I disagree. I have some of the same issues as the single mom profiled here, and reading the book helped me connect the dots. Having less of something than is required to meet all of the requirements for that something (the definition of scarcity) triggers this behavior in people. And if you don't actually stop and think about what is happening, you start making choices which are counter productive to your situation.

If you've read the Seven Habits of Highly Successful people one of their points is to invest time to work on 'important' but not 'urgent' things. They argue that by doing so these things do not contribute to 'urgency' later by becoming a crisis. They back into the same, rather powerful concept. Which is that if you don't take time to externalize all the 'costs' you don't effectively manage the resource. In my case I would get a free hour of time and think I could do "anything" with it, but once I started keeping track of things I had put off in my notebook I started recognizing where I'd spend that hour doing something unrelated to the stuff being put off and later that activity was going to be 'urgent' if it didn't get done. By choosing instead to put that hour toward one of my projects needing time I keep them under the crisis threshold. I also recognized things I really wasn't ever going to get to and got rid of those projects entirely from my 'queue.'

It can be challenging to realize that you can only do one thing tonight even though three things are vying for your attention, and pulling an all-nighter (my go to trick for college) really taints the hours you spend on projects the next day, which then take more time than they would have, which means even more things vying for your attention. You have to 'back up' to before that point where you are over loaded and understand what you can really get done in that time and then prioritize based on overall progress against the goals. Relatively easy to say, really hard to do.