Finding Ourselves
June 28, 2023
Follow The Leader
April 19, 2025
Heard of "Hurry Sickness?"
The more that is expected of you, the more you might agree to take on, pushing yourself harder to complete every “essential” task. Yet rushing through life can affect physical health and leave you feeling unfulfilled and unable to devote attention to the people and things you care for most.
When you are in a constant rush, you start missing out on so many things, opportunities, pleasures, meaningful connections. It is easy to look at your immediate situation and decide these are all “worthwhile” sacrifices that you are choosing to make, but you do not know the outcome of that decision. The results can be irreversible and only seen when it is too late to change them.
If you look at something such as raising a child, spending time with you, doing things with you, and you being a prominent part of their experiences, accounts for a lot more than them having a lot of toys, or not needing to worry about money. The truth us most children don’t worry about money anyway.
If you choose to sacrifice relationships, you can end up with very few people in your life to help you through any hard parts, and you can never build a long term connection with someone you have just met. Cutting out personal relationships only becomes apparent when you need someone, and at that point it is not as simple as going out a making a connection with someone.
When you are rushing, and making sacrifices in order to be able to rush, to can lose quality of life.
It is easy to see how rushing makes a difference. If you go somewhere in a rush, like rushing to work, or even rushing to visit someone because you are late, you won’t notice the scenery, the landscapes, the buildings, or much of anything along the way, you will be too focused on getting to your destination as quickly as possible.
If you are working on a project and rushing to get it completed on time, you don’t have time to think of how it could be improved, truth be told, you don’t want to think how to improve it most of the time because that could increase the work required and you need to get it “finished” as quickly as possible. Everything can be done in ten minutes, but the results may not be appealing.
If I need to have a layout and design done in 10 minutes, that is not a problem, I can “quickly” slap some things on a page and *boom* it’s ready. Is it good? Is it great? most likely not. Is it worth producing something that is not good or great, simply to have it done faster?
“Let’s get this ad published in 10 minutes,” why? is there a benefit to having it published in 10 minutes that will make a rubbish design worthwhile? Or would it be better to spend time focusing on having it accomplish a goal? An ad produced and published in 10 minutes is not going to drive traffic to your site more than one that has been carefully thought out and refined. Sure it’s out there quickly, but at the sacrifice of quality, and that quality relates to reduced results, if any. Therefore, making that 10 minutes spent on it almost a waste of time.
Most things in life are ruined by rushing them, and that goes for everything. From work produced, to experiences had. If you rush through them they become close to worthless, meaningless, or unfulfilling.
While it isn’t possible to take out all urgency from every task or situation, that does not mean “every” task and situation has to be one that is turned into an immediate requirement that has to be rushed. You should be able to have the majority of your time spent at a comfortable pace with bursts of rushing, not constant rushing with few “chilled” moments slotted in somewhere.
If you want to do something, it is easy to turn it into a chaotic rush, simply consider it to be required yesterday, and *boom* you are in a mad panic and need it completed as quickly as possible. For example, start cooking dinner and decide it should have been ready an hour ago, now you are in a rush to get it completed and onto the plate as fast as humanly possible. You can’t relax while you prepare it, you can’t enjoy the experience, everything is taking too long to cook, ingredients are forgotten, and the result is possibly not that great. Your emotions will probably be pretty frayed, and if you happened to have had a child “helping”, they probably got shouted at a few times at least. The overall result is you a nervous wreck by the end of it, unable to even enjoy what you have prepared, and having emotionally traumatized anyone who was in your vicinity.
When it comes to work, a project that is rushed, so critical that only getting it completed is the desired outcome, by the end of it you are just relieved it is over and you possibly don’t even want to hear of it again. You can’t be proud of it because you didn’t have time to make it something to be proud of.
If you find you are always rushing, always stressed, it is worth putting in the effort to learn how to think differently, slowing down does not mean you have to do less, just pace yourself in a way that what you focus on is beneficial and the outcome is more effective.
It is going to take time to prepare a nice meal, rather than rush through it, focus on the result you want, a delicious meal that you can enjoy, not food you can quickly stuff down your throat so you can get on to completing the next item on your task list.
Is that the goal of life, check off as many items on to do lists as possible and then die?
When I’m working on a design, I like to think about who is going to see it, what their thoughts might be, what might appeal to them, how to get them to take the action we would like them to take, why they would want to take that action, what benefit our product or service will be to them and why they should get it, and a list of other things relating to it. This then needs to be turned into the design.
By doing that, you are creating a result oriented advert / post, it has a purpose and it is designed to accomplish that purpose.
It then needs to be monitored, to see if it is accomplishing the goal, if it is not, it needs to be tweaked, and retested, monitored, tweaked, until it is perfectly fulfilling its purpose. Just as that sounds, it is NOT a quick process, but it yields results, which is by far more beneficial than simply being created and published quickly.
As you repeat the the steps, you become more efficient in them, but that does not mean you can suddenly start producing ten minute designs that hit the mark every time. The goal is not to get to 10 minute designs, the goal in this situation is to create ads that have an impact, that produce results, not to create new ads in ten minutes.
In conclusion, life is not worth simply rushing through, constantly anxious about the next item on a to do list, the results are what are important, quality results in all aspects of your life. Meaningful relationships with people, quality work that stands out, time taken to look into things, the scenery on your trips somewhere, products on the shelves of shops you go to, styles of clothing people are wearing, there are so many things that can impact your life, that can improve your life, that will all be missed if you are simply hurrying through.
“Live in the moment” is not simply a phrase, it should have meaning, and it should bring you peace. You can be productive, be outstanding, and accomplish a lot without everything being a constant crazy rush.
“The most beautiful things in life can be missed by you rushing through!”
