5 Ways to Combat Adult ADD Symptoms

By William Kueser

Finding yourself constantly distracted at work and unable to complete tasks? Can just one email derail your to-do list for the entire day? You are not alone. Psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, one of the nation's foremost authorities on attention deficit disorder (ADD) and author of CrazyBusy, says symptoms closely resembling Adult ADD run rampant in corporate America.

In a 2007 Men's Health article, Dr. Hallowell visited the overstressed and overwhelmed editorial staff at the popular magazine. There he found features editor Adam Campbell, whose email inbox was so overloaded he was forced to delete messages just to send new ones. Executive editor Bill Phillips' constant need to check email felt like an Information Age nicotine addiction.

Technologies like email, the Internet and Blackberries were intended to make us more productive. But they may be having the opposite effect. To use email as an example, a study conducted at Microsoft showed it took people an average of 15 minutes to resume work after being interrupted by an email and 10 more minutes to reach their earlier concentration level. What's even worse, more than a quarter of the subjects took two hours to get back on task.

The reason may be simple. In an era of technology and gadgets designed to enable multi-tasking, one critical piece of hardware stands in the way. The human brain. Many studies have shown that our brains simply aren't wired to handle two complex tasks at once without causing mistakes or slowdowns. Scientists at Vanderbilt used MRIs to demonstrate this all-too-human condition.

But when emails keep piling up and with information overload coming from every direction, what is an already overtaxed human brain to do? Dr. Hallowell says we can take steps at work and at home to regain control of our lives—or at least our ability to concentrate.

• Protect your "morning burst." Dr. Hallowell says most of us have a period of energy and focus in the early day, and we should ruthlessly protect it. Try working for 60 or 90 minutes before checking email or going online.

• Monitor your time online. Use a tool like pageaddict.com or an old-fashioned stopwatch to see how much time you surf the Web. Dr. Hallowell bets when you see just how much time you spend, you'll cut back.

• Disable your distractions. If you feel compelled to instantly respond to emails or pressure to check emails at all hours, talk to those people you think need your immediate attention. You may find they don't expect an instant response, especially after hours, and that you can check email less frequently.

• Empty your inbox. Schedule a few times during the day to check email. When you do, act on messages by responding, deleting, forwarding or filing—just don't leave them sit in your inbox. Save a few minutes at the end of the day to perform clean up.

• Fight stress. You focus best from a state of calmness. Try sipping tea rather than coffee. Studies show it lowers stress hormones. Deep breathing, meditation and quality sleep all contribute to better concentration and focus.