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Down time?

- Little Big Town on Their 17 Years Together: 'We Are Family', People.com, October 30, 2017.

2. Some people just seem unable to switch off. They see down time as a waste of time, and any interruption or delay to their increasingly urgent and growing list of assignments causes them anxiety and stress. To them, “multi-tasking” is not a dirty word but a badge of honor.

Their behavior goes way beyond the normal response to the pressures of having to complete competing tasks in a limited amount of time. For most people, an empty slot in the diary, or a completed To-Do List, can bring welcome relief. It’s a chance to unwind, decompress, have a stretch, and maybe a stroll to a coffee shop. But for others, that blank space in the diary screams, “Why aren’t you doing something?! What key task are you missing? Don’t let the bosses see that you aren’t working!”

Such anxiety and behavior has been dubbed “hurry sickness.” As our article, How to Beat Hurry Sickness shows, it’s something that affects huge numbers of managers. Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, who coined the phrase, described hurry sickness as “a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.” And the bottom line is, it’s extremely unhealthy. Stress can be a killer.

Performing under reasonable pressure can lead to excellent work, as we explain in our article, The Inverted-U Model. But individuals with hurry sickness bring wholly unnecessary pressure upon themselves. They take on too much, get stressed when they don’t have time to do it all, and chances are the activities they are getting all flustered about are not even hugely important anyway.