TIGER Woods and Justin Rose are doing their best, but their gym-toned physiques are not enough to change the image of golf from an ideal pastime for the retired and unfit to a sport played in the fast lane. Among radical suggestions from the World Golf Foundation to widen the appeal of a game that moves marginally faster than a glacier is the adoption of speed golf. In other words, to switch from a stately, unhurried procession across a series of manicured lawns, whose terminus is the clubhouse, to a lathering gallop from green to green, aimed at reaching home in the fewest possible strokes.

So far the record for belting around the course is 44 minutes, in which 65 shots were hit. This might be impressive, but while I’ve always enjoyed mocking golfers’ garish garb, the prospect of players in Lycra is even worse. If golf is a good walk ruined, then a links course dotted with people in leggings and headbands is a pleasant view desecrated.

By trebling the pace, the authorities want to put the concept of exercise back into a pursuit so leisurely it barely qualifies as a stroll. Those who travel by golf buggy don’t even clock up steps towards their 10,000 tally. You need only look at Donald Trump to see the negligible impact this hobby, when played in time-honoured slow motion, has on a spreading waistline.

But why stop at golf? There are countless activities that occupy far more hours than they deserve, and could do with an adrenaline shot. Cricket, for instance, is already adapting to more hectic times with the growing prevalence of one-day internationals. The once hallowed five-day-long Test Matches are now beginning to look like a relic of the Raj, when gentlemen who were not needed in the office could swan off for months at a time. You might well ask, of course, what is cricket if not a respite from the frenzy, but then you’d be showing your age.

In a few quiet corners discussions are afoot about trimming men’s tennis to three sets, to mirror the women’s game and reduce the length of tournaments. Devisers of the 10K, who put the marathon in its place, deserve a medal. So too the geniuses who came up with speed-dating. Whatever you say about requiring time to get to know somebody, the instigators of this, the ultimate in crass but honest efficiency, understood the ugly truth that people seeking romance know in nanoseconds if the person they’ve met is a contender. If this brutalist approach is not to your taste, then just by avoiding speed-dating sessions you’ll have usefully eliminated candidates with a wholly different outlook.

The jury is still out, unfortunately, on the cooks who bring us pre-mashed potatoes and julienned carrots. I’m a big fan, but since time spent cooking properly clearly saves hours at Weight Watchers or on the cross-trainer undoing the consequences of convenience eating, it could be a counter-productive short cut. Less controversially, the travelling grocer who delivers tea and biscuits to our door raves about the 15-minute drama series on Netflix, which are to Breaking Bad what Graceland is to The Ring Cycle.

It goes without saying that not everything that can be done fast ought to be. Boris Becker fathered a child in “about five seconds”, in a restaurant broom cupboard. Perhaps he was worried his main course was getting cold. Other than in exceptional circumstances, however, some activities should never be measured by stopwatch. This includes fishing – throwing in a grenade is effective but stupid – and reading books. Skipping over a writer’s words as if they were hot coals completely destroys the point. The same goes for gardening. Smothering the yard in concrete or plastic grass might save hours of weeding and mowing, but for all its merits, the go-faster philosophy should not include hastening the impact of global warming.

One serious anomaly that deserves attention is the flight to New Zealand. The swiftest routes still take over 24 hours, not counting the time spent getting between planes and languishing in the departure lounge. Inexplicably, more resources seem to be devoted to shooting astronauts and guinea pig humans into space or scouting out Mars as the new promised land than to making this epic journey bearable. Those about to build the spaceport in Sutherland could surely turn their attention to this pressing issue first. Why reach for the stars before we can comfortably and quickly cross the earth?

The whole point of doing things faster is, naturally, to enable us to fit more into a day. Hotter tumble driers, shorter university courses, more cryptic vocabulary: all such time savings open up acres of free periods for further activity. Yet the quickening pace of life is not just for hares. Sloths benefit too. For someone like me, who is most at home in the crawl lane, the arithmetic is simple. The less your time is eaten up, the more that’s left to do with as you choose, and as slowly as you like.