Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life. Harvard Publications Health
friend, she really is a good friend, but I am wondering if she has more trouble than I do. You think I am disorganized, you should see her place….”
I know this is the right time to jump in and direct our conversation back to the issue at hand or—like this morning—Jill could continue running in verbal circles and not getting anywhere. “Okay, so, you were looking for your keys…?” Jill smiles. “Oh, right, yes, I was flipping out. I spent thirty minutes trying to find my car keys.”
Jill then stops, shaking her head.
“Well, did you find them?” I ask.
She nods ruefully. “Eventually.”
“Where were they?”
“Right on my friend’s kitchen table! And, of course, I’d walked back and forth through the kitchen ten times while I was looking for them. All that time they were right there…right there in front of me. Unbelievable!”
“Sounds very frustrating…but pretty believable, as those keys have eluded you before.” Jill smiles ruefully, and I press on. “Then what happened?”
“My day was in shambles from that point on.” Jill went on to relate how the half hour she’d spent looking for the keys set off a domino effect of tardiness and inefficiency—problems galore. She arrived at work late for a meeting and opened the door to the conference room just in time to interrupt an important point that one of her company’s head honchos was making. Embarrassed and angry at herself, she returned from the meeting and finally got in front of her computer to find a barrage of e-mail reminders that further annoyed and overwhelmed her. She sent out a flurry of responses, including a snippy reply to the wrong person, who was not happy to get it (neither was the correct recipient, when she eventually cleared up the mistake). Dealing with her e-mail gaffe kept her from attending to a project due by noon. Her deadline blown, she skipped lunch, scrambling to get her work done, and what she did hand in—two hours late—was subpar and received with something less than an enthusiastic response by her supervisor.
In other words, it was a crummy day for Jill. It wasn’t the first time such a day had begun with something misplaced or by an episode of forgetfulness, but the snowball effect of losing her keys still surprised and upset her.
“This happens all the time,” Jill says, teary-eyed, angry and ashamed. “At this rate, I could lose my job…just because I can’t keep track of stupid things like keys.”
I’m sorry to hear that Jill is upset, but her story is not unusual. Jill has ADHD—and she is certainly not alone. It’s estimated that about 4 percent of adults and 5–7 percent of children in this country meet the medical criteria for ADHD. It’s equally safe to estimate that at some point in their lives almost everyone has felt as if they have ADHD, too. The symptoms of ADHD include forgetfulness, impulsiveness, losing items, making careless errors, being easily distracted and lacking focus. Who hasn’t exhibited one of these symptoms in the last few days…or even hours? Who hasn’t lost their car keys? Who hasn’t been distracted in the car (once the keys are located), on the job or at home—by a text, a tweet, an e-mail, a cell phone ring? Who hasn’t been late for a meeting or missed a deadline or made a mistake because they were disorganized that day, lost focus that morning or were distracted that minute? That doesn’t necessarily mean you have ADHD, but it does suggest you might be part of the distracted masses that now make up such a large part of our society. If so, you’ve come to the right place because we’re going to show you how to get back on track.
ADHD or OBLT?
(Overwhelmed By Life Today)
If you answer Often or Very Often (on a ranking scale of Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often or Very Often) to four or more of the following questions, it may be beneficial to consult with a health professional to see if you have ADHD.
In the last six months….
1 How often do you have trouble wrapping up the final details of a project once the challenging parts have been done? (never/rarely/sometimes/often/very often)
2 How often do you have difficulty getting things in order when you have to do a task that requires organization?
3 How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?
4 When you have a task that requires a lot of thought, how often do you avoid or delay getting started?
5 How often do you fidget or squirm with your hands or feet when you have to sit for a long time?
6 How often do you feel overly active and compelled to do things, like you were driven by a motor?
Source: World Health Organization
Whether or not you have ADHD—and chances are, you probably don’t—the purpose of this book is to inform, inspire and organize your brain. Whether forgetfulness is a “symptom” of a disorder for a person like Jill or an “issue” for someone else who doesn’t have the same degree of severity, this book will approach it in a straightforward way—and with equally straightforward and effective solutions.
What was first labeled the “Distraction Epidemic” by Slate magazine in 2005 has now reached epic proportions, right up there with the obesity epidemic and is of no less import than that or other public health crises that have befallen modern society. In a 2009 New York magazine story on the attention crisis, David Meyer of the University of Michigan described it as nothing less than “a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought” and has drawn comparisons to the insidious damage of nicotine addiction.
“People aren’t aware of what’s happening to their mental processes,” says Meyer, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.” The difference here is that unlike the “mad men” of the 1950s and 1960s who went around merrily sucking up packs of unfiltered Camels, seemingly oblivious to the harmful effects, most of us today know that we are having problems staying focused, paying attention and maintaining some sense of order in our lives.
Unlike smoking (which you either do or don’t do), it’s not just the people afflicted by the most serious and definable form of distraction and disorganization—ADHD—who are affected by this epidemic. Ask friends, family members and colleagues how they’re doing, and chances are, the responses will usually include words like “frazzled,” “stressed,” “overwhelmed” and “trying to keep my head above water.” In casual conversation, you often hear people talking about “brain freezes,” “blanking out” on something or suffering “senior moments” (often, when they really aren’t very senior). All of them…all of us…are affected to some degree by the epidemic.
To get back to my patient Jill in the four-story brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I knew that the woman with the lost keys and the lousy day was not one of the millions complaining to each other about how crazed their lives have become. She has a clinical disorder; most do not. But, as I listened to Jill’s story, I also knew the potential power of a rather simple solution that could help her and many others.
A couple of weeks earlier, during one of our regular sessions, Jill and I had somehow gotten on to the topic of the Apollo lunar landing. We talked about the coverage of the fortieth anniversary of that historic moment, the spectacle of the great Saturn rocket that hurled the astronauts into space, how exciting it still was to see the old black-and-white images of Aldrin and Armstrong on the moon and hear their voices crackling over the television from Tranquility Base and about whether we’d ever go back.
The memory of that conversation about the space program and her interest in it gave me the language needed to help frame the solution for Jill.
“So, I have a thought about how to start your day tomorrow,” I say. “As we’ve been talking about, we are working on bringing order into your life, changing old patterns that don’t work with new ones that do.”
“Right, that sounds good,” she says attentively. “What’s your idea?”
“You need a launch pad for