忙得来不及思考？你可能得了“匆忙病”

    一边在办公桌前吃午餐，一边查看电子邮件和接电话，是一种症状。开电话会议甚至刷牙时还在做其他事也是。我们经常发现自己在同时处理多项任务，但你是否会习惯性地打断别人谈话，或者在等待付款或遇上交通拥堵时变得沮丧，即便前面的车辆正在平顺前行？当你用微波炉将食物热30秒钟的时候，你是否觉得应该找些别的事情边等边做？

    如果你也有一种或多种上述症状，你或许已经患上了一种被心理学家称为“匆忙症”的疾病。伦敦商学院教授，高管教练理查德•乔利表示：“匆忙症的一种明确症状就是不停按电梯的关门按钮”。“通常情况下，这些按钮除了让灯泡闪烁一下，没有任何作用——这就是为什么将它们称为‘机械安慰剂’。但即便按这些按钮有效，你又能节省多少时间呢？五秒钟？”

    对于匆忙症患者们来说，五秒钟非常漫长。过去十年，乔利对参加其MBA课程和接受指导的管理人员进行了研究，其中约95%的管理者患有这种疾病，他们总是需要做得更多更快，即便很多时候并没有客观原因要求他们如此着急。最后，匆忙症确实会让你生病，因为它会增加身体释放的压力荷尔蒙皮质醇，这种物质会抑制免疫系统，甚至有可能诱发心脏病。

    此外，乔利表示，尽管“许多高管将匆忙症视为荣誉勋章”，但事实上，它在破坏你的健康之前，首先会毁掉你的事业，因为总是匆忙地赶时间工作，会让人只见树木不见森林。

    乔利说道：“我们正在丧失退后一步进行思考的能力，我们变得更加努力，却失去了更聪明地工作的能力。人们通常会将矛头指向科技，但科技并非元凶。无刻不停息的‘在线生活’意味着我们很容易被细枝末节分心，无法拿出些时间放慢脚步，思考一些重大问题。”

    他补充道，匆忙症令人不快的结果之一是，这类员工和管理者通常被定义为“焦虑的高成就者，在公司里，他们是有用的，甚至是不可替代的。但如果身边某位更擅长思考，并且可能不怎么‘努力工作’的管理者升入高层，他们就会变得愈发痛苦。”

    克服这种疾病看起来很容易，但通常需要有坚定的决心。首先，确定对你当前工作的成功或者未来发展至关重要的目标。然后，每天拿出时间排除干扰，集中精力为这些目标而努力。

    在指导患有“匆忙症”的管理者时，乔利要求他们写下两三项最重要的任务。之后，他要求他们查看过去六个月到一年内的日程，计算出自己为实现这些目标所花的时间。乔利说道：“一位CEO意识到在那些真正需要完成的事情上面，他仅投入了1%的时间和精力。理想情况下，这个比例应该在50%左右。”

    当然，找到一段不受打扰的时间也极具挑战性，但并非完全不可能。乔利认识的一名高管便创造出一位名叫史密斯先生的虚拟客户。乔利说道：“他会定期预约与史密斯先生进行两个小时的会面。然后他会到一个没有笔记本或智能手机的地方，静心思考。也有一些高管采用长时间骑自行车的方法来保护自己的思考时间。”

    乔利补充道，在度假时放下办公室里的那些琐碎小事，对于匆忙症患者同样很有帮助，但也是很难做到的。有位客户想出了一种奇妙的方法。乔利说道：“他给电子邮件设定了标准的自动回复信息，信息的内容都是比较程式化的‘我将在某月某日去度假’等等，但有一点区别。他首先会设置一个单独的电子邮件账户，告诉对方在真正紧急的情况下可以通过这个账户联系他。邮件的地址是goaheadandruinmyvacation@…com（意思是，继续毁掉我的假期吧）。”没有人用这个邮箱联系过他。（财富中文网）

    译者：刘进龙/汪皓

    审校：任文科

    Eating lunch at your desk while also checking emails and talking on the phone is one symptom. So is doing something else while on conference calls, or even while brushing your teeth. We all find ourselves multitasking now and then, but what about habitually interrupting someone who is talking, or always getting frustrated in a checkout line or in traffic, even when it’s moving along smoothly? When microwaving something for 30 seconds, do you feel the urge to find something else to do while you wait?

    If one or more of these sounds all too familiar, you probably have a bad case of a malady that psychologists have dubbed “hurry sickness.” A sure sign is “repeatedly pushing the door-close button on an elevator,” says Richard Jolly, a London Business School professor and executive coach. “Half the time, those buttons aren’t even connected to anything but a light bulb — they’re what’s called a ‘mechanical placebo.’ But even if they worked, how much time would they save? Five seconds?”

    To the hurry-sick, five seconds can seem like forever. About 95% of managers Jolly has studied over the past 10 years, both in his MBA classes and his coaching practice, suffer from the ailment, defined as the constant need to do more, faster, even when there’s no objective reason to be in such a rush. Eventually, hurry sickness really can make you sick, since it increases the body’s output of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system and has been linked with heart disease.

    What’s more, despite the fact that “many executives see it as a badge of honor,” Jolly says, hurry sickness can also damage your career even before it wrecks your health, because being in an incessant hurry has a way of making people miss the forest for the trees.

    “We’re losing the ability to stand back and think, and to work smarter rather than harder,” Jolly observes. “Technology often gets the blame, but technology isn’t really the culprit. It’s just that being ‘connected’ every minute of the night and day means people are easily distracted by minutiae instead of taking time to slow down a bit and ask the big, important questions.”

    One unhappy result is that hurry-sick employees and managers often get pigeonholed as “anxious overachievers, a type that is useful, indeed indispensable, in organizations,” he adds. “But they become increasingly bitter when more thoughtful — and perhaps less ‘hard-working’ — managers get the top jobs.”

    Overcoming the condition is deceptively simple, but it usually takes some determination. First, identify which goals are essential, either for succeeding in your current job or for taking the next step up. Then, carve out time in your day to focus your attention exclusively on them, with no distractions.

    In coaching sessions with hurry-sick managers, Jolly asks them to write down their two or three most important priorities. Then, he asks them to go back over their calendars for the past six months to a year and pinpoint how much time they had spent on achieving those goals. “One CEO realized that he had actually spent about 1% of his time and energy on the things he really needed to accomplish,” Jolly says. “The ideal is more like 50%.”

    Of course, finding uninterrupted time can be a challenge, but it can be done. Jolly knows one executive who invented a fictitious client named Mr. Smith. “He regularly books two-hour appointments with Mr. Smith,” Jolly says. “Then he goes off somewhere, with no laptop or smartphone, and thinks. Other people protect their thinking time by taking long bike rides.”

    Letting go of trivial details at the office while on vacation is especially helpful — and especially difficult — for the hurry-sick, Jolly adds. One of his coaching clients came up with a novel approach. “He put a standard auto-reply message on his email, saying the usual ‘I’ll be away on vacation on such-and-such dates’ and so on, except for one difference,” Jolly says. “He had first set up a separate email account, which he gave as the way to contact him in a genuine emergency. The address wasgoaheadandruinmyvacation@…com.” No one took him up on it.