“Work half done is worse than work undone.”

My mother used to tell me this when I was a boy, and I had no idea what she was talking about. But now I do.

So what’s wrong with work half done?

Work half done takes up physical space. Think about the old wooden rowboat you brought into the garage for repainting. You’ve got it on blocks and you’ve sanded it (mostly) clean, but until you finish painting it, you can forget about using your garage (or the boat). So maybe it’s not so bad with office work. But it’s hard to work on one project while the paperwork for a half-complete other project is taking up two-thirds of your desktop.

Work half done takes up mental space. It’s hard to devote your full attention to your current task if your mind is part-occupied with finishing the staff evaluation you started this morning.

Work half done is energy invested without any payoff. We put out effort but get no results (which are presumably what we’re hoping to attain). In addition, we get no attaboys, no emotional satisfaction with “a job well done”, and no resolution on issues or questions we’re trying to resolve. Without results or other payoffs, we’re deficit spending — times two.

Watch out for the incompletes. They’re like purchases left on a credit card with a high interest rate: not good to accumulate by habit.

Executives are smart people. People with ADD have a hard enough time paying attention to things that matter. So what happens when smart people run into things they don’t want to pay attention to?”The brain is an extremely sensitive physical organ, and the psyche is equally sensitive. Megaminds build up complex defense mechanisms to avoid hurt. One such mechanism is selective listening.

“Selective listeners hear only what they want to hear. And what they want to hear is praise. People of all calibers of mental attainment prefer boosts to knocks, of course, and we would all like to hear only pleasant things. Most of us cannot avoid hearing the negatives.

“…[But] certain brilliant minds use their brilliance to create screening mechanisms that fend off criticism altogether, so that the subject truly does not hear it…

“It takes a certain kind of complex and supple intelligence to build and maintain such a screen. For one thing, the individual must be motivated by a high level of narcissism, so high that no negatives at all can be tolerated. Then, the mental equipment must be sophisticated and powerful enough to intercept bad messages before they penetrate the sphere of consciousness.”

Mortimer Feinberg and John Tarrant in Why Smart People Do Dumb Things: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics
Is there something you need to be hearing that you aren’t?

The game of Chutes and Ladders isn’t a bad analogy for an ADDexec’s day. A few moments of steady progress, alternating with dramatic climbs up the the productivity ladder and even faster slides down the “where the hell did my day go?” garbage chute.

But unlike kids playing a board game, we executives with attention deficit disorder have a little more control over how we move. If we know what our “attention escape chutes” look like, we can recognize and step around them before we go into the uncontrolled slide.

What do your chutes look like? Here are some common ones:

• surfing the internet

• reading and replying to non-essential and pseudo-essential emails

• errands after lunch

• interesting but non-essential tasks (e.g., helping select items for your company’s holiday gift baskets)

Even better, we need to know what things tempt us to step onto the chute. Here are some common causes for the four chutes, above:

• anxiety about an important task — which spurs us to find something less anxiety-inducing, like surfing the net

• electronic pings — like a “you’ve got mail” pop-up that interrupts your current task and draws you to your Inbox

• lack of a personal schedule — which allows us to forget that we have more pressing tasks for afternoon than picking up the dry cleaning

• an open office door and overly cooperative attitude — that makes us say “sure, why not?” when someone drops by and asks, “can you help us decide whether we should give savory snacks or sweet treats to our clients in this year’s gift basket?”

Naming our challenges and their causes isn’t the entire solution to our issues with time, but it’s a start.

Need some more Chutes and Ladders

Early in my first job out of college, I asked my boss if she would assign me to an interesting new project  that our company had just started.  Unfortunately, started. Unfortunately, she told me, it would be at least six months before there’d be a slot for me.

“Have patience,” she said.

“‘Patience’”, I asked. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know, but I’m told it’s a virtue.”

Though this conversation is now almost twenty years old, I remember it often, especially in the context of “play to your strengths.”  Many smart people suggest that in our careers, our twenties are a time for finding out what we’re good at and what we’re not — a time for trying to “fix” our weaknesses.  But by the time we’re in our 40s (or 50s, as my then-boss was), it’s time to play to our strengths.  Patience was not one of hers, and she didn’t put herself in situations where it was a critical success factor.

In some ways, the same advice applies for executives with attention deficit disorder: we have a nature that’s great at some things and lousy at others, and we should find (or create) environments that make the most of the good and that don’t penalize us severely for the bad.  That said, most (or at least many) executives with attention deficit disorder got their diagnoses later in life — sometimes years or even decades after being in the working world.  With these late diagnoses, we didn’t have the normal “learning sequence” of coming to understand, in our teens or twenties, what we were good or bad at.  Which is to say, we may have some catching up to do.  It may make plenty of sense to spend time “shoring up our weaknesses” (e.g., time management, communication skills, etc.) even if we’re well-established in a career that rewards our other strengths.

Good breathing helps calm the mind and allows us to stay present during difficult moments when our attention might want to flee.

We knew that already, but in case you wanted a reminder written in heavy-duty scientific language, see the abstract, below. Now loosen that necktie!

Mechanisms of mindfulness: Emotion regulation following a focused breathing induction
Joanna J. Arch and Michelle G. Craske, University of California, Los Angeles.

Abstract

The current study investigated whether a 15 min recorded focused breathing induction in a normal, primarily undergraduate population would decrease the intensity and negativity of emotional responses to affectively valenced picture slides and increase willingness to remain in contact with aversive picture slides. The effects of the focused breathing induction were compared with the effects of 15 min recorded inductions of unfocused attention and worrying. The focused breathing group maintained consistent, moderately positive responses to the neutral slides before and after the induction, whereas the unfocused attention and worry groups responded significantly more negatively to the neutral slides after the induction than before it. The focusing breathing group also reported lower negative affect and overall emotional volatility in response to the post-induction slides than the worry group, and greater willingness to view highly negative slides than the unfocused attention group. The lower-reported negative and overall affect in response to the final slide blocks, and greater willingness to view optional negative slides by the focused breathing group may be viewed as more adaptive responding to negative stimuli. The results are discussed as being consistent with emotional regulatory properties of mindfulness.

in Behaviour Research and Therapy
Volume 44, Issue 12, December 2006, Pages 1849-1858

Hyperverbalism (rapid, non-stop talking) is a common symptom in people with attention deficit disorder. For the executive with ADD, the effects of hyperverbalism are at least twofold: (1) it impedes the ADDexec’s ability to listen and (2) it hampers the ability to understood.

Hyperverbalism is also a known symptom in several disorders, including bipolar disorder, autism (including Asperger’s Syndrome). Michael Bartos, MD, has an interesting list of ten similarities (and ten differences) between ADHD and bipolar disorder, available in this article at BipolarCentral.com.

A related term is logorrhea,* which Merriam-Webster defines as “excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness”. Dorlands Illustrated Medical Dictionary in MerckSource.com defines logorrhea as “excessive volubility, with rapid, pressured speech; as seen in manic episodes of bipolar disorder and in some types of schizophrenia” and lists several synonyms: agitolalia, agitophasia, pressured speech, tachylalia, tachyphasia and verbomania.

——-

*Fun fact: Fourteen-year-old Nupur Lala spelled “logorrhea” to win the 1999 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee.

Motion does not always equal forward motion, and forward motion is not the same thing as progress.

I learned this at a “ropes course” during my business-school orientation. In one challenge, our team had twenty minutes to cross an imaginary chemical spill using a few props (e.g., some rope, two small platforms and a long pole) and subject to a few constraints (e.g., maximum two people on a platform, the rope can’t touch the ground, etc.).

When the clock started, I said, “Hey, let’s take a moment to think this through.” And we did, for a moment. But then some people wanted to start trying things. I pressed back, “C’mon — just another minute to plan?” And we did. For just another inconclusive minute. Then we started trying things, and they seemed to be working. But then they didn’t. Then time ran out.

Later our instructor said, “You may be surprised at how soon I knew — without doubt — that you would fail.”

What do you mean?” we asked. “How? When?”

“As soon as Phil chickened out and quit pushing you to think before you started moving, you were doomed.”

Bad signage contributes to more people getting lost than a poor sense of direction. Consider the times that you failed to see a sign because it was too small or obscurely placed. Or stood baffled before a directory that was illogically organized and badly lit. In the realm of graphic information, wayfinding systems abide by their own set of rules. Many typefaces that are easy to read on a printed page are frustrating to make out in signage. The same goes for colors. This is why some designers and their clients are chagrined to find that the system that looked so stunning in miniature mock-up failed miserably when installed at actual size. [For guidance on how to do things the right way, a] recommended source is “Wayfinding: People, Signs and Architecture” by Paul Arthur and Romedi Passini (Focus Strategic Communications Inc.)

From: @issue The Journal of Business and Design, Fall 2005

Our businesses may not have to worry about wayfaring and road signage, but are there other ways we make it hard for people to see what we want them to see, and to find their way to the place or message we want them to get to? “Signage” has analogues in many things we do: from the way we organize our speeches, write our reports, or “sell” our plans. To build good signage, we need clear thinking, we need clear commitment to our message, and we need consideration for our audience. Failure to give good signs may be a symptom of missing something even more important.

Two takes on working in the wee hours…

On the one hand:

For night owls like [Mike] Faith [of Headsets.com], 8-to-5 is now a prelude to the 9 p.m. to midnight (or later) shift when they finally have some quiet time to think, work and plan. “Distractions during the day make it impossible to work on larger projects or [tasks] that require more complex thinking,” says Jonathan Kramer, Ph.D., founder of San Diego-based Business Psychology Consulting. At night, he says, entrepreneurs “can do a more effective and efficient job.”

On the other hand:

Susan Battley, founder and CEO of Battley Performance Consulting in Stony Brook, New York, hears about people gutting their late-night work the next day, however. “It proved to be tangential, faulty or irrelevant,” says Battley, who suggests entrepreneurs delay sending important e-mails and reports until they can read them with fresh eyes.

Ultimately, you have to know your workstyle to make late-night sessions productive, Kramer says.

Source: Bring On the Night, in Entrepreneur magazine, April 2007.

Kramer’s final point makes much sense: what works for you? And if you do like the late night focus time, how do you make sure you get rest time, also, when the 9-5 world assumes they can have your attention during regular work hours?

Battley makes two observations in one: (1) if you’re trying to create “finished” work, there’s not much point in doing it when you’re tired, and (2) final products often require a final review (with fresh eyes, whether yours or someone else’s). And that review requires time, preferably scheduled in advance.

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…