DADD - Digital Attention Deficit Disorder

I have it and I bet you do too, you just have not been diagnosed. Ask yourself if you have these symptoms:

• You open a browser with a distinct purpose in mind, but forget that purpose instantaneously when your home page loads. Five minutes later you clue into what you wanted to look at in the first place.
• There are two-dozen instances of Explorer (or the equivalent number of tabs in Firefox) open at any given time on your computer. Only two are of any importance whatsoever.
• You must physically write down search words on a piece paper so you stay focused on the task at hand.
• No matter what site you are on, something catches your eye and you click.
• As a browser is firing up you begin to read emails or offline print during the nanosecond in between to "kill time".
• You hear people on the other end of the phone saying "are you there, did you hear me" (and it goes well beyond family).
• You start to pay a bill via on-line banking and your session times out (my record is 3 times in a row).
• There are at least 25 unsent items in the draft folder that will never be sent.
• You bookmark everything for fear of missing something important.
• Cleaning up bookmarks is a once a month ritual. Unfortunately the ritual consists of getting lost in the process as you begin to click them all, which ultimately results in only one less bookmark after 2 hours of "cleansing".
• You listen to the same podcast six times as you work on a document until you figure out that working and listening are not simultaneous multi-tasking events you are capable of achieveing. This repeats itself every Monday because you think "this time it may work".
• In the middle of a deadline driven project with minutes to go, you feel compelled to check hotmail, just for a second.
• You have become Quick Draw McGraw with your Blackberry. You can now outdraw any lawyer on Bay St in your sleep.

There are likely many more symptoms, please use the comments below to help others overcome this syndrome before it is too late.

Am I alone on this? I think not. Admittedly I am a scatter-brain at the best of times but I know that there are others out there yet to be diagnosed. If there are enough of us, I will order t-shirts. Now if I could only remember that lovely site where you can get them from...

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