What does it mean that time pressure narrows thinking?

Artificial urgency causes you to abandon your thinking process.

Example: Your manager drops by at 4:45 PM and says, 'I need your recommendation on the vendor selection before I leave at five.' You have been evaluating three vendors for two weeks. You have a spreadsheet with fourteen criteria. But now you have fifteen minutes, so you skip the spreadsheet and go with your gut — which happens to be whichever vendor's name you heard most recently. The two weeks of careful analysis collapse into a snap judgment because the clock replaced your process. The decision was not made under time pressure. It was made without your thinking process, while time pressure provided the alibi.

Try this: Identify three decisions you made in the past week under time pressure — real or manufactured. For each one, write down: (1) What was the stated deadline? (2) What would actually have happened if you had taken 24 more hours? (3) Did the time constraint improve the quality of your decision, or degrade it? If you cannot identify three time-pressured decisions, pay attention this week and log them as they happen. The goal is to build a personal dataset of how time pressure interacts with your judgment — not to eliminate urgency, but to see where artificial urgency is quietly replacing your thinking.