Slow Down, Capture Time, Author Urges : Lifestyles: People can become addicted to urgency, Nina Tassi says. And they can cure themselves, she believes.

The United States leads the world at producing microsecond managers who drive miles out of their way to avoid traffic lights, spend their days faxing and car-phoning, schedule “quality” family time and complain that they can never get a minute for themselves.

Much of the nation suffers a debilitating form of time distortion: a frantic state of mind that comes from speeding through life, says Nina Tassi in her book “Urgency Addiction: How to Slow Down Without Sacrificing Success.”

She describes urgency addicts as being constantly pressured by time. They check the clock constantly. They always walk fast. They have short attention spans, seemingly unable to concentrate on the subject at hand. They tend to acquiesce to all time demands at work, although they may have already given the office more hours than seem reasonable.

“Urgency addiction isn’t a personality trait as much as it is a social phenomenon,” Tassi says. “It stems from the pace of life we’ve set for ourselves in economic terms. I see the computer as the super clock grinding out the pace at which our economic life is being lived.”

She lists the human cost of time compression:

* Losing the ability to enjoy the present because you are too busy concentrating on upcoming tasks.

* Postponing the fulfillment of various desires indefinitely.

* Sacrificing serendipity.

* Forfeiting the right to determine the pace of your own life.

And Tassi says time management techniques and timesavers make the situation worse.

A journalist and former college administrator, Tassi began researching her book when she realized that her own life as a working mother of three had achieved a perpetual overload of activities that left her and her husband feeling trapped in a cycle of exhaustion and guilt.

The methods she used to recapture time for herself form the basis of the book.

She believes that time distortion is created, in part, by living in a culture geared to feed millions of pieces of advertising and information to people every day. This fracturing of our daily experience contributes to our sense of time urgency.

“Whole generations have been raised on the television, which is now broken up into even tinier and tinier time fragments. . . . If, from a very young age, you are trained into a lifestyle in which you have to have constant moving images, that produces a sense of urgency. It produces a desire for the next image and the next image and the next image. Time urgency is a reaction which comes from a completely passive state.”

Tassi suggests that people start regaining time by wresting control from some of the data deliverers.

“Part of this whole passive-reactiveness that people feel is the feeling you have to read every piece of paper, every piece of mail that comes across your desk. You don’t. You may feel you’ve got to answer the phone every time it rings. You don’t.

“You need to make the first decision about what you need to know. Don’t let the computer or the Xerox machine decide.”

You may notice immediate savings in impatience, frustration, perhaps even hostility.

“One of the biggest things I learned from this study is that emotional energy consumes a lot of time,” Tassi says.