A review by bluestjuice
Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much by Tony Crabbe

2.0

I didn't have a particular problem with this book, but it wasn't all that revelatory either and I was a bit disappointed that Crabbe didn't seem to have anything more interesting to say. As a business psychologist, Crabbe also focused more on business in a work and career context, which makes sense given his background but isn't the holistic view that I picked up the book interested in. Basically, this book mirrored many other pop psychology books by citing research and anecdotes in about equal measure to support the ideas it proposed. However, counterintuitively I actually found the research distracting here - I'm not sure I needed evidence that busyness contributes to unhappiness so much as practical guidance on how to curate a lifestyle that is more balanced. To be fair to the book, there was some of that sort of guidance as well, but much of what surrounded it was filler and more than a little of it was advice that has been given by many others.

The one takeaway from this book that was a fairly new idea to me was the idea that we don't need better time management, we need better attention management. While quite a bit of the advice spinning off from this was well-tread (turn off your phone alerts! Put away technology on regular occasions! Be present in the moment!), the core principle of thinking about how to revisit the management of attention *instead* of the management of time really did get me thinking.