Firm boundaries can corral time urgency

Do you often feel trapped because there isn’t enough time in the day for you to complete the things you feel you need to do?

Do you feel “half naked” without your watch? Does it bother you when the individual in front of you at a stoplight doesn’t move as soon as the light changes?

Do you often finish other people’s sentences for them? Do you constantly refer to schedules and to-do lists?

Does waiting in lines bother you? Do you get bored during vacations or on weekends and find your thoughts often turning to your work and career?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be suffering from a disease some mental health professionals call time urgency. This compulsion to accomplish more and more in less and less time and an obsession with scheduling, accomplishments and the need to get more done is found in those individuals who become “prisoners of time.”

Hurry sickness or urgency addiction, as it is often called, is also often characterized by the tendency to eat fast, walk fast, emphasize and accentuate key words and suffer from a general sense of impatience. These individuals frequently eat while they work, become restless if they don’t have something to do and feel guilty relaxing. They frequently find themselves so eager to accomplish something in the future that they don’t enjoy in the present.

Many of these individuals have no desire to alter their time urgency until disaster strikes, which may occur with physical problems as a result of stress or a fractured relationship because of inadequate time devoted to the relationship and unhealthy priorities.

Some suggestions for decreasing time urgency are:

• Focus more on quality and less on quantity in life. Focus on relationships, feelings, and creative endeavors instead of numbers of things achieved, or cars or houses owned, of units sold, etc.

• If something is in your control, take action. If it’s not, let it go. Examine the tendency toward being over perfectionistic and look more at moderation, balance, and lack of tension as goals.

• Set firm boundaries on time devoted to work. Then develop activities away from work that do not overlap with your career.

• Develop activities that can help combat the tendency to be uptight when having to wait. One individual I know carries a book with him so he has something to read if he has to wait in line. Another individual listen to music on a small tape recorder with headphones, carried in her purse.

• Exercise can be a great technique for getting rid of tension associated with time urgency and helping an individual becomes more relaxed when approaching time-oriented tasks.

• Learn to say no and mean it. Overcommittment due to an inability to decline requests is often at the root of a lot of problems for people who are time urgent.

Practice being in touch with your feelings and emotions during the day and see whether you are a prisoner of time or one who truly controls your own destiny.

Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright © 1993