Honestly, I tried the Mindfulness Exercise and lasted about TEN SECONDS before feeling the compulsion to switch from laptop computer A to laptop B or the desktop, or at least swap windows to check what was bubbling-up out of the email box.

I was not always like this, so the notion of late-onset ADT seems a valid one. It has largely trashed my ability to read books or watch an entire TV show, for example, and the stacks of merely-scraped-but-unread library books at my home continues to grow. Ironically, many of those books are by authors like Christensen or Tom Peters who want you to be thinking “go-go-go change everything NOW!”

I was starting to think I was the only one who was finding my attention span shortening after getting a “stable” office job. My day job is a combination of customer service and various data processing or interpretation projects that require hours on end of intense concentration. Unfortunetly, my working environment is a cubicle and my co-workers don’t seem to understand the meaning of “I’m a bit busy right now, can you come back later?” I actually got reprimanded once because I let a call go to voicemail while I was sitting at my desk and not on another call, which meant the caller had to wait an entire half hour for me to answer their query even when they knew perfectly well that I was in the office. John Fitzgerald, I may need to borrow your sign on the back of the chair idea. In the working environment of my day job I am lucky if I can go 15 minutes without some kind of distraction.

The end result of all this multitasking is that I have noticed a marked decrease in my “productivity.” Even though I work on more projects, it takes me longer to finish any given project, and I have to spend more time double checking my work because I make more mistakes. I’m actually at the tail end of a week-long stress leave right now because the multitasking requirements of my job simply got to me. I’m going to try the catch-and-release method at work when I go back on Tuesday, though ultimately what I really need is a better job where I am allowed to work at a more reasonable pace.

[…] tomorrow, I am going to try this Mindfulness exercise: The catch-and-release distraction program! Spend one workday hour today or tomorrow self-consciously aware of each single task you’re working on at a given time (try it: I’ll bet it’s a lot harder for you than it sounds). […]

Another thing to try would be splitting attention, i.e. having attention directed toward two things at once, without focusing back and forth between the two. Now that’s a challenge. You might try looking around the room at different objects while you are feeling the blood rush through your hand. But rememeber, do not switch between the two, have attention on both simultaneously.

It is really funny. A few decades ago, human beings thought that life has no pace and fun. So, they started a rat race to invesn new technologies that would increase productivity, save time and provide us more entertainment. The race is still going on. so, now we are going to have another call- technology destroys our ability to focus. I think that soon many researchers will carry out research on how make a monitor or a sotfware that will help us to remain focused and save us from losing our mental ability to multi- tasks performing. So, a new technlogy will take place of another technology.

[…] I haven’t had a lot of time to think about much of anything of late. When I have been thinking, it’s been centered around this idea of A.D.T. which stands for Attention Deficit Trait. This article from C-Net explains it pretty well. I saw this via 43folders and don’t have much more to say than Merlin. It just Makes Sense, in a very real way. His descriptions are me right now. I take longer to get less done and feel like I’ll never be able to focus again. Continuous partial attention, ADT, and some talk of Sleep Apnea have given me a pretty good idea what I need to do to get my head back in order. […]

[…] Read the whole thing (and this post from 43 Folders that pointed me to it), but here's the quote that inspired the heading for this post: Organizations are sacrificing their most valuable asset, namely the imagination and creativity of the brains they employ, by allowing ADT [attention deficit trait] to infest the organization. It's not that hard to deal with, once you identify it. You need to set limits and preserve time to think. Warren Buffett sits in a little office in the middle of nowhere and spends a lot of his time just thinking. And we are not giving ourselves that opportunity. […]

I have found this to be a great tool for managing my attention to the current task: maintain a list called ‘Spastic’ in which I will put down anything that I figure out I need to do. As soon as my hour of pure concentration is up, I take a 20 minute break and do those things. Definitely a good motivator and organiation tool

[…] 43 folders contains a reference to a CNET article on a condition called “Attention Deficit Trait” (ADT). It’s an interview with Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who’s studied attention deficit disorder for more than a decade, and who claims that modern living has made us less efficient. […]

Are ‘efficiency experts’ the ones who read too many good articles like this when they should be doing ‘real’ work? In that case, I’m a professional ‘efficiency expert.’ I enjoyed the article, too, and will give the one hour a shot as soon as I finish writing this comment, which is currently absorbing my allocated time for procrastination.