Do you use caffeine to treat your attention deficit disorder? Or do you avoid caffeine at night to protect your mission-critical sleep? In either case, you probably ought know how much you’re taking and when. Problem is, if you’re drinking decaf coffee, you can’t always be sure.

Excerpt from A Wake-Up Call for Coffee Drinkers, New York Times, October 25, 2007:

Coffee sleuths from Consumer Reports recently tested cups of decaf ordered at Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best Coffee, 7-Eleven, McDonald’s and Burger King. They visited six locations of each chain, evaluating 36 cups of decaf in all.

A regular cup of coffee has from 85 to 100 milligrams of caffeine. Most of the 10- to 12-ounce decafs tested had less than five milligrams, the magazine reports in its November issue. But one decaf from Dunkin’ Donuts contained 32 milligrams of caffeine — about the same amount in 12 ounces of Coca-Cola Classic. A cup of Seattle’s Best was found to contain 29 milligrams of caffeine, while a tall Starbucks decaf packed 21 milligrams. Results varied at each chain, but the magazine found that the decaf at McDonald’s consistently had the lowest levels of caffeine.

Coffee beans image courtesy of iband clip art for all.

New York Times columnist Judith Warner wrote this week about her struggles with migraine headaches — meds help, but sometimes she hates the meds for the weight gain or other side effects. She notes that migraine sufferers aren’t the only ones who wrestle with the pros and cons of medication:

Many people who take daily medications come at some point to hate them. Teenagers with ADHD routinely rebel against their meds. Long-term users of anti-depressants risk relapse because they can no longer stand the way the drugs make them feel.

Some people do manage, through diet and exercise, or by protecting themselves from their worst “triggers,” to free themselves from their drugs. But many can’t do it. Many find they can’t accept living in the compromised condition that drug-free existence requires.

A smart high school girl I know switched a few years ago from a mainstream school, where she was struggling with dyslexia and ADHD, to a school that specializes in teaching kids with severe learning disabilities. Being there has permitted her to function without her ADHD meds. But now she’s bored. She’s dispirited by the lack of academic challenge and she wants out, because she’s afraid that, without academic challenges, she won’t be able to get into a mainstream college.

That’s the tradeoff: taking daily drugs, or living a life that feels not quite worth living.

Do you struggle with the side effects of whatever you might be taking for adult attention deficit disorder or anything else? My trials with Strattera and Provigil provided modest improvements for ADHD and anxiety, accompanied by modest weight gain and modest reduction in libido. At the moment, I’m not taking either — in part because of the “tradeoff math”, and in part because I cling to the hope that I can manage and even succeed without taking “yet another pill”. How about you?

Quote: Judith Warner, “Domestic Disturbances: The Migraine Diet“, New York Times, October 25, 2007

I recently hired a graphic designer to create a direct marketing piece for one of my clients.  The designer came up with a nice first draft, which I forwarded to my client so we could review them at the same time.

My client was out of town, so I went ahead and emailed my first comments to the designer.  (”Nice color — how about a font change here?  Oh, and here’s some more copy.  And can you try it with the other proposed logo?”)  You know — I figured that the sooner we started getting her changes, the faster the whole process would go.

Two days later, the client got their comments to me.  (”Great font.  And here’s yet more copy.  And here’s a correction on one line of the original copy.  And can we try a version without the logo?”)

I emailed the comments on to the designer.  And a few moments later I realized that the client  had a typo in their correction.  So I emailed the designer with a fix to that typo (and I labeled the email “high priority” so she’d read it before implementing the client’s erroneous change).    And of course I sent it quickly.  You know, about ten minutes before I remembered that I needed to request yet one more tweak…

Only one thing kept that graphic designer from shooting me — she charges by the hour.

Lesson: no one benefits from having a hundred tweaks requested one-at-a-time as they occur to the tweaker.  My ADD wanted me to deal with each idea as soon as it hit me, and maybe that would have been fine.  But I didn’t need to make the designer deal with each idea as soon as it hit me.  I could have collected them bit by bit into one document, which I could have emailed when it was complete, after I organized and reviewed it.  I’ll do better next time — I promise!

In the mid-80s when I was in high school (a decade before my attention deficit disorder diagnosis), there were already clear signs that I would be a frustrated adult — full of talent, and fully challenged at putting those talents to use.

See if these teacher comments sound familiar:

Calculus: Phil is an enthusiastic member of this class. He participates freely in class discussion and has many good ideas. It is enjoyable to have him in class but also a frustration. For although he seems to understand new concepts when presented, he doesn’t appear to spend time studying so that these ideas and skills… become part of his general knowledge. Until he can discipline himself to do the hard work involved in the education process, he will not be recognized as the talented special person he wants to be. There will be times in Phil’s life when this will have a lasting impact on what he can achieve. [Emphasis added]

British Literature: Phil’s work is always imaginative and usually insightful. His quiz scores suggest that he might prepare his assignments a little more carefully. Attention to detail is sometimes tedious but always necessary in both analytical and creative writing and thinking.

Philosophy: Phil’s quite good performance in both class discussions and written assignments was marred only by his failure to hand in the mid-term exam on time.

—

Report card illustration from the Discovery Channel’s Educator Resources.

Mental coach Dr. Richard Coop has worked with numerous top athletes, including the late Payne Stewart*. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Chapel Hill Magazine:

Chapel Hill Magazine: What kinds of demons did Payne face on the golf course?

Dr. Richard Coop: Payne was a deep thinker about golf. He was much smarter than a lot of people, but was also very impulsive. He had a bad case of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder] and so we worked with that. One thing about athletes with ADHD is that they can hyperfocus when the tension level is high. They can sit for hours in front of a video game or perform in a major championship. I used to watch Payne’s eyes in a major championship and he was hyperfocused, but in the John Deere Classic, he wouldn’t show up mentally. That’s one of the things we really had to work on hard with him. When the intensity level wasn’t high, his mind would go on vacation. We had to find ways to make a challenge out of something that he didn’t think was a challenge.

The worst shot I saw him hit was a plain vanilla chip, just something simple that you or I could hit very easily. It was too easy. He would have three or four different ways of playing it and he wouldn’t commit to a specific way. He would get caught in between.

So I would have him call his shot out loud to his caddie to commit to himself and to another person, and to be responsible for his shot. If he had a shot where he had to stand on his head and flop it up over something, he was fantastic. And those were the ones he wanted to practice, like a basketball player who just wanted to practice H-O-R-S-E shots.

–David Droschak, The Mental Side of Golf (Well, what other side is there?), in Chapel Hill Magazine, July/August 2007.

In three paragraphs, Dr. Coop vividly describes what can happen to many executives with attention deficit disorder. We excel when we face big challenges that play to our ADD nature, but we fade quickly when our ADD has room to play and distract. Not long ago, a client told me about one of his former colleagues who “was never happy unless there was a crisis. Unless there was a fire to put out, she didn’t know what to do with herself.”

Naturally, I couldn’t “diagnose” the former colleague without knowing more, but I might hypothesize two things: (1) she didn’t have a plan, and (2) it would have been nice if someone had pointed this out to her. That said, “knowing” her problem wouldn’t necessarily give her a cure.

David Droschak may well have known something about ADD when he asked the question, “What kind of demons did Payne face on the golf course?” To know your demons is an important first step. But to actually deal with them requires much more. Professionals like Dr. Coop can be a massive help. And when the stakes are high enough (e.g., for a professional golfer or for a business owner or executive), the results are well-worth the expense.

*Payne Stewart died in 1999 due to an airplane malfunction. Full story here at About.com’s Payne Stewart bio.

Have you ever avoided a task because you thought you’d get bored?

Have you ever feared a task because you thought you’d get bored, wouldn’t finish, and would suffer consequences?

Assuming you’ve said yes, how many of these tasks might have been important? It’s one thing to avoid reading some useful but boring professional journals. It’s another thing to neglect tracking or tallying your deductible expenses (or your staff’s expense accounts). And it’s a big ‘nother thing to avoid finishing your business plan.

When you prioritize tasks by importance, you’ll have a stronger sense of when to “risk” getting bore. And at least you’ll have a chance at delegating the items that need doing but not necessarily by you. (By the way: a great way to identify priorities is to look at what’s most important in your business plan. You’ve finished your business plan, right?)

In ADD in the Corner Office: Five Top Executives Discovered that an LD can be a Capitalist Tool SchwabLearning.org provides a nice article on five prominent CEOs with ADHD, dyslexia, or both. Though David Neeleman (one of the ADHD execs) has recently been removed from his CEO post at JetBlue, his accomplishments in founding and running the company for as long as he did are fully impressive and inspirational. The article opens:

“As students, they seemed to be heading nowhere — fast. A teacher hurled an eraser at one of them, and asked, “Time passes, will you?” Another graduated at the bottom of his high school class and was strongly advised by his principal to go into carpet laying. A third was labeled lazy by her teachers because she had trouble memorizing basic math facts. A fourth was a whiz with numbers but found reading a book a difficult task. The last was always falling behind in his schoolwork and concluded that he was stupid. “How am I going to be successful in anything if I can’t read and write?” he wondered.

“You might say that these nowhere kids turned their lives around. They are, in order, Alan Meckler, chairman and CEO of Jupitermedia; Paul Orfalea, founder of the copying empire, Kinko’s; Diane Swonk, a world-renowned economist; Charles Schwab, a pioneer in the discount brokerage business; and David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue Airways.

“Besides having difficulty in school, these executives share another thing in common: They all suffer from AD/HD or learning disabilities. Neeleman has AD/HD; Swonk, Meckler, and Schwab have dyslexia, and Orfalea has both. Each managed to turn his or her liabilities into assets on their respective career paths. If you have difficulty with organization, reading, or remembering math facts, these entrepreneurs prove that such limitations don’t preclude a bright future.”

Click here for full article at SchwabLearning.org.

“Don’t Sell Past the Close”

– some anonymous smart person

This isn’t just for salesmen pitching product.  It’s for any executive whose job includes persuading others to do things.

When someone agrees to whatever you’re persuading them to do, stop talking.  Stop giving them more reasons it’s a good idea.  Stop asking them to do it.  They’ve already said yes! What will you gain by talking more?  Probably nothing important.

Meanwhile, there’s a risk you might derail their “yes”.  How? Here are four different ways:

1. you might give them new facts that point them back toward “no”.
2. you might look so eager that they think they can talk you down on price.
3. your lack of realizing that you’ve already made the “sale” may make them doubt your competence and the value of whatever you’re pitching
4. your extra bandwidth demand might just annoy them. I think I’ll stop, now.

Try this today?

The next time someone asks you for a commitment, think about whatever you were about to promise them, and chop 25% off your promise before you actually speak.

If someone asks how long it will take to get something done, and you think it’s going to be 6 hours, tell them 8. If someone asks how much profit you think a new project is going to earn and you think it’s going to be $10k, tell them “$7,500, tops”.

The point isn’t that ADDexecs constantly miss by 25%. The point is that ADDexecs constantly underestimate efforts and overpromise results. We do this for many reasons: an eagerness to please, optimism, a failure to account for all the subtasks it’ll take to get a project done. But whatever the reason, we’ve grown comfortable with calling out the wrong number. This exercise forces us to live with speaking something different out loud. In the process, we discover that the world doesn’t punish us when we “fail” to be overoptimistic. That’s a good discovery.

———-

Remember the Seinfeld episode when George Costanza realizes that since his life has been such a failure, he might be well-served by doing the exact opposite of whatever his first inclination is? That was a great episode. This blog entry isn’t that great — but then again, it isn’t just something you’re watching on TV

Back in the 70s I read a book of study tips for college students.  “If you’re having troubled staying on task with an assignment, promise yourself a reward — like going out for a hamburger — as soon as you get your work done.”

How does this technique sound for a modern executive with attention deficit disorder?  On the one hand, if the promise of a little treat helps us get the job done, great!  We get the job done!  On the other hand, if we make a habit of using extrinsic and unrelated rewards (like hamburgers, or a half-hour of television, or a trip to the beach) to get ourselves to complete a task, will we gradually erode our internal ability to stick with tasks for the simple reason that they’re important?

I suspect that the “hamburger” technique (like hamburgers themselves) are fine if used sparingly, but not as a habit.  In any case, if you use this technique, what’s your “hamburger”?