ADD vs. ADT

Clive Thompson via Techdirt has a fascinating post on Attention Deficit Trait, a related sydrome to Attention Deficit Disorder:

"It has basically the symptoms as ADD -- such as an inability to concentrate on one task at at time -- except it's context dependent.

ADT is caused by the technologies of constant interruption in the modern workplace and the modern home, such as email, instant messaging, SMSes, mobile phones, and endless meetings (or endless preplanned children's sports).

The thing that makes the two conditions different, he says, is that ADD seems to be hardwired, while ADT goes away when you're on vacation or in a relaxing, non-hyper-stimulated place."

Interesting. I certainly experience ADT from time to time when I have an instant messenger window and 42 apps open. There's a definite confusion in my head and a lot of darting back and forth between windows. When I notice that I'm not getting anything done I force myself to shut down as many windows as possible to focus on one thing.

The other thing I do is I create a bulleted list of tasks for the day each morning. Then I offload new things to it and cross off things as they get done. I think of it like a mid-term memory buffer and it frees me from worrying whether I'm forgetting something. I started this practice about six or seven years ago when I noticed that I got headaches when I had more than about three or four deliverables on the day. It wasn't that I was worried about being able to get them done... it's that I was worried about forgetting them. I likened it to a CPU race condition in the back of my head. I found myself going back to this reminder constantly which distracted me and gave me a headache. There was a good article on the topic in Harvard Business Review or the MIT technology rag... I forget which one... I didn't put it on the list.

Anyhow, always interesting to see new classifications of mental processes.