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.

————-

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

“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?“.

If time is valuable to you…it makes sense to look for people who value the same things that you do. This means that you will want to do business with people and companies that respect your time.

– B. Eugene Griessman, in Time Tactics of Very Successful People (1994).

Amen. Why should we work with people who don’t help us move forward? Such an important question — and yet it seems that many often forget to ask. They (or we?) assume that our surroundings are a given. But they’re not. We can change them.

Today’s blog at Eat at Joe’s has a useful observation for grownups with attention deficit disorder. From Joe’s notes on a Thanksgiving Day production schedule:

“One thing that’s not explicitly on my schedule is personal time: when do I eat, or take a shower, or whatever. It’s foolish not to allow for time when you know you need it. I’m hoping to shower either while the ham is in, or after everything is done. Most things are going to wind up going over cold and needing reheating anyway. I also built in time to run the dishwasher when I was cooking the ham. I should have run the dishwasher last night, but we’re having a drought locally, and I’m trying not to run it until it’s absolutely full. I also forgot about a social engagement last night, and didn’t do as much prep as I otherwise would have. I may pay for that later. But we’re supposed to be starting at 5:30 or so, with dinner actually going on the table around 7, so hopefully I’ve left enough time. I also fed myself and the dogs well when I got up at about 9:30, and worked through my morning routine of e-mail and blog-checking. But I’ve probably, as usual, slacked off too much”

– Liveblogging Turkey Day from Eat at Joe’s. With no assumptions or aspersions about the author’s possible ADD.

——-

Image: Library of Congress

Lesson 13 — Keep Your Eye on Your Time, Not On Your Watch

Knowing what to do isn’t enough if you haven’t developed the self-discipline to do it.I have known successful salespeople who were drunks, gamblers, liars, thieves…but I have never known a successful person who sat on his ass all day.With all of the Anonymous groups we have for dealing with human weakness, why is it we haven’t organized to combat the most dangerous, expensive, and self-destructive habit of all: wasting time? You can do all those other nasty things and still make a decent living. But if you blow off your nine to fives on useless, time-consuming behavior, you will fail….

It takes energy and self-discipline to sell. Your customer doesn’t care if you make the call. You, the salesperson, have to care. Despite all the psychological gimmicks designed to motivate salespeople to make calls, like bullpens, sales contests, sales meetings, and motivational training, salespeople still contrive to find 1,001 ways to avoid investing the one asset they have that will invariably bring results: their time.

Why?

I wish I knew.

But I do know that a salesperson doesn’t have to be a Lee Iacocca or an Elizabeth Dole to be successful. Just follow one simple rule: Set up a schedule with a fixed number of calls to be made every working day, and complete that schedule. If you make ten stops by only one eyeball-to-eyeball sales call, you’ve made only one call.

…It’s my experience that salespeople who do monitor themselves this way actually give themselves a tougher program to follow than their sales managers give them. That’s because we know ourselves well enough to know that our real capacity far exceeds the average expectations others have for us.

– Harvey Mackay in Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition.

I’ve read two of Mackay’s books that he wrote in ‘88 and ‘90, and I wish he were still writing today. He’s plenty smart and understands all the tiny, gritty, petty, rubber-meets-the-road, less-than-exemplary parts of an executive’s mind. While much of is wisdom applies as well in 2007 as it did in the late 80s, many examples have less force because they draw on business details (like secretaries who take messages) or political examples (Carter and Ford) that are 20+ years old.

That said, there’s plenty of Mackay advice on personal executive management that would be good for almost any ADDexec. For that matter, they’d be good for an executive, even without the attention deficit disorder. Pick up a used copy from Amazon. Dip in. Enjoy. Oh, and quit cringing when you read the references to Carter and Iacocca. You’re not so young you don’t remember them, are you?

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

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.