What sort of toll does this disorder take on a person?
Aside from underachievement, you don't ever get the fulfilment of seeing yourself coming up with the ideas you ought to come up with. You don't get the fulfilment that comes from creative activity. You live at a much more surface level.
I imagine it takes a toll on the organisation as well.
Absolutely. Organisations are sacrificing their most valuable asset, namely the imagination and creativity of the brains they employ, by allowing ADT to infest the organisation. It's not that hard to deal with, once you identify it. You need to set limits and preserve time to think. Warren Buffett [renowned investor and world's second-rcihest man] sits in a little office in the middle of nowhere and spends a lot of his time just thinking. And we are not giving ourselves that opportunity.
You say this condition is reaching epidemic proportions. What percentage of the working population suffers from ADT, in your estimation?
I'm guessing now, because I haven't done surveys. But I've done informal surveys at seminars I give. If we're talking about the working population as sort of managers and executives in corporations as opposed to people working at Burger King or something, then I think you're talking 30, 35, 40 percent.
You say technology in the form of email, voice mail, instant messaging and so on is fuelling this phenomenon. It's ironic that the information age is making a lot of us dimmer, isn't it?
Absolutely. Technology is a great blessing. It is behind much of our progress. But if we're not careful with it, it can start running us ragged. This is the person who spends the day responding to email and voice mail; the person who allows himself to be interrupted by the mobile phone during an important meeting; the person who stays up late at night because he can't log off the Internet. We need to take charge of it. Right now, it's taking charge of us. We need to preserve time to stop and think.
If you don't allow yourself to stop and think, you're not getting the best of your brain. What your brain is best equipped to do is to think, to analyse, to dissect and create. And if you're simply responding to bits of stimulation, you won't ever go deep.
Are some people just better at multitasking than others?
No one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing. When it looks like you're multitasking — you're looking at one TV screen and another TV screen and you're talking on the telephone — your attention has to shift from one to the other. You're brain literally can't multitask. You can't pay attention to two things simultaneously. You're switching back and forth between the two. So you're paying less concerted attention to either one.
I think in general, why some people can do well at what they call multitasking is because the effort to do it is so stimulating. You get adrenaline pumping that helps focus your mind. What you're really doing is focusing better at brief spurts on each stimulus. So you don't get bored with either one.
You have cited software maker SAS as an example of a company actively promoting a more connected, humane workplace, with perks like a seven-hour workday and on-site day care. The interesting thing is that it is a private company and doesn't have to answer to Wall Street. Aren't most publicly traded companies too paranoid and bottom-line-driven for such niceties?
And yet [SAS] is highly profitable. Its bottom line is robust. It's just that it doesn't have to meet quarterly numbers. It's almost a metaphor for the problem. If you're only working from quarter to quarter, then it's very hard to have a long-range strategy. Hard to weather when you take a dip. This quarter-to-quarter management succeeds in the short term but fails in the long term.
