In today’s news on adult attention deficit disorder:

This lack of ability to concentrate costs the average adult sufferer 22.1 days of “role performance,” per year, including 8.7 extra days absent, according to researchers led by Dr. Ron de Graaf of the Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction.

It might be cost-effective for employers to screen workers for ADHD and provide treatment, the researchers suggest.

…The majority of the lost performance was associated with reductions in quantity and quality of work rather than actual absenteeism, the researchers said.

– Randolph Schmid, Associated Press Science Writer, ADHD Can Cost Adults 20 or More Workdays A Year, 26 May 2008.

This article speaks about adult workers as a whole, not focusing on executives or professionals.  If you consider that an executive or professional’s time is highly leveraged across other staff, the cost to business is especially high.  Appropriate ADHD treatment for a line worker might return a few thousand dollars to the company’s bottom line.  Appropriate treatment for a C-level exec or owner could return manyfold more.

I don’t know if executives with attention deficit disorder mess up any more than other executives, but I do know that on occasion, we miss deadlines, we forget meetings, we get names wrong.  We interrupt and embarrass our clients or colleagues, we accidentally deliver incorrect products, and we break fragile mementos.

All executives need to learn how to make good apologies and to make appropriate amends.  Given our propensity to make (and perhaps repeat) mistakes, the burden may be even higher for ADDexecs.

CareerBuilder ran a nice article in 2005 on How to Apologize at Work.  Among their tips which are particularly important for ADDexecs.  Here’s one for when you pledge to make amends: “promising more than you can deliver is a sure way to set yourself up as the target of future outrage.”  It’s easy for people with ADD to make a hasty promises that we haven’t taken the time to figure out whether we can fulfill.  And here’s another: “After you say you’re sorry, be quiet and listen while people tell you how angry they are.”  This is hard for the hyperverbal among us, but all the more important if you want to be sincere.

Attention deficit disorder doesn’t help people focus on priorities. Immediate pleasure attracts our attention and immediate pain distracts us. But what about longterm pleasure and longterm pain? We don’t motivate ourselves toward managing those nearly as well.

Data can help. And for starters, here are three numbers we need to know if we want to maximize our long term pleasure and minimize our long term pain: the cost of customer acquisition, cost of customer retention, and value of a customer.

Also, know the difference between your average cost/value and your customer-specific cost/value. Average cost/value is useful for planning and projecting. But for management and strategy, you’ll want to know customer-specific cost and value. Why? Because then you can try to find more prospects that look like them, for the most profit (and probably the most fun).

As part of your marketing or demarketing analysis, these calculations should turn into what your sales team calls “qualifying criteria” for evaluating leads. A sales team that isn’t obligated to qualify its leads is a sales team that’s going to cost you real money chasing after “every shiny penny.” They need a system for focusing their attention!

But sales teams aren’t usually the kind of folks who like to spend time on analysis. If you’re the boss, or if you’re the marketing chief, you need to make these numbers happen. Get to it!

When it’s crunch time, one of my friends puts tempting but non-critical projects in a cabinet and shuts the door. Another turns his monitor off and puts his keyboard away when he needs to avoid the web and email.

Is there anything you can put away today?

Similarly, some folks shut their office door when they don’t want distractions from the outside.  However: Others make sure the office door stays open so that they are constantly reminded that they’re in a place with other people who are working – not just sitting in their offices reading interesting newspaper articles or playing Scrabulous.*

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*if you don’t know what Scrabulous is, do NOT, repeat do NOT Google it to find out.  The job you save might be your own.

“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?“.

This blog occasionally mentions how our ADD nature can be an advantage. But I hadn’t thought about this one:

As Major League Baseball begins to dig out from its steroids scandal, new kinds of performance-enhancing substances are sweeping big-league clubhouses: Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs designed to help with Attention-Deficit Disorder. According to records MLB officials turned over to congressional investigators as part of George Mitchell’s probe into steroid use in baseball, the number of players getting “therapeutic use exemptions” from baseball’s amphetamines ban jumped in one year from 28 to 103—which means that, suddenly, 7.6 percent of the 1,354 players on major-league rosters had been diagnosed with ADD.

One possible reason for this increase: in 2005 baseball banned the use of “greenies,” amphetamines that help players remained focused and energetic through the rigors of a 162-game season. Amphetamines were once as common as deli spreads in big-league clubhouses—in some, greenies were used to spike the coffee. Players are now seeking doctors’ prescriptions for ADD medications, usually Ritalin and Adderall, apparently to replace the now-illegal energy boosting drugs…

– Charles Euchner in Are players using an ADD diagnosis to evade the amphetamine ban?, Newsweek Web Exclusive. Feb 6, 200. Click title for full article at Newsweek.

This full article is worth a read for more than the tidbit, above.  There’s mention of athletic activity as “the best cure for ADD” via its emphasis on both exercise and focus.  There’s also mention of how the player’s working lifestyle (lots of travel, irregular schedules, and other things that match the experience of a business executive) fuel the symptoms of ADD.

The problem of resolving fear has two aspects. We shall have to try for all the freedom from fear that is possible for us to attain. Then we shall need to find both the courage and grace to deal constructively with whatever fears remain.

– Bill Wilson in As Bill Sees It: The A. A. Way of Life …Selected Writings of the A. A.’s Co-Founder

You don’t need to be in a 12-Step program for this quote to look familiar.  It’s essence is derived from (or at least parallel) to the Serenity Prayer: “Lord, let me have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Relevance to executives with attention deficit disorder?  Executives and business owners strive for excellence, and seek to eliminate mistakes in work, and in the way we manage our own lives.  Of course we want to manage our ADD and of course we want to get rid of as many of its problems as we can.

What we need to stay wise about is that we’re not going to make all of our ADD nature go away.  We have to learn how to live with the parts that we’re going to have to live with.  We can’t obsess about it.   It would really stink to have our attention deficit disorder be more of a problem because we paid too much attention to it.

I was playing tennis today with my best friend and regular opponent, who asked after a while, “What’s wrong with you? It seems like on every other point, you’re turning your head away from the ball to look at something else, right before you start your swing.”

Granted, we were playing in a big park with lots of interesting to things to look at all around. But he was still right. My eyes went wandering when they still had a job to do.

What was happening? There are various explanations, but here’s an attention deficit disorder model: my mind had played through the point faster than the point was done in real life. And while real life was still happening, my mind was no longer paying attention.

But regardless of the model — the sports and business worlds are full of sayings like, “follow through”, “stay until the job is done” or “don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”

These sayings make sense for many reasons: when we don’t budget our time, energy, or money well, it’s easy to run out of the essential ingredient before the goal is reached. Attention is yet another ingredient.

If my attention is wandering, there is somewhere it wants to go, so obviously it does not want to be where I am holding it in the name of some self-styled obligation.

– Hugh Prather in Notes to Myself — my struggle to become a person. 

Prather isn’t writing about ADD, but it’s nice to remember that sometimes a wandering attention is just fine.

People with ADD can make things more complicated than they have to be.

Sometimes, this trait shows up in the products or services they try to sell.  “Blessed” with both smarts and many ideas, the ADDexec tries to create something of extraordinary value — several steps beyond what most people ever thought they could need, or refined to meet needs at an amazing level of detail.

Problem is — those products and smarts have a hard time getting off the drawing board.

Problem is — those products and smarts are often harder to sell.

Opportunity is — millions of customers are ready to buy common solutions borne out of common sense.  If you’ve got a plain-Jane solution that can save someone time or money, and if you can offer it with a modestly better price/service/packaging combination that will make your potential customer say “Hey, that’s nice.  that’s better than what I’ve got.  I’ll take it,” you may have everything you need.

Your customers might not need brilliance or a miracle.  What can you do to help them today?