I've always had a ton of difficulty concentrating at work. I don't think I have ADD or executive function disorder, because I'm fairly good in other areas of my life. How do I fix it?
The question pretty much says it all. A lot of the time I feel like the guy in Office Space who "only does 15 minutes of actual work" each week. I'm very good at doing responsive things like fixing problems and presenting at meetings, which makes my boss happy. But when I actually have to proactively do the actual work, I'm utterly terrible. My coworkers completely run laps around me, and it's not because they're smarter, it's because they're focused for far more of the day.
I've tried lots of things. I've blocked most web sites on my work computer for years. I put my phone in restricted mode. I've tried the Pomodoro Technique. I'm reading Deep Work. I listen to music or sometimes audio books. I quit caffeine. None of it really seems to help. I just reread the same things endlessly, or get distracted by some tiny aspect of the problem, or spiral into obsessive negative thinking, or just completely space out when I'm supposed to be working. Pretty soon 8 hours have gone by and I've done almost nothing.
Last year I had a 9-month project with well-defined goals. I basically did very little during the day, and ended up doing it all very late at night -- sometimes staying up until 4 in the morning. It did actually work and I met all the deadlines, but it was obviously not fun and pretty much wrecked my personal life during that time.
Our office is deathly quiet with few distractions, so it's not that.
Again, I don't have this problem much outside of work. I'm capable of keeping the house mostly clean and maintained, paying the bills on time, making dinner every night, reading long books, etc. I'm not perfectly conscientious, but I'm not a total disaster either. I did OK (not great) in college and grad school. In the last few months had to take two all-day super-challenging tests that took weeks of studying beforehand, and I focused perfectly and totally aced them (99th %ile). So I'm clearly capable of paying adequate attention to complex tasks when I'm not at work and/or there's a direct and very clear time pressure. But at work there really isn't, and this has been a problem at several different jobs over most of my adult life.
It's just that if something isn't intrinsically valuable to me and I don't have a deadline, I can't figure out how to MAKE my brain do it. Any ideas? |
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