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.

“Living in the moment” is one of attention deficit disorder’s most powerful traits.  Sometimes the “moment” is a 45-minute hyperfocused session of playing online solitaire   Other times the “moment” is whatever flight of fancy your mind just took you to, away from whatever you intended to be doing.

Here are some words you’ll recognize about “too much living in the moment”:

We are an impulsive and weak-willed species, we human beings. On the one hand, we are masters of delay: The lawn will get mowed tomorrow, the paper written after one more game of solitaire. Yet we are also very good at seizing the moment: overeating, drinking too much, and generally indulging in behaviors that lead to hangover and regret.

These two failures of self-control—the inclinations to procrastinate and to indulge—turn out to be rooted in the same problem: We tend to put too much weight on the here and now when evaluating the costs and benefits of action (or inaction). Behavioral economists refer to such misguided decisions as “time-inconsistent preferences.” You’ve got a report to deliver by first thing tomorrow, but the moment you sit down to start writing, surfing the Web just seems like more fun; you know that you’ll be sorry if you eat that last scoop of Haagen Dazs, but you just can’t resist. Both bad decisions are the result of privileging the present you over the you of tomorrow morning…

…By thinking of procrastination as the result of a human tendency to live too much in the moment, we can devise better strategies for overcoming it. If the problem is weighing present versus future costs and benefits, we need to find a way to either bring future benefits closer to the present or to magnify the costs of delayed action.”

Ray Fisman, How Economists think of Procrastination, Slate, May 15, 2008

This week’s special feature at Slate: Procrastination 2008: a brief history of wasting time, on topics ranging from “Solitaire-y Confinement — why we can’t stop playing a computerized card game” (it’ s more than a mesmerizing place for an ADDexec to hyperfocus for 45 minutes (or maybe 2700 second-long moments?)  to “Procrastinators Without Borders — do the Japanese waste more time than we do?“.

The FDA requires pharma manufacturers to include “New Drug Application” (NDA) data in some of their packaging inserts.  Here is an excerpt of the side effects data for Strattera:

Commonly observed adverse events in acute adult placebo-controlled trials — Commonly
observed adverse events associated with the use of STRATTERA (incidence of 2% or greater) and not observed at an equivalent incidence among placebo-treated patients (STRATTERA incidence greater than placebo) are listed in Table 2. The most commonly observed adverse events in patients treated with STRATTERA (incidence of 5% or greater and at least twice the incidence in placebo patients) were: constipation, dry mouth, nausea, appetite decreased, dizziness, insomnia, decreased libido, ejaculatory problems, impotence, urinary hesitation and/or urinary retention and/or difficulty in micturition, and dysmenorrhea.

Source: Strattera NDA 21-411 (p. 16)  The NDA also includes other conditions that prompted subjects to drop out of the test.

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.

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

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.

“No” is one of our power words. How do you say “No”?

Professional organizer Ramona Creel has a list of twenty ways. Here are seven of them, good for the office and for all the other places that people want some of your professional time (homeowners association board, anyone?):

I DO NOT HAVE ANY MORE ROOM IN MY CALENDAR

* be honest if your schedule is filled
* “filled” doesn’t have to mean really filled
* know when you are scheduled as much as you are willing and stop

I HATE TO SPLIT MY ATTENTION AMONG PROJECTS

* let people know that you want to do a good job for them
* but you can’t when your focus is too divided or splintered
* you will be more effective if you focus on one project at a time

I NEED TO LEAVE SOME FREE TIME FOR MYSELF

* it’s okay to be selfish — in a good way!
* treat your personal time like any other appointment
* block off time in your calendar and guard it with your life

I WOULD RATHER DECLINE THAN DO A MEDIOCRE JOB

* know when you aren’t going to be able to deliver a quality product
* the reason doesn’t matter — not enough time, wrong skills, etc.
* whatever the reason is enough for turning a request down

LET ME HOOK YOU UP WITH SOMEONE WHO CAN DO IT

* if you aren’t available to help out, offer another qualified resource
* helping to connect people is a valuable service to offer
* make sure the person you refer will represent you well

NO

* sometimes it’s okay to just say no!
* just say it in a way that expresses respect and courtesy
* leave the door open for good relations

THIS REALLY IS NOT MY STRONG SUIT

* it’s okay to admit your limitations
* knowing what you can handle and what you can’t is a skill
* your time will be more efficiently spent on something you do well

Click here for -> the full twenty.

Credit line, per request from the author:

“Content provided by OnlineOrganizing.com — offering “a world of organizing solutions!” Visit www.onlineorganizing.com for organizing products, free tips, a speakers bureau, get a referral for a Professional Organizer near you, or get some help starting and running your own organizing business.”

Adult ADD and Money: Adult ADD & ADHD Personal Finance, Money Management, and Business Blog

As is obvious from its title, this blog covers territory far beyond the ADDexec workplace, but there is plenty of relevant material — particularly in categories like ADD/ADHD Business Articles and ADD/ADHD Business Tips.

But if you want to indulge your ADD self before reading those categories, check out the blog’s other fun at Stupid Things To Do With Money and Celebrity Money Issues which are competing for “my favorite category” status.

Adult ADD and Money author John MacKenzie is a small-business consultant who has worked with numerous ADD/ADHD clients. MacKenzie is also an instructor with ADDClasses which offers teleclasses on a variety of ADDult topics.

Corporate America has a longstanding tradition of bosses wanting to look infallible, and staff not wanting to risk the bosses ire by pointing out mistakes.

And it’s a damned costly shame.  It doesn’t serve the boss, the staff, or the bottom line.

Your staff knows that they’re supposed to help you meet your goals.  Let them also know that you want to help them do their jobs well, and to make that happen, they need to help you be the best boss you can be.

Get their input.  Ask them to tell you when you’re not being clear, or when you seem to be doing something that doesn’t make sense, or when they need your time and attention to accomplish whatever mission you’ve given them.

And guess what — this isn’t just about managing ADD.  It’s about being a good boss all around.

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For one broader exploration of this theme, check out What is Servant-Leadership? at the Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership.

Also see "Managing your Boss"  in the Harvard Business Review January-February 1990.  This article, by John Gabarro and John Kotter, was considered groundbreaking when it came out just seventeen years ago.  We still have a lot of "old thinking" DNA about the boss-as-infallible.  A whole lot of not-very-useful DNA.