How to Deal With Deadline Panic

The race is on, and you and your business are losing, to a foe so ingrained in the way you work you'd never even suspect it. The culprit is the very warp-factor speed so many entrepreneurs think is essential to success--time pressure, an obsession with scarcity of time that researchers call time urgency. It spawns a chronic state of hurry-worry that locks you into a perpetual rush hour, even if there's no reason for it. Constant clock-checking, zero tolerance for waiting longer than a nanosecond, the need to do everything ASAP or it's apocalypse now--these are just some of the telltale behaviors that come with this condition and the chronic impatience it brings.

Time urgency kills attention spans, rational decision-making skills and, at its most acute, the body itself by contributing to factors that lead to heart disease. People who feel chronic time pressure are twice as likely to have high blood pressure--even those in their 30s, a Northwestern University study found. Stephen Cole of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School linked people with an insistent sense of time urgency and impatience with a "significant" increased risk of coronary heart disease.