I have written fairly extensively about the phenomenon that I call organizational attention deficit disorder,  or “Org-ADD” for short. It is prevalent in way too many of our working lives, without regard to industry, function or position. We busy ourselves (or others make us busy) with the myriad of activities that come our way through a variety of inputs. We have become so busy, buzzing around like bees, that our electronic devices have come to communicate to us in “bee language,” replacing the traditional ring of the telephone with the ubiquitous “bee buzz” that is the vibrate mode for our “can’t do without” hand-held-all-everything communication device.

If Twitter, Facebook and never-ending texting have taught us anything, it’s that everything is important to someone, somewhere at some time. So how do we respond? We try to do it all. “Work” no longer describes a destination, like it did for our parents. Now it describes a state of being. A contiguous connection of actions, reaction and distraction. That’s what being a competent over-achiever is all about, right?

And we are training our children to follow in our footsteps. Their lives must be meticulously scheduled, from the earliest age, in order to squeeze in soccer, ballet, gymnastics, piano, mandarin and pilates for toddlers (okay, I made that one up, I think). We have replaced being a kid, with being a small grown up, complete with schedule anxiety and stress. No wonder there’s a boom in anti-anxiety medications for kids, which was virtually unheard of a generation ago.

Rather than recognize this explosion of “mini-me’s” with our kids as negative, we tell ourselves a convincing story that we are giving them an advantage, a head start for when they are a head taller. An opportunity to outpace and outperform the other kids out there. And it’s working, sort of.

Sure our kids are better prepared to get on the treadmill that we find ourselves on, with never enough time to do what needs to be done (which is to say “everything”). They’ve learned to put their nose to the grindstone, to eat from the drive through window and talk about their busy schedules to their equally busy friends. But they are missing out on one of the greatest gifts of childhood, the license to be a kid. The opportunity to engage in free form play that is the fuel for the type of creativity that  we lament seeing less and less of in our workplaces today. Hmm.

Do your kids a favor. If you can not overcome your own case of Org-ADD, at least let it stop at your doorstep. Unplug when you are with your kids so that you can be present, physically and emotionally. And if you kid’s idea of pretending is “pretending” to be happy with their over scheduled lives, do them another favor. Stop and think about when you were happiest as a kid, and look at their lives through that lens. Perhaps it’s time for a time-out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 7:29 am and is filed under Career Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.