- Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable
I’m Paul, and I’m addicted to distraction. (Hi Paul.)
I’m subclinically ADHD-1 (predominantly lazy-fuck) and I have probably the worst kind of job for my subtype: periods of intense stress-driven troubleshooting punctuated by periods of downtime. Add to that a big writing project I’m trying to soft-land, and I’ve gotten myself stuck in a nice little chronic avoid-stress-avoid cycle which means shit takes forever to get done. And this bears a real resemblance to the addiction cycle: which has been characterized as:
- Pain
- Reaching out to an addictive agent to salve our pain
- Temporary anæsthesia
- Negative consequences
- Shame and guilt, which result in more pain or low self-esteem
The link between lazy-fuckitude and addiction is actually starting to be recognized as a physiological one:
It is speculated that every time we shift our attention from, say, responding to an email to answering the phone to editing a story, our brain releases a shot of dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in seeking rewards and stimulation. This is probably why some refer to their BlackBerries as CrackBerries.
The crash from the distraction rush comes when I realize how much of my short life is being wasted checking the Internet or dicking around with my bike, etc. Obviously, you’ve got to have some downtime, but I can lose a lot of productive time even when I stop fucking off, recovering from a space-out. You don’t get right back to full productivity.
Lately, I’ve been having some success with the “30-minute sprint” technique. Focus on a small, low-priority task for 30 minutes, then give yourself a break. You get something done, but just as importantly: you feel a sense of accomplishment, which is its own satisfaction. Over time (one hopes, anyway), the satisfaction from getting shit done begins to edge out the momentary cheap high of checking my friends’ Facebook updates.
In the end, you have to use whatever works for you. Key to my recovery from being a lazy fuck is in recognizing the habit in every moment it arises and making a different choice. Do it now. Launch word processor, open vein. womp.
