My plane was forty-five minutes late landing in Los Angeles. By the time I got to my 6:30 P.M. appointment with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the thirty-six-year-old chairman of Walt Disney Studios, it was nearly 6:45. Katzenberg, who is legendary for packing more into a day than most human beings accomplish in a month, is usually meticulous about his schedule. But as it turned out, he was stuck on the phone, and there were two people in front of me waiting to see him. When we finally sat down to talk about what it's like to live in a state of constant acceleration, it was nearly 7:15. Which meant I had a new dilemma. Assuming that we'd start on time, and that Katzenberg would give me no more than forty-five minutes, I'd scheduled a dinner meeting for 8:00 a half-hour across town. Either I cut short this interview or I'd be late for the next one.

"When's your next appointment?" I asked him casually.

"At 8:00," he said. "I'm having a dinner party at home."

Katzenberg lives at least five minutes past where I was going, so as best I could figure it, he was going to have to leave within fifteen minutes.

"Doesn't give us much time," I said.

"We've got till 7:45," he replied breezily. "It takes me exactly fifteen minutes to get home."

This I found hard to imagine.

"I'm going the same way," I said. "I'll follow you."

For the next half an hour, we talked about schedules and telephone lists, about not having enough time to stop, reflect on and enjoy the present, and about the need to be constantly doing. By this stage in the day, Katzenberg had probably made two hundred phone calls and attended a dozen meetings. He didn't look remotely tired.

At 7:43 he stood up. "Come on," he said. "We can talk on the way to the car.

At 7:45 precisely, Katzenberg steered his Mustang out of the Disney lot. 1 followed directly behind. The moment he hit the street, Katzenberg roared off, leaving me in his wake. I couldn't resist trying to keep up. I pushed the accelerator nearly to the floor, gripped my hands so tightly around the steering wheel that my knuckles turned white, and focused my full concentration on the road ahead. Katzenberg was weaving in and out of the traffic at a speed I didn't dare to contemplate.

We drove this way for several miles, somehow making every light. Finally I saw a red signal up ahead. Katzenberg began to slow down, and I started to pull up alongside him. But when I got next to his car and looked over, I couldn't catch his attention. He was too engrossed in conversation on his car phone.

It's possible to become chemically addicted to a certain level of excitement. "Once the brain gets too much of any hormone—adrenaline, noradrenaline— it gets hooked on it!"

Call it acceleration syndrome. Life in a state of constant overdrive. There's more information than ever to absorb, more demands to meet, more roles to play, the technology to accomplish everything faster, and never enough time to get it all done. And the cycle feeds on itself. Living fast can be addictive.

The phenomenon is most visible, of course, among those in fast-paced professions—communications, politics. Wall Street, and Hollywood—and in big cities that are themselves intense, especially New York and Los Angeles. But living at an accelerated pace isn't limited to major metropolises and high-powered professionals. Clerical workers who use computers, for example, report with increasing frequency that they find themselves adapting their own rhythms to those of the computer—trying, in a sense, to become more like the high-performance machines they operate. For that matter, just ask any working mother, no matter how placid her temperament or high her income, whether she finds herself running faster to try to accomplish more and yet struggling constantly to keep up.

There are those who argue passionately that living faster means living better. Certainly it seems to work for Jeff Katzenberg. So, too, for Bob Pittman, the thirty-four-year-old cofounder of MTV and now president of Quantum Media, which produces The Morton Downey Jr. Show, among others. I tracked Pittman down in Wichita, Kansas, where he was in the midst of a week of advanced flight-training classes. He recently purchased a twin-engine Cessna that he flies around the country himself.

"We now have a generation of people—the TV babies— who can absorb enormous amounts of information and do multiple activities at the same time," Pittman told me. "My parents are used to finishing one train of thought before starting another. I can carry on two conversations while I'm reading my mail, and still manage to keep an eye on the TV I've got on in the background. That allows me to pack a lot more in. It gives me an edge."

Not so, in the view of writer and social critic Jeremy Rifkin. "It is ironic that in a culture so committed to saving time we feel increasingly deprived of the very thing we value," Rifkin writes in his book Time Wars. ' 'The modem age has been characterized by a Promethean spirit, a restless energy that preys on speed records and shortcuts, unmindful of the past, uncaring of the future, existing only for the moment and the quick fix.. . .Despite our alleged efficiency. . . we seem to have less time for ourselves and far less time for each other. . . . We have become more organized but less spontaneous, less joyful."

Mark Ethridge can identify with those sentiments, even though his life-style seems to belie it. While most other ambitious journalists I know have moved restlessly from job to job and city to city, Mark has worked for sixteen years at The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina. The paper has won plenty of journalistic distinctions during Mark's nine years as managing editor (among them three Pulitzer Prizes), but at the same time, Mark has continued to live on a ten-acre farm a half-hour outside the city, and he remains married to his high-school sweetheart, Kay, a potter who works at home while raising their two young kids. It still sounds pretty mellow, I told him when we spoke recently for the first time in several years.

"Are you kidding?" he said, laughing. "The word 'mellow' isn't part of my vocabulary anymore. From the moment I wake up now, I have people tearing at me. I feel like a Russian bureaucrat. Supplicants at my door. Everyone seeking something. In the old days, when I got home from work I'd say to myself, O.K., now I'm free, I can relax, kick back, put my feet up, gather my strength for the next day. Now home is a whole new set of people with demands and needs to satisfy. When my first kid was born, I thought, Great, I'll use the half-hour it takes to drive home from the office to purge all my office preoccupations and I'll be able to concentrate on my kid. But now all that happens is that while I'm driving I think of more things I should have done back at the office. So when I get home I'll often say to my daughter, 'Just a minute, Emily. I've gotta go to the computer and send a few messages to people. ' And, unfortunately, these people have computers in their homes, too, and they answer my messages. And then suddenly I'll look up at the clock and it's time for the kids to go to bed, and I've missed being with them altogether.

"After the kids go to bed, I want to spend time with my wife. What I've found is that I spend about forty-five minutes a night with her—but often that's shared with the television news. Because if you don't get home in time to see Rather and the local news, and you want to keep up, then you have to tape the damn thing. So at about nine, I pop the tape into the VCR and lie down to talk with my wife—while I watch the news. She refuses to believe that I can do three things at once."

"What's the third?" I asked.

"Reading. Because when I get home, besides that day's Observer, there's also the Greensboro News and Record, the Raleigh News and Observer, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today waiting for me. I feel I have to read all of them. So there I am, trying to carry on a conversation with my wife while watching the TV news on tape and scanning the newspapers, just to make sure there's nothing I missed.

"In the old days, I'd stay up till 11:30, midnight. Well, now by 9:30 or 10 at night. I'm just dead. There are nights I have a hard time outlasting my kids."

"I love living in a pressure cooker. It's what keeps me going."

Few would disagree that we're living faster. Technological advances are one factor. Computers, fax machines, overnight mail service, portable stock-quote machines and phones that can be used in cars, on airplanes, and walking down the street have all vastly increased the speed at which communication occurs and business gets transacted. In addition, there is more information and entertainment available than ever before— multichannel cable systems, videotapes that can be rented or purchased for use in home VCRs, computer data bases that can be accessed instantly, and the constantly growing number of magazines, newsletters, and books.

With so much so easily accessible, expectations rise almost inexorably. Invention is increasingly the mother of (overnight) necessity; just ask someone who has a car phone if he could imagine living without it now—no matter that he almost certainly did so until a year or two ago. People have higher expectations as well about the number of roles they can juggle simultaneously—full-time professional, parent, spouse, and (in a mild yuppie backlash) good citizen. All this, of course, is on top of the time that must be set aside for staying in shape and burning off tension—a minimum of an hour, three times a week.

The fire's fueled, too, by the fact that speed, performance, and productivity—doing more things faster—are so widely viewed now as virtues. Nearly thirty years ago, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman coined the term "Type A" personality to describe the sort of relentlessly aggressive, competitive, often hostile, impatient, and driven style that led men (mostly) to early heart attacks. Today, those same Type A qualities are likely to be seen less as a perilous warning of incipient disease than as prerequisites for success and achievement.

Then, too, because living fast is exciting and stimulating, it's often self-perpetuating. The faster you go, the more you want to go fast. Once you're moving at a certain speed, operating at a slower pace can seem boring, even anxiety-producing. Some researchers now believe it may even be possible to become physically addicted to certain substances produced by the body— adrenaline, noradrenaline, endorphins—much as a smoker becomes addicted to nicotine.

When it comes to assessing the effect of living at an accelerated pace, the real issue may be who's in control. There's a distinction—sometimes quite subtle— between driving and being driven, living at full throttle and chasing the high, exhilaration and dependence. If one is moving fast enough, it isn't always possible to detect just when the crossover occurs and the addiction takes hold.

Consider something as simple and commonplace as the telephone. Little more than a decade ago, most people had single-line, rotary-dial phones in their homes. Touch-tone telephones made it possible to dial faster. The innovation of call waiting ensured that even if you were busy talking you could pick up the incoming caller. Call forwarding ensured that if you left home, or the office, you could be reached at your next destination.

Answering machines guaranteed that even if you were away from a phone you still wouldn't miss anyone—particularly when a second generation of machines made it possible to call in from anywhere in the world and pick up messages simply by punching a touch-tone code. Cellular car phones not only eliminated one of the few remaining places in which most people were absolutely unreachable, but also provided a means by which to make driving time more productive. (Nothing so pleases someone with acceleration syndrome as the ability to accomplish two or more things at once.) Telephones in airplanes eliminated perhaps the last place where it was impossible to be reached—unless you count camping in the wilderness, where the fully portable cellular phone has now solved even that problem.

The effect is that one need never be out of touch, that it's possible to be connected and efficient around the clock. Bob Pittman has a phone in his car (and always gets a phone in his rental car when he's traveling). Now he intends to purchase a portable phone so that he can make calls when he's walking from one appointment to another in New York. "It's totally dead time," he says. "You can't read and walk at the same time, because you'll bump into people. But why not use the time to make calls?"

This sentiment is enthusiastically endorsed by Nancy Woodhull, a founding editor of USA Today and now president of Gannett New Media. I caught up with Woodhull at a hotel near the airport in Los Angeles, just before she was scheduled to catch a plane back to Washington, D.C., after a business trip, in time to be with her husband and child for the weekend.

"I came back from Honolulu recently," Woodhull told me, "but I'm not the type of person who can just sit around the pool and not do anything. So I take a Dictaphone to the pool, and when I have ideas, I can record them. Not being able to do that would be very stressful to me. People will say to me, 'Nancy, relax, recharge your energy,' and I say, T'm being energized by getting these ideas down. ' Having access to a Dictaphone allows you to be more productive. So does having a cellular phone, and so does having a computer. You take all these tools and there really is no need for downtime. Anyone can find me, anywhere, anytime."

But the flip side of the capacity to be constantly connected is the difficulty of ever disengaging. Dick Wolf, the co-executive producer of Miami Vice and a screenwriter, has worked as many as thirty-four days consecutively and hasn't taken more than a week of vacation in four years. "The scary thing is that I've lost the ability to shut off, even on a weekend," he says. "Even when I'm up in Maine, where we have a vacation house away from it all, and even if I have nothing to do when I'm there, I find myself feeling guilty if I'm not working. I'll think, I really should be doing something. And I'll almost always find something to do. It's an inability to pull the plug and just vegetate."

Of course, when Wolf does feel the urge to work during a vacation, he has his portable computer at hand. Among all the new technologies, computers may be the best symbol of acceleration. Craig Brod, a clinical psychologist and author of the book Technostress, puts it this way: "We idolize the computer's qualities: speed, efficiency, obedience, accuracy, rigidity, conformity. . . . Our expectation is that computer technology... will save time, make our work easier, and create more leisure time. But computers are anything but mere replacements for pen, paper, and typewriter. By offering us so much power, speed, and accuracy, they are expanding at a breathless pace our concept of what we can—and should—do. . . . The ability to accomplish a task often creates the need to execute that task—often too frequently. The labor-saving computer can become the labor-making computer."

It's also notable how quickly we become dependent on any technology that saves time or increases efficiency—and how helpless we feel in the face of a breakdown. Consider the almost surreal plight of one individual facing the prospect of being technologically disconnected even for a short time.

I happened to talk to Richard Kletter, a screenwriter, on the day he was scheduled to move from the house he'd just sold, into a friend's house for a few days, while he waited for workmen to put the finishing touches on the renovation of his new and larger house. Simultaneously, his wife, producer Sarah Pillsbury, was due to deliver their second child and was also trying to close a deal to begin shooting a movie she will be producing with her partner this fall.

Kletter himself was in the midst of casting and preparing to direct a scene for a directors' competition in which he'd just been chosen a finalist. Most of this Kletter felt he had relatively under control—but not so the technological logistics.

"I want to keep my current telephone number when we move," he explained, "so yesterday they transferred one of our two lines over to the new house. Now I'm left with one line here, which a half-dozen people are competing to use. They're going to transfer this line over to the new house tomorrow, but because there's no power there yet, I can't hook up my answering machine. Which means that for at least twenty-four hours, when everyone in the world is calling this number, we're going to be unreachable. I'm trying to get the phone company to forward my calls for one or two days to the friend's house we're going to be staying in, but I don't know if they'll do that.

"Meanwhile, I have to do some work on the scene I'm going to be directing, but my computer is packed because of the move to the temporary house, and I'm reluctant to set it all up when we're just going to be there for three days. So tomorrow, if Sarah doesn't deliver the baby, I'm going to go over to my office and do my writing on a computer there."

Another factor that encourages acceleration syndrome is the sheer volume of information now available. Witness Don Simpson's desk. In partnership with Jerry Bruckheimer, Simpson is one of the most successful producers in Hollywood (Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop I and II, Top Gun). One reason, he believes, is that he has a voraciously cultivated sense of what's hot now—and what's going to be even hotter tomorrow. On the day I went to see Simpson, the desk between us was filled with books, scripts, and magazines. I asked what he was reading at the moment.

"All of it," he said. He wasn't kidding, so I asked him to elaborate.

"Well," he said, taking me on a tour of his desk, "I'm in the middle of this U.S. News & World Report article called 'Inside America's Biggest Drug Bust.' I'm also reading Business Week's cover story on 'Smart Design.' I am right in the middle of an article in Penthouse called 'Cashing In on Christ,' and I've just started one called 'Bad Taste of the Rich' in House Beautiful. I'm reading about space technology in Metropolitan Home. I have the Forbes 500 issue here, which I've been leafing through. I also just finished an article on the new Davis Cup in Sports Illustrated, and I read this article in Rolling Stone about Neil Diamond and why everyone's audience is hipper than his but he's still a star. Very interesting.

"Then there are the books. I've just begun Mob Star, about John Gotti. I also got Travels, by Michael Crichton, and I read all but the last two chapters last night. Yesterday I got hold of the two books about CBS, because I read the excerpt of the Ed Joyce book in Manhattan, inc. and that got me interested in knowing more. I'm also reading a book called Intruders, about the U.F.O. phenomenon. U.F.O.'s are going to be very big, folks. Then there are the four scripts I've got here, all of which I'm in the midst of reading. I also have at least thirty-five to forty books stacked up by my bed at home, most of them two-thirds finished. The truth is that I find it difficult to read to the end of anything that I'm truly involved in, because I hate too much to see it end."

I asked Simpson whether another reason might be that he can't concentrate for long enough to finish anything, that he gets too distracted by all the other things on his mind.

"No," he said emphatically. "It's truly because I get so involved in what I'm reading that I just don't want to let it go. Now, television is a different story entirely. When I watch television, nothing else exists. I will watch any program all the way through. I am very monogamous when it comes to TV. Books and magazines are my mistresses; TV is my family. Last night I watched Churchill all the way through. And I'm the same way watching Sanford and Son. To this day, I can tell you every line in virtually every episode of Sanford and Son."

It seems hard to imagine Don Simpson sitting quietly glued to a television program for two hours. "Are you saying that you don't do anything else while you're watching TV?" I asked.

"Of course not," said Simpson. "I just said I don't change channels. But I'm always reading something while I'm watching. Last night I read the Michael Crichton book during Churchill. Television isn't enough to hold all my attention. My brain's racing too fast."

"In that case," I said, "I'm flattered that I've had your full attention for this long."

"You haven't," Simpson said. "Do you see that Sports Illustrated in front of you? I've been reading it upside down while we've been talking. Would you like me to tell you what it's about?" I said I would. He did.

Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment, has learned to program for audiences who are as distractible as Simpson is. "There's no question that attention spans are shorter," Tartikoff said. "The only question is whether television made them shorter or whether we've just learned to program with short attention spans in mind. Look at commercials. In the beginning, they were a minute long. Then they were split up into thirty-second bits. Now in some cases they're down to fifteen seconds. Even a show like Sesame Street takes this into account. No piece on Sesame Street is longer than a commercial. It's all info-bits. The show is twenty years old, and several generations of kids have learned how to count and read letters from these little, easily digestible capsules of material."

The key change in television viewing in recent years, Tartikoff believes, was prompted by the advent of the remote-control channel changer. "Once a guy didn't have to get up from his chair to change the channel, you could no longer take the same kind of time to set up characters and stories," Tartikoff explained. "In comedies particularly, people have to be funny the moment they walk through the door. It's become exponential now with the addition of cable and so many choices. The fact is that a TV show which doesn't immediately grab the audience by the throat has an uphill battle today."

Tartikoff himself, who has watched literally thousands of television shows, can detect the impact on his own attention span. When he goes out to the movies, for example, he prefers multiplex theaters. That way, if the movie he sets out to see isn't riveting, he can get up after twenty or thirty minutes and walk over to watch another movie that's playing. There are many times when Tartikoff watches at least part of five movies in a two-hour span.

For people like Tartikoff, a short attention span is as much a by-product of living fast as fax machines and cellular phones are tools of the trade. No fewer than a half-dozen people I interviewed spoke breezily of their limited attention spans. "Like a flea's," said Bob Pittman. "Short as a canary's," said Mark Ethridge. "No better than a rat's," said another.

The bible for people who have limited time and patience is USA Today. "I love the lack of depth," said Tartikoff, only half joking. "It's a quick fix, like eating Cheetos." Bob Pittman also reads USA Today. "I'm interested in knowing a little about a lot of things, but in most cases I'm really not interested in going any further," he explains. "Because of the way USA Today is laid out graphically, I can scan the headlines and often I don't even have to read a story to get a sense of what it's about. The subject might come up in a conversation a little later, and I find I know a little about it, so I can participate."

Book reading borders on the impossible for many who live at an accelerated pace. When they do read books, they tend to choose ones that demand minimum concentration. And even then, if the pace of the narrative isn't blinding, they often quit after thirty or forty pages. Not even people whose livings depend on reading books are immune to distraction. "One of the main problems in getting real work done is finding time to concentrate," says Peter Osnos, a senior editor and associate publisher at Random House. "You have to very carefully structure things so that's possible. The trick is to get away from the telephone, and from other people, and meetings. The other day, I had to go to lunch across town on a rainy day. I knew it was going to take forty-five minutes each way, so I decided I'd call for a car and spend the forty-five minutes there and back working. The traffic was terrible, but I got a lot of reading done because I couldn't be interrupted."

Osnos reads approximately twenty-five weekly and monthly magazines and six daily newspapers. How does he find the time?

"I think it's a question of what you call reading a magazine," he says. "As an editor, you develop the skill of knowing early when you're reading something that's worth it, and of skimming. Of course, that's also a message to writers; you need something arresting right at the beginning."

Donald Trump—acceleration incarnate—sets out this requirement even when it comes to talking on the telephone, which he does nearly around the clock, seven days a week. Call Trump, and if he has a reason to talk with you he will usually pick up the phone very quickly. But don't expect the call to last long. Trump has instructed his secretaries to bring in on a piece of paper the name of anyone who phones while he's already on the line. If he decides that the incoming call might be more interesting than the conversation he's already having, he's apt to cut you off literally in mid-sentence. The trick, if you haven't finished saying your piece, is to call him back three minutes later. By then he's almost surely bored with the caller who replaced you moments earlier.

The capacity to process and act on information very quickly is crucial to anyone living in a state of constant acceleration. Bruce Babbitt learned this lesson, albeit belatedly, in the course of running for president. Babbitt's natural instinct is to take his time, to step back and mull things over before he offers an opinion or reacts to a situation.

"Even when I was governor of Arizona, I would travel and remain away from the telephone for substantial periods of time," Babbitt says. "I thought it was useful to read something from beginning to end without interruption, to reflect and relax." But as a presidential candidate Babbitt discovered that such an approach was self-defeating.

"The tools of modern communication have reduced the distance between voters and candidates to the point where there is no space for reflection and consideration," he says. "Every response must be instantaneous. If hostages get taken in the Middle East, politicians find out about it at the same time that voters do—through television. And as a candidate, you find yourself being asked by reporters to respond instantly to events that are often as yet only dimly understood. Often you end up merely upping the level of noise and chaos in the system."

Babbitt cites the example of his own experience on the day that Gary Hart announced he was re-entering the presidential race. The news leaked shortly after seven A.M. in New Hampshire. Babbitt was in a hotel in Los Angeles, where it was shortly after four A.M., when he got a call from his press secretary. "He told me that if I was going to be in the story line— if my reaction was going to be part of what got reported—then I had to respond in forty minutes."

By this point, Babbitt had been in the race long enough to know how to play the game. He came up with the phrase "ghosts of Christmas past" to describe Hart's return, and, sure enough, it proved sufficiently catchy to be reported everywhere— putting Babbitt's name in the news.

"The premium goes not to the candidate who is the most thoughtful, considerate, intelligent, and incisive," says Babbitt, "but to the one who is the quickest and most quotable. I had to learn to place myself into the train of instantaneous response. I'm not a Type A personality, but I had to adapt myself to a Type A world."

Moreover, Babbitt had to learn to both simplify and amplify his message. "What happens is that there is such information overload, so much being reported, that everything gets diffused and trivialized," he says. "You start to drown in information, and the only way to keep from drowning is to have a life raft—a few basic principles which can be very simply stated: a three-letter word, a ten-word sentence, a fifty-word paragraph. Anything beyond that is nice, but it isn't really going to help. It's almost comic-book communication. I was actually encouraged to read comic books during the campaign. Very few politicians I know read books at all."

Trying to do more in less time is a symptom of something broader: bigger appetites and higher expectations. Kay Unger, forty-three, is co-owner of the St. Gillian Group, a dress company that in the past five years has expanded from two divisions to nine. In addition to running the company with a partner, she remains its chief designer. She also heads a charitable foundation connected to the Boys Club of America.

Unger is married to Gerald Pitman, a plastic surgeon, who has a full-time surgical practice and is writing a book about his work. They have two children, Max, nine, and Sam, seven, and two residences, including a large house they purchased recently on the South Shore of Long Island and an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In an effort to find one regular time when the family can be together during the week, Pitman recently convinced Unger that they should all get up a little earlier and sit down together for breakfast at seven A.M. Several mornings a week, either Pitman or Unger has to be out of the house by 7:15, but now, at the very least, they have fifteen minutes together each weekday morning, and sometimes as much as forty-five minutes to an hour. For Unger, this time is particularly precious. Pitman gets home most nights by 6:30, but Unger rarely gets home before 7, and often not until 8.

To get through her day, Kay Unger relies on a color-coded calendar—one color for each division of her company—that reminds her which meeting she's scheduled to attend at any given hour of the day. In the evening and at the end of weekends, Unger makes more lists—talking into a tape recorder and writing notes to those who help run her family's personal life.

For those living accelerated lives, scheduling a personal life can often be a prerequisite to having one at all—however unspontaneous and unromantic that may seem. Bill Block, thirty-four, and two partners recently launched an agency called InterTalent, which represents clients ranging from actor Kiefer Sutherland to director Jim Abrahams. Around the same time, Block began to go out with someone, and before long he sensed the possibility that it might be more than casual.

"I sat down and explained to her that I wanted to have a relationship," he says, "but that in order to do that I was going to have to make time, to schedule it as much as I would anything else. Eliminate certain business dinners so we can have evenings together. Integrate her into others where we can go out with other couples. Find time for each other in the mornings."

Block is no different about scheduling his work for maximum efficiency. For example, he tries to avoid going out to lunch at all unless it will lead directly to a commission—"a 10 percent lunch," as he puts it. Even the weekends are scheduled: the beach on Saturday mornings, Saturday afternoons at the office to plan strategy for Monday mornings, reading scripts on Sunday mornings, and calling around Sunday afternoons to hear what everyone else has been reading. By Monday morning, when he arrives for work. Block has his call list organized in order of importance. "I've already done the thinking over the weekend," he says, "so on Monday mornings all I have to do is execute: bang, bang, bang."

Many people come to depend on the constant stimulation, pressure, and excitement this sort of pace supplies. "I love living in a pressure cooker," says Bob Pittman. "It's what keeps me going. As a child, I always did well in school, but I was also a misbehaver. The truth is I was just plain bored. I found it hard to live within constraints. Now I can do as much as I want, and, boy, do I pile it on. I push myself constantly.

"It doesn't have to be work. I'm just forever doing something. Relaxation for me is not lying down for a week and doing nothing. I'd go crazy. I go flying, and fishing, and hunting and skiing. Fortunately, I happen to be married to a lady who is very similar. During the past year, my wife, Sandy, spent two weeks trekking in Nepal, took a horseback-riding trip in Kenya, and went kayaking in the freezing cold on Baffin Island in the Arctic. We both love piling things on."

What becomes difficult is setting limits. "I sometimes feel like the girl in the song 'Oklahoma!,' just a girl who can't say no," says Sarah Pillsbury. In addition to being a mother and working long hours as a producer (Desperately Seeking Susan, River's Edge), Pillsbury remains politically active in several organizations. "I should probably wear a straitjacket so I don't raise my hand and volunteer," she says. "I love what I do, and I'm proud of it. I definitely feel like I'm trying to do too much, but there's also still the part of me that says, 'I'm not doing enough.' "

Kay Unger puts it even more bluntly: "Part of people like myself is that we just don't want to miss any experience." Unger will go to extraordinary lengths to accommodate her multiple priorities. Not long ago, she had to be in Chicago to help promote a new line of her company's clothing. As it happened, her older son was scheduled at 9:30 the following morning to read several stories he'd written at a school assembly. It was important to him that one of his parents be there, and Unger's husband was irrevocably scheduled to be in surgery.

She booked herself into an airport hotel, and reserved a six A.M. flight. As it turned out, she didn't finish work until after midnight. The next morning, when her wake-up call came at five, she was so exhausted she slept right through it. The hotel management, concerned, sent the police to investigate.

When Unger awoke to see police officers staring her in the face, her first reaction was panic—but not at seeing the cops. She looked at her watch. It was 5:40 A.M. Thanking the police, she jumped up, grabbed her bag, and literally ran through the tunnel connecting the hotel to the airport. There was just one catch: she was still in her pajamas—the ones with the ducks and frogs on them. The well-dressed gentleman in the first-class seat next to Unger was plainly shocked—but perhaps not so much as when she disappeared into the bathroom, only to reappear minutes later with all her makeup on, completely decked out for the day.

She did not consider this a terribly big deal. "I'm used to it," she says. "I once changed in an airplane bathroom from tights and a sweater into a formal gown with a train." And, sure enough, she got to her son's school on time.

At some point, however, living at an accelerated pace, with relentless intensity and constant stimulation, can become less a choice than a compulsion. Paul Rosch, head of the American Institute of Stress, believes that certain types of people—especially those living time-urgent, high-intensity lives—"may become habituated to stress, a physiological and psychological response with obviously damaging consequences, most notably heart attack." Meyer Friedman, one of the two cardiologists who first defined Type A behavior, believes that it's possible to become chemically addicted to a certain level of excitement.

"Once the brain gets too much of any hormone—adrenaline, noradrenaline—it gets hooked on it," he says. "What's frightening is how much the environment is nourishing Type A behavior now. In a service-oriented society, people become more conscious of time and more greedy—not only for acquisition but also for event participation."

Indeed, leisure time takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to those leading highly accelerated lives. Preferred forms of exercise, for example, are almost invariably demanding and competitive.

Don Simpson works out with free weights and a trainer most mornings. "I think it's as addictive as anything else," Simpson says. "I'd get depressed now if I didn't work out." He has overcome anxiety about spending too much time exercising by doing it faster than anyone else. Simpson's workout takes his partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, at least ninety minutes. Simpson races through the whole thing in forty-five.

Simpson also goes away for weeklong vacations to the Canyon Ranch, a spa with a rigorous fitness program. He says that as part of the regimen he often spends as much as six or seven hours walking in the desert in total silence. This seems positively Eastern—which does not sound like Simpson. Absolute silence?

"Well," says Simpson, "I do wear headphones and listen to music while I walk." How would he do, then, if he tried to spend a week lying on a beach in Hawaii?

"Doing nothing would drive me insane," Simpson replies instantly. "I just couldn't deal with it. The noise inside my head would become so cacophonous that I'd want to put a bullet in my temple."

Even those who find they can relax while on vacation often report that the unwinding process takes them longer and longer. "Let's say I go away for a week to the summer place my wife and I bought recently at the beach," says Mark Ethridge. "The first few days are no different from being at work. I call in a lot with things I forgot to take care of before I left. After five days, I finally get myself to stop calling. On day six, I have a pretty good, calm day. On day seven, it's time to drive back home."

Ethridge is quick to acknowledge that there's a price he pays for living at the speed he does. "During the past several years a new word has come into the newspaper business," Ethridge says. " 'Hyperediting' refers to those occasions when you don't really sit down and concentrate on a story you're editing. Instead you give it a hyperedit, which means you read it real fast to see if it makes sense, but you don't bother to examine what it really says.

"I think we're all engaged in a kind of hyperediting version of life. More and more, what I find is that you don't really live in the present anymore. You're never fully engaged in what you're doing at any given moment, because what you really want to do is finish it, in order to get on to something else. You kind of skim along the surface of life. It's very frustrating."

Even Jeff Katzenberg, who has no complaints about the hyperkinetic life he leads, has experienced this phenomenon. "We never get enough time to stop, pause, appreciate, and reflect on our successes and failures," he says. "In order to succeed next winter, and the following summer, we have to be maniacally focused now. If we don't, it all falls apart. But the result is that we're always living in the future."

Perhaps it's not surprising that people who live in a state of constant acceleration rarely have much time for this sort of introspection. But stop them long enough to ask whether they're missing anything important by living so fast, and frequently the answer will be yes.

For some, of course, it's just the time and efficiency to accomplish even more, faster. But more often they'll say that what are being sacrificed are all those things that require concentrated time, particularly the unstructured time it takes to nurture relationships. Indeed, insufficient time for friendships—and even for spouses—is often accepted as inevitable. "I don't have as much time for my husband as I'd like, and I have very little time for my friends," says Kay Unger, echoing many others. "My really good friends I see once every two or three months, but they don't get angry. They have the same demands I do."

The issue of children is more complex. "The characteristics that are useful in business are very different than those it takes to be a mother." says Sarah Pillsbury. "Efficiency is not an important value with small children. My four-year-old already has a sense of being busy. I see that I've passed it on to her. I'm always rushing, and I rarely get her to school on time. But hurrying a kid to get dressed and downstairs can be harmful more than helpful."

Marilyn Segal, who runs a family center in Fort Lauderdale, sees the hurrying phenomenon among many parents who bring their young children to parent-child classes. "The pace of infants is much slower than the pace of even the average parent." she says. "But parents are not always sensitive to their children's responses. What happens is that they often want us to introduce more variety, to speed up the pace, to make more things happen than infants are really ready for. We have to make it very clear to parents that we're not here to accelerate their infant's development."

Sometimes acceleration takes a purely personal—and physical—toll. In the midst of the recent heightened frenzy of his life, Richard Kletter's back went out. That didn't slow him down. Instead, for two weeks he conducted his business by phone, while lying on the floor in his house. Before long, he had company in his supine position. His wife, Sarah, was ordered by her doctor to spend the last three weeks of her pregnancy on her back—mostly in order to slow down the pace of her life. Kay Unger was recently diagnosed with an ulcer—which she ascribes to the accumulated stresses of all the activities she's currently juggling. But she's not overly concerned. "I figure it'll be gone in three weeks," she says.

Everyone, of course, has a different threshold. "There are costs to living constantly on the go, but I've decided they're well worth it to me," says Bob Pittman. "It might seem like I'd have an ulcer, but the fact is I feel great, and I have plenty of energy."

So when, finally, is enough enough? It would be hard to conjure up a man with more voracious appetites—and a more Machiavellian approach to satisfying them—than Van Gordon Sauter during the era he ran CBS News. With great charm and remarkable success, Sauter nurtured a public persona as a candid, colorful, easygoing guy. He then used that low-key image deftly in the service of his campaign to rise up the CBS corporate ladder.

But as ambitious as Sauter was in those days, I was always fascinated by his capacity to walk away at times—to up and spend a week, without phones, fly-fishing in Idaho. On more than one occasion, Sauter let it be known that if he were to lose his job one day—with all its perks, power, prestige, and excitement—he could survive happily, and without regret.

Sure enough, his day of reckoning arrived. Two years ago, when Laurence Tisch took control of CBS, Sauter was fired. Eager to see how he was faring, I called him recently. I was headed for Los Angeles, where he now lives, and I suggested we get together. "Pick your time," he said. "I'm totally free."

A week later, we sat down over lunch. "When they threw me out of CBS," Sauter told me, "I went to Montana to fish. I've never looked back since. CBS was a place moving at such a velocity that the centrifugal force really just tore asunder people and relationships. Social graces, the sense of class and loyalty, the sharing, style, and elan that once permeated institutions like CBS just don't exist anymore. The fact is that people find it's not economic to spend time on personal transactions."

Sauter did not mention that he helped to create the very atmosphere at CBS that he now decries. But that doesn't diminish the validity of his insight—or negate the possibility that he's found a more satisfying way to live.

"I've constructed my life now so that I can find ways to get back in touch with the environment," Sauter explained. "I just bought a house in Sun Valley, Idaho, which is a town of five thousand. I'm going to get to know some people there, I'm gonna go to the river and fish, I'm gonna read my books, and I'm not going to have these big cities contaminate me the way they contaminate the air."

Of course, Sauter is planning to keep his home in the Hollywood Hills. He also recently wrote a pilot for a TV series, writes freelance articles for the L.A. Times, and is co-producing a series he helped conceive about real-life doctors, which has already been sold for syndication. And he has several other projects he's pursuing.

Unfortunately, there wasn't time for us to get into all of them. By this point, Sauter was already running late for his next appointment. And so, frankly, was I.