Our culture values speed and output; we talk of quotas and productivity.  A few companies base entire marketing campaigns on maintaining quality over producing great numbers of products, and those are the companies that will last--as long as their product delivers what their ads promise.  This focus on speed, though, hurts us in quite a few ways.

First of all, when we focus on speed, quality almost always suffers.  There are a few types of jobs that really can't affect quality if we speed them up, but most jobs do.  Do you really want the person who worked on your computer on an assembly line to risk making a mistake because he or she has to meet a quota every hour?

Maybe that's why my modem doesn't work properly--someone was in such a hurry that he or she missed soldering  a very important connection, or plugged something in a bit too loosely before everything was closed for good.

And what happens when we force young people to hurry up?  What are we teaching them?  That taking their time and doing a job right aren't valuable habits--speed is all that matters.  It's kind of sad, but it's very true.  Kids grow up thinking that things have to be done super quickly, not super well.

We also lose our ability to focus on the process.  If we're so focused on getting to work, all we notice are the other cars that may or may not be in our way, and we focus so much on the driving that we don't see anything around us--we miss the trees and the flowers and the birds and the people that we could be seeing along the way.  We sacrifice those things because we want to focus on the road and the destination, not the trip itself.  Sometimes I've built things quickly, and I've gotten nothing out of the process of building them other than a finished product.  Sometimes I've needed to do this, because I've needed things quickly, and the quality didn't really matter.
  
But other times, I've taken my time and I've focused on the process of doing something very well, and I've gotten an awful lot out of the process of making what I've made.  It's been great to take the time to measure things several times, and to make slow, precise cuts in wood, for example, or to take my time with the paint and pay attention to every brush stroke.

Many of us also lose our ability to relax and smile a bit.  Because we're so caught up in thinking about getting what we need soon, we can't relax until we have it.  We worry about time; we look at our watches instead of trusting other people to deliver what they've promised.  Does this help us?  Not a bit--we end up being worried all the time, and much time passes that we haven't enjoyed, never again to be recaptured.  The time we've spent fretting and fuming and warning and being impatient cannot be reclaimed, and if someone were to ask us if we were getting the most out of our lives during those moments, we'd have to shake our heads ruefully and answer "no"--that is, if we're being honest.

I've forced myself to recognize when I'm starting to be impatient, for I'm an impatient person by nature.  If my car isn't ready when they told me it would be and I have another hour to wait, my natural tendency is to be impatient and annoyed.  I try very hard, though, to force myself to find a positive way to spend the time--usually I'll do one of three things--take a walk in the conscious attempt to see something I've never seen before; visit a store with the same purpose in mind, or take the chance to read something that I normally wouldn't read.  When I've done these things instead of being impatient, I've gotten a lot out of time that I otherwise would have wasted, and I've felt much better about myself afterwards.  Sometimes, I take the opportunity to do nothing--I just go outside and watch people or think.  That's nice, too.

Impatience robs us of a great deal of joy, and it prevents us from enjoying peace of mind and peace of heart.  If we can find ways to deal with it, we can get so much more out of our time.  We don't have that much time on this planet, but when we think about it, we have a lot of time.  Let's use it productively and get something out of it, rather than being miserable just because we want something now that we can't even get now--we have to wait.  Let's make the wait enjoyable.

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