One of the main tenants of hurrying is that it’s built on the feeling that we have so much to do and too little time to do all that we “need” to do. This, in its turn, necessarily creates a feeling of urgency.
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However, interesting enough, we mentally rather perceive this feeling as time scarcity instead of task overload, and it causes us to speed up physically and mentally. By speeding up, we think we can do more tasks, perhaps finally catching up on our never-ending to-do-list.
So, instead of trying to diminish the activities on our task-list by looking at them critically, setting priorities, and taking some of them off the list, we feel that everything is urgent and needs to be done as soon as possible.
The fact that we continuously experience a lack of time not only makes us anxious and worried, it also drains our mental capacity. It creates a so-called “tunnel vision” that focuses greatly on the imagined or real immediate and — according to our own judgment — always urgent demands. At the same time, it inhibits our capacity for long-term planning, appropriate decision-making, and critical and creative thinking.
As we have so much to do and want to do it all now or at least as soon as possible (before things get even worse …), we often start to multi-task, which progressively creates fragmented behavior; we do a bit of this and a bit of that, and nothing entirely or satisfactory.
In addition, it makes us quickly stressed, irritated, or angry if there are delays in doing our tasks. We start to see everything as an obstruction keeping us from what we need to do. For instance, waiting for the slow elevator, the red traffic light, being stuck in a traffic jam, or waiting in line in the supermarket becomes a real burden to us.
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It often also means that we start to sacrifice our self-care, such as sleep and rest time, meals, hobbies, housework, and social connections, simply because we can control those, and by diminishing the time we spend on them, we’ll have more time to do what we think is really important to do.
The real question here is if we indeed have a lack of time or if it’s rather that we’ve simply taken up, accepted, and embarked on too many activities/tasks in our lives at the same time. It could also be that we spend too much time on one specific activity (like our job), which makes that we have little time to do the other things we find important or urgent.
At any rate, there’s a limit of the time we have or can make on a day, and also of how much we can do in a specific period of time — even if we would be super-efficient — and so the only logical conclusion is that we need to find ways to do less on a given day, and not more.
