For nine months, Perlow studied the work practices of a product development team of software engineers at a Fortune 500 corporation. She reports her findings in detailed stories about individual employees and in more analytic chapters. Perlow first describes the individual heroics necessary to succeed in the existing work culture. She then explains how the system of rewards perpetuates crises and continuous interruptions, while discouraging cooperation. Finally, she shows how the resulting work practices damage both organizational productivity and the quality of individuals' lives outside of work.
“Ambitious, fast-paced, fact-filled, and accessible.” —Science “A compelling case for why achieving the right balance of time with our families...is vital to the economic success and prosperity of our nation... A must read.” —Maria Shriver From backyard barbecues to the blogosphere, working men and women across the country are raising the same worried question: How can I get ahead at my job while making sure my family doesn’t suffer? A visionary economist who has looked at the numbers behind the personal stories, Heather Boushey argues that resolving the work–life conflict is as vital for us personally as it is essential economically. Finding Time offers ingenious ways to help us carve out the time we need, while showing businesses that more flexible policies can actually make them more productive. “Supply and demand curves are suddenly ‘sexy’ when Boushey uses them to prove that paid sick days, paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care aren’t just cutesy women’s issues for families to figure out ‘on their own time and dime,’ but economic issues affecting the country at large.” —Vogue “Boushey argues that better family-leave policies should not only improve the lives of struggling families but also boost workers’ productivity and reduce firms’ costs.” —The Economist
Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.
“Ambitious, fast-paced, fact-filled, and accessible.” —Science “A compelling case for why achieving the right balance of time with our families...is vital to the economic success and prosperity of our nation... A must read.” —Maria Shriver From backyard barbecues to the blogosphere, working men and women across the country are raising the same worried question: How can I get ahead at my job while making sure my family doesn’t suffer? A visionary economist who has looked at the numbers behind the personal stories, Heather Boushey argues that resolving the work–life conflict is as vital for us personally as it is essential economically. Finding Time offers ingenious ways to help us carve out the time we need, while showing businesses that more flexible policies can actually make them more productive. “Supply and demand curves are suddenly ‘sexy’ when Boushey uses them to prove that paid sick days, paid family leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care aren’t just cutesy women’s issues for families to figure out ‘on their own time and dime,’ but economic issues affecting the country at large.” —Vogue “Boushey argues that better family-leave policies should not only improve the lives of struggling families but also boost workers’ productivity and reduce firms’ costs.” —The Economist
Finding Time for Your Self invites busy women and men to connect with deeper longings for self-fulfillment as they navigate the stressful demands of daily life. Thought-provoking reflections by the author are followed by practical exercises for a weekly study over a year of many aspects of life experience. Most of us feel scattered a lot of the time. Like the dismembered Egyptian god Osiris, we are spread out all over our personal world. Finding Time for Your Self offers help to bring ourselves back together again and learn how to re-member ourselves, not by withdrawing from the world but by being engaged right in the middle of our daily life. Fifty-two reflections on familiar life situations help the reader stay inwardly alive and present to meet life's many challenges to pause and reflect at any moment of the day. They are followed by practical exercises that offer day-by-day experiments to assist in finding a more balanced sense of ourselves in the midst of outer activity. The old Shaker song "It's a gift to be simple" tells us that the solution is in the turning, until "by turning, turning, turning we come round right." When we turn away for a short time from activities, goals and commitments and toward the inner self we discover a world that's just as active and full of surprises as the outer one. Turning our attention to the world within allows us to reconnect with that person who we essentially are, in the depths of our being.
Restore the balance and bring perspective to daily life with these wise, funny, friendly words from a master storyteller. Drawing on her experiences as wife, grandmother, priest, retreat leader, and spiritual director Crafton is the wise and funny friend every woman needs every day.
Practice spirituality in a culture where work has become a religion. This collection of real-life examples offers refreshing stories of everyday spiritual practices people use to free themselves from the work and worry mindset of our culture. Drawing from the experiences of others, it shows you how you too can refocus and enrich your daily life with spiritual practice, including: Finding a haven for inspiring reading at a coffeehouse Singing during the morning commute to work Prayerful walking at home and on business trips Mindful eating and other deliberate experiences of God's goodness Full of insight and inspiration, Finding Time for the Timeless will help empower you to see how even your busiest workweek can include spiritual habits and routine.
Finding Time for the Old Stone Age explores a century of colourful debate over the age of our earliest ancestors. In the mid nineteenth century curious stone implements were found alongside the bones of extinct animals. Humans were evidently more ancient than had been supposed - but just how old were they? There were several clocks for Stone-Age (or Palaeolithic) time, and it would prove difficult to synchronize them. Conflicting timescales were drawn from the fields of geology, palaeontology, anthropology, and archaeology. Anne O'Connor draws on a wealth of lively, personal correspondence to explain the nature of these arguments. The trail leads from Britain to Continental Europe, Africa, and Asia, and extends beyond the world of professors, museum keepers, and officers of the Geological Survey: wine sellers, diamond merchants, papermakers, and clerks also proposed timescales for the Palaeolithic. This book brings their stories to light for the first time - stories that offer an intriguing insight into how knowledge was built up about the ancient British past.
The long-awaited final volume in the acclaimed Penguin translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—one of the world’s most beloved works of literature “The greatest literary work of the twentieth century.” —The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper Ian Patterson’s acclaimed new translation of Finding Time Again introduces a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. The seventh and final volume in Penguin Classics' superb new edition of In Search of Lost Time—the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s—brings us a more comic and lucid prose than readers of English have previously been able to enjoy. In Finding Time Again, Marcel discovers his world destroyed by war and those he knew transformed by the march of time. An exquisite picture of France in the throes of the First World War, and containing, in the “Bal des têtes” sequence, one of Proust’s most devastating set pieces, Finding Time Again triumphantly describes the paradox of facing mortality yet overcoming it through the act of writing. As Marcel rediscovers his vocation, he realizes that he can live on by writing down the story of his own memories and of his quest to recapture the past.
For every woman too tired, too busy or just too stressed to think of herself, this new, updated edition of Finding Time is an intimate, yet practical, guide to finding time. A treasure trove of time-honored techniques and inventive new ideas, Finding Time is ideal for every woman who finds herself doing more than there is time to do. Finding Time will help you: -- Say "yes" to yourself and "no" to others -- Schedule personal time -- Prioritize -- Limit interruptions
