Often

Sometimes

Rarely

Never

1. Speeding up. You are haunted by the fear that you don't have enough time to do what needs to be done. 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.

2. Multi-tasking. 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 people may drive, eat, drink coffee, listen to tapes, shave or apply make-up, direct business on the car phone—all at the same time.

3. 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 often carry around a time organizer the size of Montana.

4. Sunset fatigue. We come home after work, and those who need our love most end up getting the leftovers. This is part of what author Lewis Grant calls "sunset fatigue"—all those end-of-the-day behaviors that signal hurry-sickness:

• You rush around at home even when there's no reason to.

• You speak sharp words to your spouse and children, even when they've done nothing to deserve them.

• You hurry your children along. You set up mock races ("Okay kids, let's see who can take a bath fastest"), which are really about your own need to get through it.

• You tell your family that everything will be okay in just a week or two.

• You indulge in self-destructive escapes: watching too much TV, abusing alcohol, or scanning pornographic websites.

5. Love impairment. The most serious sign of hurry sickness, though, is a diminished capacity for love. Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is the one thing hurried people don't have.
When I get hurried, I begin to resent the very people I'm supposed to minister to. I also start thinking about people in strictly utilitarian terms: how can I get work out of them? I use them instead of love them.