Author(s): James Gleick

Science

Do you hit the 'door close' button because the lift doors are taking too long to shut? Did you know we work longer, commute longer, shop longer and sleep 20% less than we did a century ago? W e are obsessed with making more time, yet a microwave saves just four minutes a day - the average amount of time we spend having sex or filling in government forms.

With acute insight and mordant wit, James Gleick dissects our inceasing struggle to squeeze as much as we can into the 1,440 minutes of each day. From one-minute bedtime stories to Federal Express, from multi-tasking to the double-edged benefits of e-mail. Faster is the perfect self-help book for the twenty-first century, a description of our lives and an answer to our fundamental complaint that there is never enough time. First published 1999.