Organization in the Workplace

When it comes to organizing those with A.D.H.D. / A.D.D. might start with some simple basic things that will help get our mind organized. With A.D.H.D. / A.D.D. , sometimes our minds are distracted to the point of overwhelm, so we will start with organizing our minds.

There are many ways to organize our minds:

• On the basic level, research continues to support the idea that about 30 min of daily aerobic exercise is great for adding focus, mood regulation and mental energy.

• We already believe that fish oils are great especially those that have been processed in such a way that the molecular structure is small enough to penetrate the blood brain barrier.

• There is great value in being aware of what your preferred learning modalities are you visual, auditory or kinesthetic. Gaining this knowledge can alleviate frustrations.

• There’s the environmental factor where we might consider the home, office or school environment. When possible selecting or adapting these environments to support us to be effective. We can do so by being aware and learning about the impact of sound on our concentration; music, silence or other types of sound may help us to focus and create an organized mind environment.

• There is the tactical or practical hands-on business of organizing time, information and stuff.

The process of starting to get organized can often overwhelm someone with A.D.H.D. / A.D.D. One method we find useful is the basket method. Get 5 baskets then mark each one with one of these – file, trash, give away, return to owner, don’t know need to talk to someone. As you start organizing your room everything goes into a basket. At the end of the day, the giveaway and trash baskets must be out of the house. A trip to Goodwill and the garbage can take care for these baskets immediately.

We have found that someone with A.D.H.D. / A.D.D. going through this process, it is critical to have someone on your informal support team or a professional organizer with you. Remember this is someone whom in their presence you feel good about yourself. Getting organized is tough business, however if you are in an environment of feeling good about yourself it makes this process that much better. The function of your support person is to help you talk through the stuff you are unsure about and keep you out of overwhelm. Organization can help you go from frustration to focus to gain more success in life, school and work.

Time Management in Navigating the Workplace

In the workplace most things are time driven and for those with ADHD/ADD who have a particularly hard time tracking time; this represents a unique set of challenges. Some of the challenges of time management include: the awareness or the ability to track the passing of time, noticing what time it is, remembering to stop one activity to start a new activity and being able to foster the focus toward each scheduled activity.

Some jobs have a built in factor of time being tracked for you most of the time. For example one client, a psychologist, has the benefit of her clients showing up at the appointed therapy time and, in some sense, tracking their own time of when to show up, start and end a therapy session. However, once she was promoted into a supervisory role that includes some of the therapy sessions, reports and overseeing the activities of other therapists; she found that without an external trigger she was falling behind on her administrative duties. It was not an issue of ability or skill to complete any of the tasks. It was simply a matter of time management. Once she took a class pertaining to time management strategies, she found external triggers such as pop ups and bells on her computer, her supervisor scheduling meetings with her and occasional reminder phone calls that she was able to quickly get on schedule with her reporting.

Time management for those with ADD/ADHD is unique because their brain works differently. Working with a typical time management expert (one who has studied the art and science of time management) usually gets those with ADD/ADHD overwhelmed, frustrated and ultimately in trouble. But when time management is taught around the way someone’s mind works, wherein the first point is discovering how the client’s mind works and then developing systems to work around the person, everything changes.

So if you want to be on time and know what to do when, I invite you to sign up for my Be On Time tele-forum class offering.

Also, I am presenting this weekend in Minnesota at the ADHD Spring Conference. For more information on my presentation on Navigating the Workplace, feel free to call me at 1-800-929-4127.

Value #2 Inner Motivation

To understand Inner Motivation one should start by understanding the different types of motivations. The top five (5) motivations are:

Utilitarian – meaning one prefers some practical or useful results to come from ones efforts, time, energy or money. People with this value are results oriented sometimes towards money, more productivity or better health. When people with high Utilitarian value volunteer, they want to see practical results to their efforts.

Altruism – someone who values service to others to benefit a certain person, group of people or cause. People with Altruism value want to see that their efforts are used for the good of others.

Aesthetics - can be a beautiful architectural design, art in general or noticing beauty in simplicity of elegance. People with Ascetics high on their values list; see the beauty and interconnectedness to life and its rhythm. Remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder so for a mathematician this could be a theorem or equation while for an artist it could be colors and textures.

Tradition – value of families and connecting through families. This could be around holidays, religious tradition (ceremonies, holidays, and rites). Usually it is not related to liberal or conservative but more about continuity.

Theoretical – value of understanding how things work, why they are the way they are. Usually people with high theoretical follow science, chemistry, biology or religious activities understanding how and why life all fits together.

The next step is to understand how one ranks these values and how specifically they show up for you. Most people need to take an assessment to rank their values. This will help one to understand more deeply and quickly how they show up in your life. This assessment will help you to understand how to spend your time, energy and money to align with your values.

12 Common ADD Challenges

After over a decade of coaching ADD/ADHD clients, I have found 12 challenges to be the most common.

1. Values - Lack of clarity to what is important and how to connect those values to choices about work, friendships, relationships, education and other parts of life.
2. Inner Motivation - Lack of understanding of what really motivates oneself.
3. The Big Goal(s) - Keeping the focus of the big goals in place on a daily basis.
4. Time -Remembering appointments and deadlines.
5. Project Completion - Challenges ending or starting tasks.
6. Stuff - Clients are buried in piles of papers, books, files, tools or other items.
7. Information- Clients may be trying to track too much information.
8. Social Cues and Social Skills -talking too much, interrupting, saying inappropriate things, etc
9. Perfectionism - Working to get things to the impossible level of perfect, rather than getting things done or getting things done well enough.
10. Getting Started - Blocking points that can occur from sequencing to knowledge that hinder the start of a project.
11. Transitions -Include the stages between stopping one task and starting another.
12. Impulsiveness - Making effective choices despite impulsivity.

It is important for us to remember that just as we would not tell someone who requires glasses to see properly, to just put away the glasses and try harder. We should not to expect someone with an invisible disability to "try harder" on tasks. I have laid out these tasks because often it is what the world sees as the "simple" stuff that gets in the way of individuals with ADHD keeping them from having full, satisfying lives. Over the next few months we will take some time on each of these 12 challenges, diving a little deeper in each round of blog entries. I hope you can come along on this journey.

Coach Robb

ADD and the Traffic Cop

I have a traffic cop analogy for defining ADD/ADHD and how coaching will help you.

When I think about ADD/ADHD, I sometimes think about a traffic cop directing traffic at an intersection. He is telling the cars exactly where to go. As long as the drivers pay attention to him, everything moves along efficiently. Now imagine if the traffic cop directs traffic in the wrong direction, too fast or too slowly. This intersection becomes a snarled mess and we have gridlock. This is what happens in the mind of someone with ADD/ADHD. Their thoughts are moving at light speed through their minds and without direction sometimes they get jumbled. It is a random jumbling of thoughts therefore harder to regain efficiencies.

Here is where coaching comes into play. A coach helps individuals to install traffic lights which will help to automate the traffic patterns. This frees up the traffic cop to focus on other items. A coach will help the traffic cop do better more consistently. However, more importantly it will help identify where the traffic light will take the place of the traffic cop so it’s more automatic. The traffic cop will monitor bigger things while the traffic light will monitor the details automatically.

Thanks and I hope you will come along this journey of learning about ADD and how coaching will help you or your loved ones enjoy a fulfilling life.

Strengths - Finding more time for enjoyment

So, what if you have been tracking the amount of time you spend on your Strengths and you find that there is a lot of room for improvement?

Well, you may wish to start with something that is the simplist and easiest for YOU to do. That is, pick one thing for work or school that you can easily add more time doing that is within the things you do well and enjoy doing and set a goal of spending one more hour a week doing that thing. On the other side, see if there is something you do not enjoy doing and see how you can spend 30 minutes less a week doing that (while still being effective in life). For example, could you pay someone else to do that thing, delegate it at work? What if you barter, you agree to do something for someone else who agrees to do that thing for you? Who knows, if you look closely, you may discover that you can get a system set up or automate a process so it no longer is something that you dislike so much, maybe with a system set up that works for you, it becomes something you do well and enjoy? Send your comments and discoveries to me...

Keep Creating a Better Life For Yourself, One Step at a Time...

Robb

The Attention Deficit Disorder Association Conference in Minneapolis, Minnasota July 2008

Here are some summary points from some of my notes from participating in the conference:

Some important reminders that the speakers addressed at the conference included the importance to those with ADD/ADHD challenges (and others who share those challenges) to cover some basics:

Get and stay connected socially with those who love, support and accept you for who you are and who encourage and support you.

Get work where you feel productive and appreciated.

Have constant structured support to stay focused on short term and long term goals.

Use systems and technology to help you get and stay organized.

Bring and keep fun in your life and plan for and schedule fun and social time so you support yourself in having it.

Some new things:

Research shows that having a trained and specialized ADD/ADHD Coach in your life helps you feel happier, stay focused and be more productive.

Daily exercise is key to overall mental and physical health and helps elevate mood, increase focus and is vital for those with ADD/ADHD.

Get an exercise buddy or group who will support you and you them...even nag each other to make time for exercise.

Complex exercise tends to be more stimulating and interesting so those are the best for those with ADD /ADHD to participate. (i.e. raquetball, martial arts, and other sports with many levels of complexity and mastery that offer many ways to constantly learn and improve.)

With the guidance of an expert, you may be able to get accomodations at work. It is best to enroll the services of an expert before beginning this conversation at work.

It is probably best NOT to disclose your ADD at work before enrolling the help of an expert.

ADHD ADD at the workplace

The qualities and traits of ADHD can show up as positives and/or negatives in the workplace. Many times those traits that are showing up as negative or perceived by others as negative can be turned around in short order. Sometimes an advisor, advocate, strategists or support staff is needed to make the transition as successful as possible. These changes can result in job security, promotions, raises and/or new and bigger opportunities. In my experience, some of the clients I have worked with have gone from being an employee at jeopardy of losing his or her job, or an executive at risk, too being seen and recognized as a vital link to the success of the business or organization. For example, one architect with key marketing and sales responsibilities for a key architectural firm went from a place of the partners discussing his possible dismissal to a place where the partners were discussing how they could pay him more incentives and praising him for firm wide record breaking performance. The solutions involved many parts and stages, some of the things I advocated for and worked with the employee and firm to create included reframing the context within which his role was viewed and thereby defined, comparing the support staff and administrative functions in place in his areas of responsibilities compared to those of similar levels in other parts of the firm, gathering broader and deeper financial data to make a sound argument for the changes that needed to be made that were not only justified, but demanded by the firm's own button line history. After the client and I had his actions and plan in place and a clear plan of attack in place, all of our key requests were granted and the implementations were successful to the benefit of the employee, as well as, the entire firm.

If someone is concerned about job security, finding and keeping the right joy, keeping a position in the company they are in (at least until something better is secured), it is important to take both a big picture perspective as well as identifying the details. Top performance is in the best interests of the employee as well as the entire organization. If you or someone you know are concerned about such things, you may begin by speaking about (and writing down) the plus and minus sides of the big picture: What is working and what is not working? What is a true problem and what is a perception problem?
Then, proceed to get to smaller and smaller details until you have a full list of what is working and what is not working. (alternatively, one can start with the details and build up or start with the big picture and get more specific). At that point, put the list down for a period of time and come back to it several times with fresh eyes. Then, it is time to engage in productive conversation with a trusted friend, family member or professional who can help.
I invite you to tell me about your current or past experiences with ADHD at the workplace.