Metablog

UPDATE: Here’s another article by Thomas Brown, taking the view that ADD is or is one of a spectrum of executive function impairment disorders. Really good article. I’ll blog it later.

I just read a really interesting article about what Jeffrey Tate, a doctor specializing in ADD, thinks the core symptom of the disorder is. He thinks that it’s about not being able to focus on important tasks, as opposed to interesting tasks. Normally, either importance or interest are enough to allow us to focus on something, but for ADD sufferers, interest is all that suffices.

Now, this seems like it might be a bit off to me. Doesn’t everyone have trouble focusing on boring but important things? Or is that really pretty unusual? So, if you’re reading this, please answer these two questions:

1. Do you find it (a) easier (b) as easy, or (c) harder to focus on important tasks (things that need to be done) versus interesting tasks (that are entertaining, but not necessary)?
2. When there is something quite important but relatively uninteresting to be done, do you find it (a) easy (b) moderately easy (c) moderately hard, or (d) hard to get it done?

If I’m right, most people would answer C on the first question, and C or D on the second. Wouldn’t that make it so most people suffer from ADD? And what is “important”, in this context? Is it our conscious determination of the importance of the task? Unlikely. It’s probably some heuristic based on urgency, using cues from peer pressure (who wants you to do the task?) and the perceived immediate consequences of not doing the task. If someone is breathing down your neck about doing something, it can be a pretty powerful motivator.

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Broadly construed, there are generally only two ways people spend their time*. Either they’re doing something that helps them achieve a certain goal (such as keeping one’s job or not starving or keeping the house clean or getting a degree or finding romance), or they’re doing something that interests them, without having a particular goal in mind. The latter kind of activies are often called “wasting time”.

*More technically, there is a binary, exhaustive, and fuzzy categorization of “ways to spend time” that is the only one relevant to my post.

But is time spent thusly a pure waste? I would say not. Such time is often spent learning new things about the world, or improving one’s skills or social connections. And experiences thus gained can make a person more interesting, and more able to enjoy life, and sometimes can unexpectedly affect the goals a person has and how they achieve them. If I had never spent any time of this quality, I can’t imagine how much poorer my life would be. Additionally, one’s activities in this time are often guided by unconscious goals, which can become more concrete and explicit over time.

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