Don’t Push the Panic Button!

Today’s English
August 31st, 2017

Are you running ahead the time, running with the time or running behind the time?  If you are going to a place in advance or complete a work before the stipulated time, then you are running ahead the time.  Be punctual and you run along with the time.  Go or do late and you run behind the time.  The phrases “race against the clock" and beat the clock both mean that you are in a difficult situation to finish the task more  quickly than usually.
1.I’m sorry! You are running behind the time. It’s houseful now.
2.You are always beating the clock.  When will you be free?
3.Don’t worry! We are running ahead the time.

If you want to tell someone “to work as fast as possible”, you can use the expression “go hell for leather.”  If you go away from a place very fast, especially to complete some urgent works,  then, as the English idiom goes, you go “like a bat out of hell.”
1.We have no time. It’s time to go hell for leather.
2.I couldn’t talk to him since he rushed out like a bat out of hell.

If you are doing something very quickly without thinking about that, in a difficult situation, then you “press/hit/push the panic button.”
1.I have to push the panic button now. There’s no other go.
2.Hit the panic button and we can rectify the small errors later.

“In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.”
-Ann Voskamp, “One Thousand Gifts”