All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.

–17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, apparently familiar with adult ADHD. Quote from the online-readable Pensées

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Various websites have noted that champion swimmer Michael Phelps is a high-performing adult with ADHD. I’m inspired by his ability to focus in training for what I consider a remarkably monotonous activity.

Phelps’ mother advocates for others with ADHD through the community ADHDmoms on Facebook. Note that Phelps is not affiliated with ADHDmoms.com, which is just a link-aggregator for people looking for ADHD stuff.

One of my business partners and I are in the habit of interrupting people whenever they’ve said something that gets us excited.

Never mind that they’re only on sentence 2 of a 4-sentence paragraph that we will really profit from hearing… Sentence 2 made us think of something interesting that we have to share right now!  Fortunately, John and I trust and like each other enough that we can interrupt the interrupt with something like, “Hey, John — Amy’s still talking!”.  Said with a smile, it usually gets a giggle and a shut up.

The key to the trust is that we know that we have each other’s interests in mind.  When he interrupts, I know he’s not shutting me down to make me look bad — he’s shutting me down so I can get what I want.  And he always does it with a smile.

In today’s New York Times, there’s advice for meeting leaders on how to stop “blatherers” from monopolizing meetings.

But what if the leader is the monopolizer?

Help your colleagues help you by giving them permission (or orders!) to interrupt you when you’re taking the meeting where it doesn’t need to go. And help both yourself and them by telling them what kind of language will get you to stop, without accidentally making you mad.*

Excerpt from the NYTimes:

Q. One or two blatherers always end up monopolizing the discussion at meetings, and running everything off the rails. How do you get them to stop?

A. Monopolizers need to be reined in because they rarely have the self-awareness to stop talking themselves, said Glenn Parker, a team-building consultant in Skillman, N.J., and co-author of “Meeting Excellence.”

It’s O.K. to interrupt a monopolizer, Mr. Parker said. But be polite about it, perhaps by validating what the person has said. You might say something like this: “I think you’re making a good point. Let’s see how the rest of the team feels about that.”

Then turn away from the talker, preferably to another part of the room, and ask someone else his or her opinion on the topic.

Similarly, he said, if a monopolizer or anyone else goes off on a tangent, you can say something like: “I may be wrong here, but I thought we were supposed to be dealing with customer complaints. If you all agree, let’s get back to the agenda.”

– Phyllis Korki, “Another Meeting? Say It Isn’t So“, Career Couch, New York Times, July 20, 2008

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Some activities just suck us in.  Not long ago I spent four hours cruising iStockphoto looking for “just the right pictures” for one of my client’s direct mail campaigns*.  The job “should” have taken no more than two hours.

A “normal” executive might have saved an hour by delegating this task to someone else (after figuring in time for delivering instructions, etc.).  But seeing how the task turned into a complete time-suck for me, I could have saved three hours.

I need to remember this math in for when I consider paying someone else to do a task.

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*Most of the time I work as a marketing consultant.  The ADDexecutive is something I do for “fun”.  It’s a nice distraction