These days, we all have too much to do and too little time. This book is about how technology has changed our lives and what we can do about it.

What happened to the promise that technology would give us more leisure time? Instead, we are working harder and for longer hours than we did fifteen years ago, squeezed and scattered and stressed to the point of burnout. We are trying to cope with a constantly accelerating pace brought about by cutbacks and restructuring, but also by computers and cell phones that, in their super-efficient dispatch of data, text and voice messages and the like, let us do more things faster than ever before.

Yet somewhere between the multi-tasking pace and the sea of data divorced from real life, we're losing touch with ourselves and with each other. We're even losing a sense of how to tell when things go wrong and how to take action when they do. We need to take back our lives, and renew the humanity of our social institutions.

Heather Menzies is an award-winning writer and scholar. She is an adjunct professor (School of Canadian Studies and Women's Studies) and a sessional lecturer at Carleton University, Ottawa, and has taught at other Canadian universities (McGill, Simon Fraser and Wilfrid Laurier). She is a mother, a gardener, a peace and social-justice activist, a video producer and the author of seven books, including the 1996 best seller, Whose Brave New World? Menzies has published chapters in 13 books, including Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing and Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution. She also has contributed articles to international and North American journals and newspapers.

Preface
Introduction

Part I: Individuals: Stress Trashing the Body and the Mind

Chapter One: Building an Environment in Motion

Chapter Two: Stressed out and Dreamless

Chapter Three: Workaholics and Chronic Fatigue

Part II: Institutions: Attention-Deficit Culture

Chapter Four: Virtual Worlds and Deserting the Real

Chapter Five: Nurses and Health Care

Chapter Six: Minding the Common Welfare

Part III: Society: A Crisis of Accountability and Meaning Comes Home to Roost

Chapter Seven: Children's Time and Attention Deficit Disorder

Chapter Eight: Drawing Students into Society's Conversations

Chapter Nine: Civic Dialogue and Noisy Silence

Part IV: A Feeling for Ourselves

Chapter Ten: Take Your Time

Chapter Eleven: Time for Dialogue and Democracy

Epilogue

Notes