Diagnosing Hurry Sickness
October 1, 1998
Here are some symptoms.
Speeding up. You are haunted by the fear that you don't have enough time to do what needs to be done. You try to read faster, lead board meetings more efficiently, write sermons on the fly, and when counseling, you nod more often to encourage the counselee to accelerate. You chafe whenever you have to wait. At a stoplight, if there are two lanes and each contains one car, you read the year, make, and model of each car to guess which will pull away most quickly. At a grocery store, if you have a choice between two check-out lines, you note the number of people in each line and multiply this number by the number of items per cart. If the alter-you leaves the store while you're still in line, you feel depressed. Multiple-tasking. You find yourself doing or thinking more than one thing at a time. Psychologists call this polyphasic activity (it could be called doing-more-than-one-thing-at-a-time, but that would take too long). The car is a favorite place for this. Hurry-sick pastors may drive, eat, drink coffee, listen to tapes for sermon ideas, shave or apply make-up, direct church business on the car phone—all at the same time. Or they may try to watch TV, read Leadership, eat dinner, and carry on a phone conversation simultaneously. Clutter. Take a look at your desk. One researcher noted that the average desk-worker has 36 hours worth of work on the desk, and spends three hours a week just sorting through it. The hurry-sick lack simplicity. They often carry around a time organizer the size of Montana. Do you find yourself subscribing to too many journals and then feeling guilty because you can't read them all? Ever buy time-saving devices or Bible-software programs and then fail to use them because ...
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