I have an extremely bad case of attention deficit disorder, bad to the point where it’s debilitating if I haven’t had my medication. I’ve literally had people sit me down and ask me if I was high/drunk/schizophrenic and for a while I was in “slow learner” classes in middle school. I was diagnosed in college, and I’ve been carrying a 4.0 GPA in the honors college at one of the toughest public colleges in the country since.
I managed to somewhat competently cope with this for eight years, so I think these are pretty good ways to stay focused.
Firstly, at work I set my e-mail to only send/receive every 30–45 minutes. Multi-tasking, mental disorder or not, is a myth. It does not exist, it only appears to exist. Your mind works best when it’s focused and this is the only way to enter a state of flow. Any distractions that you allow yourself to be sucked into consume more of your time than you know, since it takes your head out of the train of thought you were on and you immediately drop a lot of short term memory. It might take 5 minutes to answer an e-mail, but after all is said and done you’ve probably lost 20 minutes of productivity. This is a universal suggestion, too. It doesn’t just apply to e-mail. Distractions are huge time wasters, and surprisingly many of them are within your control. When people jump into my office that’s one thing. Before I had medication, I had to literally unplug my phone and let the voicemail get it and shut my e-mail client off, and that reduced 90% of my distractions. Manage your attention with a vengeance.
If you work with your computer much, make use of software. There’s a program for Mac OS X called Apimac Timer that I use, for example, and it’s basically just an alarm clock. If I need to remember something, and annoying message in the middle of the screen plus a dumb sound is a really good way to do it. Also, there’s a great to-do list called Things for OS X, which works wonders, and I also use Tudumo when on Windows. A simple GTD to-do list can be remarkably helpful.
You have to discipline yourself to respect your own rules though. At first, I didn’t think any of these things were the least bit helpful since it was that easy for me to just ignore them and go back to doing whatever it was I was already doing. You have to force yourself using the simplest possible way: just do it. It sounds simple enough (why didn’t I think of that?!) but when you’re being slapped in the face by your own timer and you’re thinking about “5 more minutes” or “tomorrow” that kind of thing—no. Don’t. Just do it. It seems like the simplest thing in the world, but sometimes it can be the hardest.
I use this desktop background when I’m at work, which has proven surprisingly helpful.
There’s no foolproof method. If you want to focus, you can help yourself, but you have to be willing to work against your wants. If you want to focus, these are the kinds of things that can help. It can be frustrating, but it’s manageable.
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