Adult ADD Strengths

One of the advantages of coaching adults with ADHD, is that you often have some pretty creative clients. One client had trouble organizing themselves while they were out of the house and generally preferred using the computer to help her manage time.

Being a Mac person (sold them for 7 years) and knowing that she didn’t want a cell phone (so no iphone) I suggested she consider getting an ipod touch because ease of use and intuitiveness were important considerations. Also I asked if she usually lost her ipod, because the ipod touch is amazing, but kind of expensive, and that wasn’t a problem for her. She got an ipod touch it worked great for her. Here’s her review of it from the usefulness for an ADD time management perspective.

Update: Here’s the wiki page for the ADHD presentation on the Moosecamp Wiki

I’m doing a presentation at Moosecamp at the Northern Voice Blogging Conference in Vancouver today. Title is Attention Surplus Condition (Aka ADHD) in High Tech. Managing all that Extra Energy and Creativity. So if you or anyone you know or work with have the gift and the challenge of ADHD, and are at the blogging conference at UBC today, please show up with your questions. Thanks to noted Vancouver Fashion Photographer and digerati Kris Krug for the encouragement. Here’s the overview

There are a lot of ways how to deal with Adult Attention Surplus Condition, aka Adult Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Here are a few.

Top Ten Ways to Manage Adult ADHD

1. ADHD Coaching. More for adults than children. Pills can be useful but pills don’t teach skills. They can however, put you in a better place to learn them through ADD coaching or therapy. See the 26 benefits of adult ADHD coaching. Adult ADHD Coaching focuses on practical day to day ways to manage adult ADHD more effectively at work and at home. Adult ADHD Coaches work on dealing with the challenges of ADHD and identifying and developing the strengths of having ADHD. They work over the phone for 3-4 sessions per month. Most adult ADD coaches offer a free sample sessions of ADD coaching so you can try before you buy.

Less = More.

That’s the concept of Zenware the software category of reducing the increasing amount of clutter clogging our computer screens. Jeffrey MacIntyre had a good article in Slate magazine about it. Via Webworker Daily.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you’re used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you’ll benefit most from their absence.

Lifehacker has a great post on Top Ten Telephone Tricks

I especially like #1 Trick automated phone bots into thinking your line’s dead. and #4. Skip the greeting and get right to the beep with one keypress. ADHD adults are known for many things but patience in the face of inefficient, irritating voicemail loops from hell isn’t one of them.

There’s a special place in hell waiting for the person(s) who invented voicemail menus that often leave you trapped in voicemail hell. One of the worst I remember was Hewlett Packard where you spent several minutes going from one voicemail option to another for what seemed to be like an eternity only to have them hang up on you at the end.

Here’s some links to some of the content that will be mentioned in my discussion on Attention Surplus Condition in Technology at Barcamp Saskatoon Saturday September 29th.

Adult ADHD Screener Test

Top Ten Advantages of Having ADD in a High Tech Career

ADHD Treatment - Technology - Online, desktop and external clock and reminder for those of us whose internal clocks don’t work so well.

Succeeding with ADHD in the Workplace

Here’s a few other links relating to ADHD at work

ADD at work articles

ADDA’s ADHD at work section

ADHD on the Job

Possible places to call for ADHD Diagnosis in Saskatchewan. Or where to get suggestions on where to look.

After doing a presentation at Barcamp Vancouver on Attention Surplus Condition in Technology that seemed to go over well, I was asked to do a presentation on the same topic at Barcamp Saskatoon by Ginger Koolick, one of the organizers and who is also the Manager of Media Development for Educational Media Access and Production (EMAP) at the University of Saskatchewan.

I’ll be doing it Saturday September 29th at 3.15 Saskatoon time. It will be an interactive one and questions are welcome. If you’re not sure what are Barcamp is check this out.

I recently got a isight camera and we’ll be doing the presentation virtually through ichat. Seems like a lot of interesting topics for techies, here’s the topics page.

For those of us impatient ADDers, or just those who want to surf the net quickly and efficiently, here’s some keyboard shortcuts for Firefox (you’re not still surfing with internet exploder are you?) from Lifehacker.

Here’s some of the navigation shortcuts from the toolbar

* Select location bar: Ctrl/Cmd+L or Alt+D
* Select search bar: Ctrl/Cmd+K
* Back: Backspace or Alt/Cmd+Left
* Forward: Alt/Option+Right or Shift+Backspace
* Change search engine: Ctrl/Cmd+Down (Next) +Up (Previous)

I’ve been using a lot of Firefox shortcuts for a while, but the select location and search bar was new and useful. More keyboard shortcuts on their site, check the comments for tips too.