Business Insight Zone

Are your thoughts and obligations packed together this tightly?

The Attention Deficit Doctor

Dr. Edward Hallowell is psychiatrist who’s known best for his groundbreaking work on Attention Deficit Disorder. He coined the term “Attention Deficit Trait,” or ADT, to refer to the ADD-like symptoms that affect so many of us today because we overstimulate ourselves with too much information, too many obligations, too many inputs.

If you suffer from ADT — no shame in that — here’s a three-point summary of Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD:

• “Owing to disorganization, frustration, and the feeling of being overloaded, the person tends to waste his or her creativity, energy, and talent, getting more and more buried under unmet obligations, unfinished projects, and piles of books or papers waiting to be read.”
• The antidote is straightforward to describe, but difficult to implement: “In order to cope with the many demands of everyday life and the information overload each day brings, a person needs to be able to stop and think, to pause over one point long enough to extract what matters before moving on. . . . Life is a powerful accelerator these days; what separates the successful from the frustrated is the quality of their brakes and their ability to use them.”
• Working harder or faster will never be the solution to this problem, because of basic constraints in how our brains work; Hallowell takes considerable pains to describe these constraints and how to work with them instead of against them.

If any of this rings a bell for you, I encourage you to find a time to set aside your busyness long enough to read what follows. And if this review prompts you to read CrazyBusy, so much the better. I wouldn’t call it a timeless classic, but it is a highly informed analysis of our current maddening ways of doing business — personally and collectively — and it’s loaded with wise prescriptions, both scientific and philosophical, for how you can turn down the “crazy” in your life by turning down the level of “busy” that plagues so many of us.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Book Review

Let me tell you a little story at my own expense. Last year, after writing about Carol Dweck’s book Mindset and the research of Anders Ericsson into “deliberate practice,” I thought I would revisit CrazyBusy, which I had reviewed on my personal blog in early 2007.

So I pulled the book down off the shelf, skimmed through it again, and added it to my pile of blog fodder, which seemed to grow no matter how much I weeded it down or tapped it for new blog posts. Finally, after weeks of lugging the book around in my work bag, I sat down with a pad and wrote out all my notes on the book, tying Hallowell’s thoughts together with those of Dweck, Ericsson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and others. Nine full pages of legal-sized paper.

That was before Thanksgiving.

From that day to this, I’ve written well over 100 posts on this blog, written and delivered several public talks, juggled all manner of Hoover’s duties and outside projects, traveled to see family for the holidays, et cetera-and-then-some. There were high points and low points and many points in between, all larded with far more busyness than I like to admit.

Yet for all of that, those notes on Hallowell’s book sat untouched, even though they could have saved me from at least some of the grief created by my crazybusy schedule.

What Death Means

Then, twice in the span of ten days, I had occasion to quote for friends the passage from CrazyBusy that most stuck in my mind — one that I quoted in passing here in December:

But time, a far more precious asset than money, rolls on unnoticed. We spend it. We waste it. We even kill it. Killing time. It’s worse than burning money. Sages through the ages have cautioned us to seize the day, to make the most of the moment, to live each day as if it were our last, but rare is the person who truly does that. Time is a finite resource, but we behave as if it were infinite because, at the deepest level, we deny the fact of death in our everyday lives.

Well, that gets right down to the point, doesn’t it?

There are some things about CrazyBusy that I don’t like — for example, Hallowell’s tendency to overindulge in neologisms like “taildogging” and “gemmelsmerch.” But I respect the book so much because Hallowell is willing to tell us the level, unblinking truth on this one point. We’re all going to check out at some point, and the best thing we can do about it is to make meaning with our lives and work steadily between now and that day, however soon or distant it may be.

Along the way, we can work better to manage the quality, quantity, and context of the information that flows into our lives (cue a subdued Hoover’s connection here) so that we’re not victims of information overload, but rather the masters of information flow.

Getting Our Acts Together

It’s sobering to reflect on how many of the habits and tools in the modern, hyperconnected workplace could almost be designed to keep us from achieving that good feeling of accomplishment. (I’m looking at you, e-mail.)

Too often the solution we pursue is to promise that we’ll “get organized” — but Hallowell makes a telling comparison:

“. . . getting organized has become the modern form of dieting. Everyone wants to do it, few do it successfully, and even those who do do it successfully usually revert to their former state.”

People who lose weight and keep it off don’t do it by “dieting,” but by making lasting behavioral changes. To put it another way (and use a favorite term of mine), they adopt new algorithms of eating and exercise. The same applies to shedding busyness, and in the sections that follow I’ve highlighted some of the algorithms that emerge from Hallowell’s book.

Stability, Not Control

Early in the book, Hallowell discusses the “the agony of a rotary phone” — the pain we feel when we have to use a piece of technology that takes even a second to respond. (The comic Louis CK aptly roasted this tendency on Conan O’Brien’s show recently.) We get angry at rotary phones. Our impatience at tiny, inconsequential things like the time it takes to dial a rotary phone becomes automatic.

Tied to this, we try to control far too many things around us, especially by falsely optimizing around the mixed blessing of speed. This leaves us victims to the paradox of control:

“By trying to control life as much as possible, you can run yourself ragged, losing control in the process.”

What’s far better is to acknowledge the reality that you don’t have control over everything . . . and that the lack of control is okay. Hallowell cites the example of Warren Buffett as someone who doesn’t sweat stuff beyond his control, and who therefore is “never too busy to think.”

And there we have it: our go-go habits — especially “screensucking,” which has us grazing from our computer, television, and handheld screens all day long — actively prevent us from thinking our way through our challenges.

Dr. Hallowell has a few prescriptions algorithms to get out of this trap:

• Don’t use busyness as a way to avert your gaze from “loss, tragedy, and pain.”
• In regards to the sometimes-frustrating workings of the universe, “Acceptance — not busyness — brings us to a peaceful place.”
• Humans thrive on genuine connection, not simulations of it: “It’s not the illusion that we need. We need the real thing.”

Yeah, it sounds touchy-feely. But his observations are also grounded in up-to-date neuroscience. Oh, and I would add that, for all that we may try to make the business world about numbers, technology, and the manipulation thereof, it’s still about people, touchy-feely emotions and all.

The Importance of Positive Emotion

Carol Dweck spends much of her book Mindset (reviewed here) explaining how people with a “growth mindset” are likelier to overcome challenges because they believe they can overcome them in the first place. Here, Hallowell suggests something similar, and something that I’ve touched on before: that maintaining positive emotions helps you to use the frontal lobes of your brain better and more frequently, which in turn enables creative thought and allows us to overcome bad habits.

(Conversely, “negative emotions . . . shut down the frontal lobes, making them primitive, costing them the sophistication and creativity they otherwise possess.” Yikes.)

How do we cultivate these positive emotions? Hallowell emphasizes the importance of connecting with what’s most important in your life, whether individuals or causes or goals:

“[T]he key to positive emotion is not merely getting organized — although that can help — but also maintaining your connections to what matters most to you. This in turn requires that you select the connections you care most about and cultivate just those. In so doing, you will create the positive emotional state that will allow you best to deploy your time, attention, and energy.”

This is a far cry from the always-on putting-out-fires mode of operation that infects many workplaces. Frenetic activity and a lack of filters prevent us from finding the rhythm of work we will need if we are to accomplish meaningful things.

“Many elements combine to lead you into the right rhythm, elements that busy life can batter and destroy if you let it. Positive emotional environment. Prioritizing. Planning how you use your time. Getting rid of people and projects that drain you, while cultivating those that are replenishing. Doing what you do best. Practicing. Having time to practice.”

It should be clear that this applies just as well to business — to building the value of enterprises — as it does to one person’s life.

The Forces of Distraction

And yet we array the forces of distraction against ourselves. We hold too many meetings on too many topics (including too many of little consequence), and we schedule them so that they fragment our working days. We keep e-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, and the phone (or two phones) up and running at all times, even though doing this costs companies scads of money, and even though it costs each of us bits of our productive lives — no to mention our sense of well-being — every day.

We know from neurological and psychological research — including that which informs Hallowell’s work and Csikszentmihalyi’s — that human brains work best and do their best work when they’re given large, uninterrupted pools of time in which to work. (The novelist Neal Stephenson has called these “unbroken slabs of time.”) We ought to run our organizations in ways that reflect this truth rather than attempting, fruitlessly, to deny it.

Banishing the Status Symbol of Busyness

In one short chapter, Hallowell lists 26 reasons (A to Z) why we keep so busy. Among them: “We overcommit,” “Others overcommit us,” and “We imagine that we must be.” But the one that hits home the most for me is this one:

“Being busy is a status symbol. Isn’t that strange?”

What if, instead of scrambling through the kind of working day that everyone complains about — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (more or less) — we inverted that image, so that we labeled as the real achievers those who consistently get the important things done . . . because they have time to think?

I say we start this campaign right now. Who’s with me?

Train Your Attention

Given all this, is it any surprise that so many companies complain of an inability to innovate, when our modern working styles encourage freneticism and interruption?

The antidote is to train your attention, and here Hallowell’s expertise in ADD really kicks in. From his many suggestions, I’ll paraphrase just a few:

• Get enough sleep.
• Eat right, especially to regulate your blood sugar throughout the day.
• Exercise.
• Reduce the forces of distraction in your life, especially physical and electronic clutter.
• Pursue variety in your work.
• Promote positive emotions, especially via human connection.

Plenty of these sound like common sense, but given our collective embrace of overwhelm these days, a good dose of common sense (especially when backed by sound medical science) could be just the ticket.

The Only Time You’ll Ever Have

It’s a known neurological quirk that, even though we could rationally figure out that we won’t have time to spare later, we tell ourselves that we will. Hallowell does a good job throughout his book of reminding his readers of the preciousness of their time.

“The best reason to take your time is that this is the only time you’ll ever have.”

I’ve spent so much time on this one self-help book because I think it has important implications for our personal and professional lives. Beyond that, I think we go badly astray when we try to separate our business lives from all the other parts of life. We can’t separate them. They’re all one big thing. We should follow Hallowell’s guidelines so that we get more out of all the parts of our lives. I hope you agree that the time spent has been worth it, and I hope you can use something here to reduce the business — and the craziness — in your own working life.

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Related posts:

• Hallowell on “killing time.”
• My birthday gift to myself: FOCUS.
• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• We are not beasts of burden.

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Photo credits:
Apartment block by Steve Cadman, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
Headstone by skitzianist, used under a Creative Commons license.
Baby by Kyle Flood, CC-Share Alike.
Dog by buildscharacter, CC-Share Alike.

Category: Books, Productivity, The business brain