A.D.D: Things you should know about.

What is A.D.D. I hear you ask? Is it something like a new form of Aids, or something that I might catch on the way to work?

I must admit that until a few days ago I wasn’t sure myself, and I didn’t realise even when I found out more about just how bad it could be. A.D.D. is simply Attention Deficit Disorder which is affecting more and more people every year, and that includes Children as well.

In this modern world of fast technology with so many new pieces of office equipment to make our life better, and more productive it sometimes has the opposite affect. Sometimes you have to keep up with technology to keep ahead of your opposition, so you must follow all the latest information on all new pieces of technology that will enable you to do your work faster, and better than all your competition. (Information overload)

It is believed that Attention Deficit Disorder affects 5% of people and children through out the world, yet in some business circles it can be as high as 80%. When this sort high figure crops up it’s almost as thou the person affected has burnt out, and will be replaced with someone who is not affected, or someone younger. It could be that a business run by someone affected will simply go out of business, and at the extreme that person could go bankrupt.

Well what causes it?
For Children one of the main causes is Television, or maybe computer games. Test have been done on Children who watch three hours of Television a day, and it found that when they were compared with Children that didn’t watch television they were nowhere near as good in exam results, or having the ability to concentrate on their work.

In adults there are many things that can make a person suffer. Things like phones, or mobiles, or organisers, or pagers, or emails. The list is longer, but even those few items can stop the train of thought.

You might have been in this type of situation yourself, where your working on an important document when the phone rings. You stop what your doing to answer the phone. Now this maybe an important call, and perhaps it’s one you been waiting for.
You talk to the person making notes as you go, as you concentrate on what the person is saying. Once this phone call is over you carefully put your notes to one side so that you can deal with it later, and then you go back to what you were doing before. But all of a sudden you look at the work in front of you, and you can’t remember what you were doing or just where you were. Often in cases like this it can take you up to twenty minutes to get back into the swing of things.

The incoming sound of an email can stop your train of thoughts, and even someone stopping by your desk for a chat can stop you in your track. Things like this are said to cost thousands of man hours every year, as these odd ten minutes, or the odd twenty minutes add up.

Some times modern technology can be the vain of your life. You buy the most up to date piece of kit, after reading that it will save you time and money compared with what you are using, only to find that you don’t understand it. It becomes frustrating that you have to wait for one of your young children to come into the house to help you out. Countless number of man-hours are lost each year with new technology that is supposed to make your life better to the point that sometimes you put them to one side, and don’t even use them.

Another thing I have noticed, and it’s something I have put down to A.D.D. is multi tasking. You’re working away doing one job, when someone asks if you can something else. No problem you think, as you go headlong into this next job, thinking that you will go back to your original job later. But this new job takes you onto another that needs doing, and then you think that while I’m doing this job I’ll just do another. To the point you’ve forgotten all about what you were doing.

One every successful business Lady I read about would only do one job at a time. She would take no phone calls, no emails, and no interruptions at all. Her reason is that once she concentrated on one job she did it without interruption, which in her mind did the job better.

This subject could be talked about, or written about for hours, but my phones going….he..he.