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AN EPIDEMIC OF
ATTENTION DEFICIT
DR. EDWARD HALLOWELL, A PSYCHIATRIST in Sudbury, Mass., has seen the fallout of multitasking mania: it walks through his door five days a week. Over the past decade, he says, he has seen a tenfold rise in the number of patients showing up with symptoms that closely resemble those of attention-deficit disorder (ADD), but of a work-induced variety. "They complained that they were more irritable than they wanted to be," he says. "Their productivity was declining. They couldn't get organized. They were making decisions in black-and-white, shoot-from-the-hip ways rather than giving things adequate thought, all because they felt pressured to get things done quickly." But Hallowell, an ADD expert and co-author of several best-selling books on the subject, including 1994's Driven to Distraction, noticed something different about his new cases. Unlike patients with typical ADD, which persists no matter the setting, the new patients felt frantic only in certain situations--mainly in the workplace or, for at-home moms, while managing the home front.
In a Harvard Business Review article last January, Hallowell gave the condition a name: attention-deficit trait, or ADT. He explains that ADT takes hold when we get so overloaded with incoming messages and competing tasks that we are unable to prioritize. The result is not only distractibility, impulsiveness and haste but also feelings of guilt and inadequacy. "People think it's their fault that they're falling behind," he says. "They think they have to sleep less and work harder and stay later at the office, which only makes it worse because they're not taking care of their brain by getting enough sleep." How common is this phenomenon? "It's rampant," says Hallowell, who believes that corporate downsizing and job insecurity contribute to the problem. "When I give lectures around the country, there's always instant identification with what I'm saying. People in the audience immediately say, 'Oh, yes, that's me,' or, 'My whole office is like that.'"
THE HIGH COST OF INTERRUPTIONS
IT'S NO WONDER SO MANY OF US SUCCUMB to the panicky feeling that we can't keep pace with workplace demands. A series of new studies that examined the modern, multitasking worker show that the constant splintering and diversion of our attention wastes time and money. In a study of 1,000 officeworkers from top managers on down, Basex, an information-technology research firm in New York City, found that interruptions now consume an average of 2.1 hours a day, or 28% of the workday. The two hours of lost productivity included not only unimportant interruptions and distractions but also the recovery time associated with getting back on task, according to a Basex report titled "The Cost of Not Paying Attention," released in September. Estimating an average salary of $21 an hour for "knowledge workers"--those who perform tasks involving information--Basex calculated that workplace interruptions cost the U.S. economy $588 billion a year.