Crazy at work? It may just be office ADD

By Tom McGrath

updated 9:03 a.m. ET Oct. 9, 2007

How bad is it for Adam Campbell? This is how bad: Before he can send an e-mail, he has to delete one.

"Arggh," he grunts, staring at the error message on his computer. Adam has just finished composing an e-mail to his boss, postponing a 3 p.m. conference call.

But Adam's mailbox is so stuffed with messages that this new missive refuses to go anywhere. His fingers now stomp over the keys as he deletes some old (and useless? let's hope so!) e-mail. Finally, the message zooms off into cyberspace.

Across the cluttered office, noted psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, M.D., watches with a bemused look. "Adam," he says calmly, "why don't you just empty the whole thing out?"

It's a reasonable enough question, akin to asking a man who complains of headaches why he doesn't simply remove the railroad spike protruding from his skull. Adam seems a little flustered by it. Well, he starts to explain, I still need to respond to a lot of these e-mails, and, yeah, okay, some of them are, like, 9 months old, but... .

Suddenly Dr. Hallowell is on his feet and moving toward Adam's computer. He reaches into his shirt pocket for his reading glasses and peers over Adam's shoulder at the screen. Spotting just how many e-mails Adam has yet to respond to, he chuckles, then sits back down. For a moment it seems that Adam may continue protesting, but slowly a look of defeat washes across his face. "What are you supposed to do," he asks forlornly, "when you're down by 3,200 e-mails?"

3 surefire stress killers To focus better, calm down. "The higher your stress levels," says Ned Hallowell, M.D, "the more likely you are to avoid tasks that require heavy concentration." So fight stress, and boost work productivity. Sip tea. U.K. researchers found that people who drank 4 cups of tea daily had 20 percent lower levels of stress hormones than those who drank a placebo beverage containing the same amount of caffeine. Breathe deeply. Before starting a task, perform 5 minutes of deep breathing — 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out — which has been shown to reduce stress. What's more, Emory University scientists discovered that people who regularly meditate maintain better focus as they age. Invest in sleep. Canadian researchers found that people who reported a lack of quality shuteye also had higher stress levels and trouble concentrating the next day.

It's a rainy afternoon in rural Pennsylvania, and Dr. Hallowell has come to Men's Health's editorial offices for a 21st-century Information Overload Intervention. Lord knows, the MH staff — in particular Adam Campbell, features editor — can use it. On a typical day, the two dozen or so people who put together the editorial portion of this magazine send and receive upward of 10,000 e-mails. That's 10,000 messages ranging from tiny, tinny "thanks" to epic, complex screeds rivaling documents put out by the Vatican. To say nothing of all the other information exchanges that take place on a daily basis: countless landline and cellphone calls, voice-mail and text messages, even honest-to-goodness, face-to-face conversations. It's a mushroom cloud of messages.

The same is probably true of your workplace. "Our brains field more data than ever before," says Dr. Hallowell, "and with no acknowledgment of it." Indeed, though most of us act as if nothing big has changed in our lives, Dr. Hallowell says we're actually in the midst of a historic shift not seen since Gutenberg fired up the first printing press.

The problem, as Adam Campbell and the rest of the Men's Health staff would be the first to attest, is that our Gutenberg-era brains may not actually be capable of handling all this Bill Gates–era info. Meanwhile, Dr. Hallowell himself — one of the country's foremost authorities on attention deficit disorder — says that in his private practice he's seen a spike in people reporting ADD-like symptoms: difficulty focusing, inability to complete a project, irritability, anxiety. To paraphrase Dean Wormer in "Animal House": Frazzled, distracted, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

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The good news is that there are ways to regain control of our lives. And there may be no better person to help than Dr. Hallowell. A stocky, affable New Englander with wiry salt-and-pepper hair and bright blue eyes, he has spent the past several years focusing on how the pace of modern life messes us up. He wrote an award-winning book, "CrazyBusy," and frequently consults with corporations about how they can help their employees. That's his mission here today: to help three Men's Health editors — and by extension, you — manage the mass of information we all deal with.

The really good news is that none of the solutions involve tossing out our iPhones, dusting off our Leo Sayer records, and pretending it's 1974 again. Although maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing. As Adam says, "At least in 1974, 125 people weren't contacting me every day."

Case Study 1
Subject: Peter Moore
Problem: Brain Interrupted

When Peter Moore landed his first magazine job back in the '80s, the Internet, e-mail, and fax machines hardly existed. So, of course, the pace of life in the magazine business — and offices generally — was far slower.

But Peter, who as Men's Health's editor is essentially COO of the editorial department, isn't so sure that a faster pace translates to "more productive." At least not as far as his ability to edit a story goes. Today, this task is constantly interrupted by frequent, frequently urgent e-mails from MH's hard-charging editor-in-chief, David Zinczenko, and the rest of the staff. Peter appreciates the value of those messages, but admits they're a mixed blessing. "They sap my concentration," he says.

Now, conventional wisdom says that handling a few pressing e-mails and phone calls during the day shouldn't be such a huge deal. After all, do we not have big brains? Are we not multitaskers? The short answer, unfortunately, is no. Study after study shows that our gray matter really can't handle two complex tasks at once — at least not without slowing us down or screwing us up. It's why, for instance, someone on the other end of the phone can always tell from your distracted tone that you're checking e-mail ("e-mail voice," Dr. Hallowell calls it), and why studies say that talking on a cellphone while driving impairs you as much as having had a couple of drinks.

Worker distractions 2 hours, 15 minutes: Time the average office worker spends visiting non-work-related Web sites daily. 1.1 billion: Dollars employers lose in productivity each week during the NFL season to workers managing their fantasy football teams. 14: Percentage of office workers who admit to browsing adult Web sites on the job. 21: Percentage of office workers who constantly check personal e-mail.

"Our brains have billions of neurons, each making thousands of connections, and yet the truth is we can really focus on only one thing at a time," says René Marois, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. In a study published last year in the journal Neuron, Marois and his colleagues used fMRI to show that an actual neural bottleneck occurs in our frontal lobes when we attempt to do two tasks at once.

And don't assume that once you've finished responding to an e-mail, you can seamlessly go back to what you were doing before. A study done at Microsoft last year looked at how long it takes people to return to a task when they're interrupted by an e-mail or instant message. The average: an astonishing 15 minutes. More than a quarter of the subjects didn't return to the task at hand for 2 hours. "It's inertia," says Eric Horvitz, M.D., Ph.D., the principal researcher for Microsoft Research and a coauthor of the study. "We found that people, once interrupted, take the opportunity to do other things, like check more e-mail. Or go to news or sports pages."

Dr. Hallowell calls this "screensucking," and he says it's a turbocharged version of a natural human trait: procrastination. "Technology gives us even more of an excuse not to do tough work," he says.

What's more, when people do finally start working again, they don't reach their earlier level of concentration for 10 additional minutes. Total time that can be lost answering just one e-mail: a half hour, and that's the best case scenario. "Every e-mail interruption is like a hand grenade being thrown in the middle of your brain," says Dr. Hallowell.

Disable your distractions

Protect your morning burst. That's what Dr. Hallowell calls the rush of energy and focus most of us have in the early part of the day, and he says we should be ruthless about shielding it from interruptions. His advice: Do 60 to 90 minutes of work in the morning before you check e-mail or go online. "Protect that time to do stuff before e-mail and other distractions," he says. "Be rigid: 'I'm going to do top-quality brain work.' "

Monitor your online time. How many hours does Web surfing suck up? If you use Firefox as your Internet browser, go to pageaddict.com and download the software, which gives you a summary of the time spent (wasted?) on each Web site. Or just measure your time with a stopwatch some day. When you see how much time you're wasting, you'll be more motivated to stop.

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