always on call as well) and “Ideal Mother” (the she-fault parent who manages to have a home cooked meal every night, a spotless house, and well behaved, well rounded children) in the vast majority of the U.S. make even these bright spots difficult to maintain. It’s swimming upstream against hundreds of years of cultural norms & expectations.

Shulte ends the book with updates on how she and her husband have made changes to balance their work and home lives. The process of researching & writing the book exposed her to many groups & experts trying to change the patterns, and she starts to implement them in her own life, and has seen improvements.

My favorite example: they hold “cocktail minute” weekly, since ain’t nobody got time for an hour. She made changes to her work schedule to work smarter instead of just longer. And she now finds time for play, and being in the moment with her family.

In true modern, impatient fashion, the book ends with a TL;DR appendix: a bulleted list, organized by the book’s section topics, of the key takeaways from each. So if this book sounds compelling, but you know you don’t have time to read or listen to the whole thing, skip to the appendix & read those 7 pages. In fact, due to the age of the research, and the depressing deja vu of the anecdotes, I’d even recommend skipping the rest.