I started practicing law at about the same time that personal computers were becoming affordable. The firm where I worked decided to provide PCs to all of its lawyers and to teach us how to use them. The idea was to increase productivity by allowing lawyers to revise their own documents instead of having a secretary do it, and to shorten the overall time it took to produce a new document. Both goals were fulfilled, sort of… But something else also happened. Where once a document might go through three or four drafts before it was finished, it became commonplace to see eight, nine, ten drafts or more, all in about the same amount of time it had taken to do three drafts before. And yet the quality of the writing did not noticeably improve; the tenth draft was no better than the third, and we weren’t winning or losing more cases or motions than before. The tenth draft was different, yes, but not better, and it soon became apparent that the process of going from start to finish was taking about the same amount of time as before. One thing had changed, though–the drafting process had become more harried and anxious, in part because of the proliferation of drafts.

– Benjamin Sells, in The Soul of the Law — Understanding Lawyers and the Law, an excellent book in the tradition of Thomas Moore. When this book was published in 1994, Sells was a psychotherapist (and former lawyer) who specialized in counseling legal professionals.

The stories in this book are vivid, and Sells provides commentary that is both sophisticated and clear. Much is useful for ADDexecs and anyone who needs insight into why professional careers too often turn out to be far less rewarding and healthy than they might be. As the jacket-notes describe it:

Sells addresses issues that face people in all walks of life–workaholism, materialism, stress, fear of failure, and ethical dilemmas–and explores the loss of meaning, not only in the law, but in busienss, politics, and our every day lives… [and] offers ways to bring fundamental ideals and passion back into our work and balance into our lives.

Faster does not make sooner, more does not make better.

From A messy desk undermines your career, by Penelope Trunk

When it comes to projecting a positive image through your personal space, some areas are more easily managed than others. A messy desk is tough. If you keep a messy desk, it’s probably inadvertent, and you will have to change behavior in order to clean up your act. It’s worth the effort, though. “There is a cultural bias toward orderliness,” says Eric Abrahamson, professor at Columbia University Business School, “Messiness is considered bad.” Kelly Crescenti, an Illinois-based career coach, concurs: “When people have a clean desk it looks like they get things done and they are productive.”

You cannot really know how productive someone is by looking at their desk, says Julie Morgenstern organizing guru and author of Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work. But she concedes that “the image issue is giant.” So even if you can find everything you need on your pile-laden desk, clean it if you want to look good. Start with a filing system, and Crescenti advises that at minimum, you take the last fifteen minutes of every day to actually use the system and clean things up a little before you go home.

But as with all image management advice, don’t go overboard: Everything in moderation. Abrahamson provides a postmodern defense of the messy desk: “Messiness is related to creativity because it tends to juxtapose things that don’t normally go together.”

Penelope Trunk is a columnist at the Boston Globe and Yahoo! Finance, with a witty and often wise blog at Brazen Careerist — Advice at the Intersection of Work and Life.

For a few ADDexec relevant posts at the Brazen Careerist, check out:

• Make life more stable with more frequent job changes,
• Good news for job hoppers: Frequent change maintains passion, and
• 10 tips for time management in a multitasking world

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Image: ADDexecutive.com

No Quick Fixes. Lasting and effective change and improvement come from moving beyond bolt-on programs to built-in processes. Many people are looking for what’s new in quick-fix improvement programs. But what works are fundamental improvement practices that become a habitual way of life.

– Jim Clemmer in the introduction to Pathways to Performance: A Guide to Transforming Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization

Clemmer was writing about businesses, not people. But there’s truth in there for executives learning how to work with their attention deficit disorder. The fixes don’t happen in one day. So we keep at it until they become habit.

Taking Action. My years of research and work with behavior-based skill development methods clearly show that we act our way into new ways of thinking far more easily than we can think our way into new ways of acting. Throughout this book you may find yourself nodding or thinking “I know that already. When’s he going to get to the new stuff?” Whenever that happens, ask yourself “So what I am doing about it?” I’ll try to nag, spur, inspire, prod, and otherwise move you beyond knowing to doing.

– Jim Clemmer in the introduction to Pathways to Performance: A Guide to Transforming Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization

I don’t think Clemmer was thinking about ADDexecs when he wrote this, but consider this question:

How many of us know what our daily priorities are, but still don’t do them?

“Well, we can’t because our attention deficit disorder is getting in the way.”

So then, a second question: How many of us know we need to do more with our ADD but aren’t giving it enough (or any) energy?

For some of us, discovering that we have ADD was a great gift. Finally, we had an explanation for many of our challenges. But having the explanation isn’t the same thing as having the solution…

Even in casual conversation, the point guard’s eyes dart enigmatically around the gym, rarely focused on the person in front of him. Jason Kidd can’t seem to stop himself from seeking the better opportunity, the next best play.

Be it personality affectation or genius at work, who wouldn’t want to appear night after night Kidd’s enabling field of vision and enduring championship dream?

- Harvey Araton, in the New York Times, 15 May 2007

Jason Kidd, point guard and captain for the New Jersey Nets, is one of the best ball handlers in NBA history. Against the strongest defenses in basketball, he has an almost precognitive sense of which teammates are about to be in position to score, and then he whips and threads passes through space that any other player* would consider impenetrable.

What’s the relevance for attention deficit disorder? He doesn’t do this by “focusing on one thing at a time.”

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*except Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns. Kidd and Nash are widely regarded as the best  ball passers currently playing in the NBA. Both of them can score and defend, too. Kidd recently eclipsed the legendary Larry Bird to become the NBA’s all-time No. 2 in triple doubles” (with Kidd earning his in points, rebounds, and assists.)

Image credit: SportsResourceZone.net, vendor of autographed photos, apparel, and other pro-sports collectibles.

[Douglas] Tieman said that the very character traits that make executives successful can also lead to their belief that they can overcome alcoholism or other addictions themselves.“They have a big work ethic, are very clever and creative,” said Mr. Tieman, whose company treats about 1,200 executives a year at its centers in Pennsylvania and Florida. “They also have the notion of invincibility. They suffer from terminal uniqueness. They think: ‘I am different. I can drink again.’ That creates a very slippery slope.”

- One Misstep and They’re Out the Door by Geraldine Fabrikant, New York Times, 15 May 2007. Douglas Tieman is chief executive of Caron Treatment Centers.

How much of “it’s lonely at the top” comes from bosses making it that way? How often do we reject the useful counsel of peers, or neglect to use competent professional help? In this quote, Douglas Tieman is talking about substance abuse. But what about other things like deciding on corporate direction, figuring out how to deal with a troublesome employee, or even managing our attention deficit disorder?

Are there places where our mindset (or pride, or habit) keep us from seeking help that will pay off? Or even from noticing that help might be available?

Getting more words in per minute may be efficient, but the trouble with people who talk too fast is that they often say something they haven’t thought of yet.

– Walter H. Gmelch in Coping with Faculty Stress (Survival Skills for Scholars), Volume 5 in Survival Skills for Scholars.

Do you need silence to think? Is your office noisier than you want?

While some people with attention deficit disorder prefer or even need some ambient noise when they want to concentrate, others don’t.

Has anyone tried noise-cancelling headphones as an anti-ADD measure? How has it worked? Do you pipe in music (or some other sound that helps), or do you just cancel out the ambient noise? Or has anyone tried the white noise generators?

Illustration, above, copied from NoiseFreeHeadphones.com. This link is not an endorsement — but if we’re borrowing their illustration, the least we can do is give them a shout-out.

A dog with colored spots. A dog wearing running shoes. A dog with a gas mask.

In Capturing Attention by Triggering the Mind, marketing expert Max Sutherland, PhD uses ads with these three dogs to show one way that advertising can capture the attention of consumer eyeballs that are more likely to whiz by an ad than to stop and look:

The formula is simple. Take any familiar object and change it somehow so that the ID scanner in the mind’s eye instantly identifies it but at the same time says ‘hang on a second….something’s wrong’… When something doesn’t quite fit, [the mind] ceases the automatic processing and the bell is rung to recruit additional attention and processing.

While Sutherland’s article doesn’t specifically point to attention deficit disorder as a root challenge for advertisers, the parallels are obvious. Consumer eyeballs in an advertising space are programmed to keep skimming. It takes something special to make them stop.

But Sutherland emphasizes that stopping to pay attention isn’t enough:

Remember that getting attention is one thing. Registering the brand is quite another. Too many ads go for attention but fail to register the brand.

This is an essential second point.

For ADDexecs in business, Sutherland’s observations are useful two ways:

1. We learn more about how our own brains work, and can try new techniques for capturing and directing our own attention when it might wander, and

2. We learn how we can design our own advertising (or other communications) to cut through ADD in the marketplace (or in our own colleagues).

We’ll visit some more of Sutherland’s articles in the near future, to highlight their application to the business life of adults with attention deficit disorder. Meanwhile, we encourage you to check out Sutherland’s website Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer.

This tip, like many at the ADDexecutive, sounds like common sense. It is. But for adults with attention deficit disorder, it’s common sense that often needs reminding.

I once did some consulting work for a small health care provider that was in big trouble. They had lost most of their contracts, their management team was crumbling, and their past due bills were piling up.

Though the odds were long, they had half a chance of saving the company if they focused 100% of their attention on nailing two important contracts: one with a prospective client, and another with a necessary partner. Instead, the owners spent half their time on CYA* tasks, interviewing accountants and attorneys that they might need if they had to declare bankruptcy, and looking at cheaper office space that they could move into if they didn’t win a contract with the new client.

Do these people sound crazy to you? Perhaps a little stupid? Just stupid and crazy enough to have earned two PhDs. and an MBA, and to have run a longtime mental health care practice. It can easily happen to the best of us. That’s why we need the reminders.

And you can guess what happened.

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*”cover your ass”