Imagine your day. You have 6 things you should be doing, one of them really important. You sit at your computer, and start waiting for the first interruption of the day. After 20 minutes of browsing Reddit, there it comes: somebody says "good morning" to you on the company chat. You handle whatever issue it was, and go back to waiting for the next interruption. Jump forward 7 hours, you're ready to leave for home, and you're not sure that you've achieved anything over the day. You didn't think about that one important thing even once.
Repeat 5 times and you're ready to start your weekend, thinking you've achieved nothing this week. You might even be right.
Attention Deficit Trait is not a new revelation at all, but it just recently hit my radar. Harvard Business Review had a lengthy article about it in 2005. I have no idea of its status as a valid psychological diagnosis, but it might be telling that Wikipedia offers nothing when searching for this term.
ADT differs from the more known ADHD in that it is learned. Neuroplasticity seems to support this. It means everything we do teaches the machine that is our brain. If most of your day is getting interrupted and then recovering from the interruptions by gathering dopamines by browsing the internet, then that's what your brain expects every day to be like.
While fully realizing the risks related to self-diagnosing non-scientific mental problems via the Internets, I am pretty sure that ADT is exactly what's wrong with me.
This is one of the things I do to fight it.
The weaker your mind is, the stronger it resists any deviations from the default behaviour. The more complicated the deviations, the easier they are for the mind to resist. Therefore, to attack it, you'll want to do two things:
The List is an attempt to make deviations from default effortless. It's a physical list (so there's zero possibility of the actual list causing you ADT), maintained using a piece of paper or notebook and a writing instrument. It should always be located near a place that's causing you problems. For instance, I have 2 lists: one for each computer in my life. The lists should always be available when I'm at that location. Actually, I have a third "global inbox" list as well, for recording things that come into my mind, GTD-style, but that's beside the point here.
Here's the recipe:
Crossed over things don't exist on the list, so if you have a recurring task, you will need to write it before doing it every time.
This technique helped me to found this blog and write this very first article. If this isn't the only article of this blog, then it probably helped me write those too.