Getting It Done When You're Depressed

Outline

Getting It Done When You're Depressed (2008) offers fifty practical strategies for staying productive and keeping daily life on track during periods of depression. Julie Fast and John Preston explain how depression affects motivation, thinking, and energy, and suggest manageable steps for handling work, household tasks, and responsibilities. The book encourages readers to focus on action rather than waiting to feel better first.

• The book offers fifty practical strategies for keeping work, household tasks, and daily responsibilities on track during periods of depression.
• Depression affects motivation, thinking, and energy, and understanding these effects helps you plan around them instead of blaming yourself.
• Manageable steps matter more than big efforts, because small actions can add up to steady progress.
• Conserving energy and reducing overwhelm are central goals, so tasks are handled in ways that feel doable.
• Take action first rather than waiting to feel better; the book encourages doing before the mood lifts.

Julie Fast and John Preston combine personal experience and clinical expertise. Fast is an American author and coach who writes about mood disorders from her own experience, and Preston is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus. Together they also wrote Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder.