In 2005, the Harvard Business Review ran an article discussing how overloaded attention circuits cause spart people to perform below their skill levels. The author, psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, discusses both the reasions behind the increasing distractedness, stress and dissatisfaction at workplace, and the actions people and leaders can take to change the situation.
Their experience is becoming the norm for overworked managers who suffer—like many of your colleagues, and possibly like you—from a very real but unrecognized neurological phenomenon that I call attention deficit trait, or ADT. Caused by brain overload, ADT is now epidemic in organizations. The core symptoms are distractibility, inner frenzy, and impatience.
He discusses that people with ADT have difficulty staying organized, setting priorities, and managing time and how these symptoms can undermine the work of an otherwise gifted executive. He goes on to say that if the protagonists of his examples, and the millions of people like them understood themselves in neurological terms, they could actively manage their lives instead of reacting to problems as they happen.
