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Diagnosing Hurry Sickness

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 ...

July/August
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