CrazyBusy: Overstretched, overbooked, and about to snap! Edward Hallowell

"strategies for coping in a world gone ADD"

Some quick notes - I checked it out of the library when I saw it on the new books shelf, sat down, read it, ignored my blackberry, tried to focus on it but also read very fast to get the idea.

More from the book's web site, "Crazy Busy Life".

The book is in two parts. The first half is a series of anecdotes about how the world has gone mad with fragmented attention spans, so that people have environmentally-induced ADD. The second half is self-help on coping with that world, and a few really neat exercises to improve your concentration.

There's a number-matching game done with pencil and paper that really deserves to be turned into a computer game. And there are lots and lots of lists of things you should do to be a better, more focused person, which I didn't quite find that I had enough time to focus on.

Hallowell has a very interesting, almost throwaway comment in at the end of the book on blogs and the Internet, after going through a series of tirades about how "screensucking" time is awful:

Blogs could become one of the most powerful problem-solving devices ever invented. Through the creative use of blogs, all the talking heads and consultants we've grown so accustomed to could give way to the collective wisdom of millions of thinking heads, all brought forth in seconds.

Would that it were so.

He has invented a couple of fun words which I won't define but that should serve to mark this posting - gemmelsmerch, blather, C-state and F-state, doomdarts, EMV (e-mail voice), frazzing, gigaguilt, gush, leeches and lilies, OHIO, pizzled, taildogging, and a few more. Does psychiatry of a certain school give you carte blanche to invent words?

Popularity index: at the moment, four people have this book cataloged at LibraryThing.

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Comments

[Angie Dixon]

Thanks for the review. I actually have this book on reserve at my library; it's checked out.

I met Hallowell about 10 years ago at an ADD conference where we both spoke. He had about 1,000 times as many listeners as I did.

He's an interesting man and, from what I've seen, pretty realistic.