Best 26 quotes of Brigid Schulte on MyQuotes

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

As long as you're pushing men to stay at work, you're pushing women to stay home.

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

Busyness has become such a social value that we will even create it, we will create that sense of breathlessness because we think that's how we show status and importance. That is a really interesting and troubling finding. We've taken this notion of hard work to a crazy degree.

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

But the majority of mothers work - and are responsible for taking care of the kids and home. And more fathers are spending more time doing child care and housework, and still working long hours. That work-life conflict is weighing on everybody.

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.

If you had the perception that you are very stressed out then your grey matter was fully 20 per cent smaller in volume than people who did not have that same feeling. This is the grey matter in your prefrontal cortex: It controls thinking, learning, planning, decision-making. That matters because when we are feeling more stressed, that is when we are at our most vulnerable in our inability to think our way out of it.

I'm a big believer in education. If people learn the truth, they'll see the benefit if they have gender neutral policies.

I'm optimistic. I really believe people in power want to do the right thing.

I take solace in knowing that some of the steps I took can help other people.

I think that was probably one of the biggest revelations, is leisure is really in the eyes of the beholder...

It's become such a cultural norm that people brag about it: "Oh yeah, you did that? I did this." Keeping up with the Joneses used to be about "I have the bigger house and car," and now it's much more about how much stuff you can cram into your calendar.

It's incredibly painful to think back to the time I had to come back to work. I was so, so needed at home. Like the vast majority of people in America, I couldn't take unpaid leave.

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?

On a personal level, I do a "brain dump" where everything that's in my head that needs doing gets written down. It gives your brain a rest. And then I give myself permission not to do everything on that list. I'm much more clear about my priorities: What are those moments of connection that are most important to me? Today is a busy workday but it's also a snow day, so I'm going cross-country skiing with my husband. And then I'll come back and finish my work.

Our perception of time is indeed our reality.

The best thing a society can do is ensure its children are taken care of.

The big message is that we need to reimagine and re-engineer how we work - what does work mean and how do we measure what's good? The second thing we need to reimagine is our relationships - who does what and why? One of the biggest things that has helped me and my husband is coming up with a common set of standards about what it takes to run our house, what is a fair way to divide tasks, and how are we going to keep each other accountable?

The more armed we are with information about the seduction of technology, the more we can build systems to better deal with it. I had no idea that I got a hit of dopamine, which is the pleasure hormone that also governs addiction, every time that little email bing goes off.

The prejudice is against men and women - assuming men stay at work. That's the reason why we don't have enough women in the halls of power - the prejudice is pushing women to go home.

There are new studies showing that young men and men with more progressive views of what a father should be - which is not just a helper and fun parent, but actually a partner - are beginning to feel more work-life conflict than mothers are. They're trying to do what women have been doing for 30 years, and they're having a very stressful time of it - a harder time at work because we still expect men to be on 24-7, working 40 years straight.

The United States is the only advanced economy with no paid parental leave for either mothers or fathers.

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.

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?

What often matters more than the activity we're doing at a moment in time is how we feel about it.