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ETech Notes: Englishmen on the beach, attention deficit, and the 12-inch Life Hacks remix


Nick Sweeney says Damn You Merlin Mann
Originally uploaded by caterina.

I’m back from ETech and starting to recuperate a bit. It’s amazing how just a few days and nights can be so exhilarating and exhausting at the same time (esp. if one of those nights is spent on a fake beach with a lot of English people who drink like sailors). (Incidentally, if you have a pulse and a POP account, I probably owe you at least two email replies at this point, so accept this massive group apology until I can shovel my way toward the light.)

I reckon that if my technical prowess were more mature, I might not have to confess that all my favorite conference stuff inevitably happens outside the sessions—although in the case of ETech, the ones I caught were all very good. But there’s a weirdly “Disney World” quality to wandering around a hotel lobby bumping into, literally, dozens of clever, hilarious people whose work you’ve admired and enjoyed for years. Such a thrill for me. Like meeting Santa, Han Solo, and The Monkees all in the same friendly bar.

I think Danny and my talk went pretty well, although I’ll probably not repeat my iconoclastic experiment in skipping the PPT deck (sorry you all were stuck with just my mug and a bunch of hand waving). The most interesting part for me came after I’d closed out the talk mentioning how aging or disabled people are almost necessarily life hackers, in that they must constantly find novel ways to route around challenges. No fewer than three people approached me right after to talk about ADD and the ways to fight it, harness it, or, in one case, to celebrate it. Fascinating stuff that I’ll be thinking much more about—especially given that I’ve always suspected I’m an undiagnosed ADD sufferer. May be a life-hacking gold mine there.

Also, the conference theme of remixing was picked up and munged in countless ways by the speakers and attendees, and I think its relevance holds for the themes we talked about in our session. Particularly, I want to keep exploring how the frameworks for thinking about change and improvement compare across different domains. What tricks of training athletes might be useful for frequent travelers? Are there tips from cooks, nurses, and librarians that might lead to an “aha” moment for a creatively constipated programmer? Can we derive any patterns for self improvement that apply transparently across multiple jobs, domains, and challenges? Which ones just don’t work in other contexts? Great and inspiring stuff to mull over.

I really do think this is all just going to get more and more interesting to watch. As vocabularies evolve and as we start unpacking what “life hack” can mean to different people, I suspect we’ll start to see some surprising turns. What began with Danny’s informal research to break the code of alpha geeks is evolving into a broader conversation about how people think about their options in life and how they learn, cope, and make decisions that get them closer to where they’d like to be. That’s an idea that a lot of folks can probably find both useful and noble. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Pete Quily's picture

"I’ve always suspected I’m an...

"I’ve always suspected I’m an undiagnosed ADD sufferer"

Then you might want to take the adult ADD screener test by Harvard and the World Health Organization. It's a 5 minute test. It is designed to do is to let you know if you do have some of the symptoms of ADHD. If you do, then you could go to your family doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist to get a proper clinical diagnosis, since there are other conditions that can be similar to ADD ie thyroid problems.

you can download it from my website at

http://www.addcoach4u.com/adultaddtest.html

Very interested notes on your presentation. I'm an adult ADD coach who has ADD and sold Macs for 7 years. I've always thought there were a lot of ADDers in hi tech jobs because it seemed like such a natural fit. i.e., rapid fire mind, ability to hyperfocus on a screen for hours on end, hi energy levels (12 hour days no problem), an understimulated brain that craves constant stimulation, none of that available on the net, able to multitask with ease-1 single browser with 1 single window? Boring.

My Vancouver Adult ADD Support group has a booth at a local hi tech trade show this Wednesday to promote ADD Awareness and our group because of these high numbers.

I've been scanning the net and emailing the numerous ADD groups I belong to asking if they know of any articles or research done on ADD and people in the hi tech world for my groups table at the show, and the feedback I keep getting is yes there seems to be a lot of them with ADD and no I've never seen anything written on it.

I'd like to have something to bring to the show on this if possible, in the meantime I'm writing an article on the advantages of having ADD in a hi tech world .

Do you or any of your readers know of any articles or research on ADD in the hi tech workplace?

Very cool site you have. I've put it in my list of ADD work related resources handouts for the hi tech show (even if you don't have ADD your site is useful for ADDers)

thanks

Pete

 
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