Aspies For Freedom

My work load has gone up recently.

I used to be able to get away with spending only 60% of my time working. The rest of the time I'd spend  writing poetry, exploring non-work related ideas and day dreaming. Now I find that unless I spend pretty much all of my time working I don't get everything done.

I know this is how it's supposed to be; I'm supposed to work while at work. But I find it amazingly hard to get through the day without some form of distraction.

It's almost as if (in my head) there's a door slightly ajar. Behind it there's a place of wonders (fabulous ideas, beautiful images) to which I'm irresistibly drawn

I need to visit this place to maintain my sanity. But I know that if I go there at the wrong time or stay too long, I'll loose my job, alienate my family and even make myself ill (though lack of sleep or not eating).

Does anyone else need distraction to maintain their sanity? But find balancing this with work/family commitments difficult.

Yep same for me, I don't even have family but it's this problem that drove me to seek diagnosis with ADD (and got me diagnosed as AS with ADD).

Oh definitely, on my last (only) job, it was the sort where you have to work against the clock, but because I had no time to do non-work related things in between things, I was driven to depression and I think I was gradually losing rational thought.
To compensate it seemed my mind just took a break every now and then and I found myself just stood still, staring into space for quite a while. I sort of zoned out completely and I didn't realise I was doing it until I came back round.
I didn't last at that job for too long.

yep but don't need to do it every day. I'm lucky though with my job i can get distracted with work related ideas. Sometimes I can go down this line ignoring work with a higher priority, but I have to do it to stay sane. Sometimes I resist and use it as a treat to do something urgent first and then do the thing that is trying to get my attention.

It's kind of like your ideas are in the box of your head trying to get out and explore, they demand your attention, or freedom of thought.

I always put a magazine of my interests on my desk when I start work to glance at between customers. I think work is generally dull but it is a means to an end. Boring jobs with over enthusiastic managers/ supervisors are worst. I can't really complain about my current job, it's easy and well paid and although its busy at times we also have alot of quiet times.

Yep, that has been a major problem for me at the office. I love research but before I get done with one path of research on the problem, I see 10 other ways to approach gathering more data about more aspects, which branches off into more. Soon I am immersed in detail level work for hours. I accumulate tons of papers full of data on tons of details, with things marked in highlighter.

Until... I throw it all in the trash. Amazing. I usually throw a whole week of work in my trash can because (1) the part that interests me is the research and (2) I always get stuck when it is time to summarize the data and give it to the boss or I don't even know who to give it to.  I'm working hard to fix that problem. But... I always have trouble when it is time to communicate the results of my research to another human.  They have no idea how much work I do. Just that I know stuff.

For a moment,
My mind did wander,
Away from what,
I meant to do,

And in that moment,
My mind did wonder,
As it found,
Something new.

My work Mantra: May I keep control today; not let my mind get swept away.

Since getting headphones and bringing in CDs of music to play I've found it a bit easier to concentrate on work as it cuts out most of the outside noise that was such a distraction.

I still get interrupted a bit though and have to pull off the headphones so people can talk to me.

It's also a bit of a concern that people can come up behind me without my knowing until the very last minute but I still think overall it has been a positive move to have the music.

Structuring the working day is hugely important for my work productivity. I find that I can only work well in short bursts.

I find that identifying tasks at the start of the week, working out  a timetable, and prioritising really helps. Into this I also build meetings and times when I have to call people etc.

By identifying times it enables me to work less pressure to meet deadlines.

However, it is important to be  a "starter completer" wherever possible. Because of my shorter concentration threshold I have the tendency to start something and let my mind wander, and then stop and go onto, something else. I then do that - briefly!

It also helps when working on longer tasks to build in a 3/4 minute break when I can pull back and just relax. Knowing I can do this helsp me to relax and focus.

For some reason, I find it easiest just to start somewhere and then just keep going.

I'm like that too.

If I have a job I can keep going on--I'm alright.

But if I have lots of smaller jobs--with gaps between each job--then I start to daydream.  

Each gap affords me another opportunity to become distracted.

Here I am, distracted at work... my 1:30 appointment didn't show up and I'm online looking at various ways to get myself organized to complete my current semester's work... and I find this in the New York Times...

Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent
By LISA BELKIN

WASTING time gets a bad rap. We pester our children not to do it; we take pride in the multitasking that ensures we never do it; and we bristle at our fellow workers, shop clerks and just about anyone else who slows us down by doing it.

But we all do it.

One of my favorite books as a child was “Cheaper by the Dozen,” the story of Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., who introduced the idea of efficiency to 20th-century America. His time-shaving techniques ran the gamut from a new way of laying bricks to a quicker method of buttoning his vest (bottom to top, saving four seconds).

Inspired, I slept in my clothes for a few nights back then to save time dressing for school, though I don’t think that’s exactly what the man had in mind.

I can only imagine what Mr. Gilbreth would have made of the modern workplace, with its endless possibilities for distraction. His 21st-century counterparts are an army of product researchers, academics and personal improvement gurus, who all agree we are frittering valuable minutes, hours and even entire days, though they can’t agree on how many.

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

The experts disagree on how we are wasting all this time. The AOL survey says time is lost to surfing the Internet (given the source, that is either self-congratulatory or self-incriminating).

The Microsoft survey pointed to worthless meetings. Respondents said they spent 5.6 hours each week in meetings and 71 percent of them thought that those meetings “aren’t productive.”

Searching through clutter is another diversion, says Peggy Duncan, a “personal productivity coach” in Atlanta, who maintains that rifling though messy desks wastes 1.5 hours a day.

But wait, you say, you spend all your time working. Your boss is a slave driver. You’re the only one left in the office after the downsizing, meaning you are doing the work of three people. Well, there are numbers that also support this situation.

The average professional workweek has expanded steadily over the last 10 years, according to the Center for Work Life Policy, and logging 70-plus hours is now the norm at the top. And there are those of us who work even when we are at home, driving or worse. A poll conducted for Staples found that almost half of the small-business managers in the United States work during time meant for family, while 49 percent make business calls and check e-mail messages while behind the wheel; 18 percent read e-mail messages in the bathroom.

So how to reconcile the seemingly conflicting trends — the fact that we are working harder and wasting more time? A crotchety boss might say that we’re working longer because we’re wasting time, but the opposite may also be true. We are wasting time because we are working harder.

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says.

And those respites look an awful lot like wasting time.

It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.

Over the years I have come to see that the hours away from the writing are the time when the real work gets done. When a paragraph turns itself this way and that in a corner of my brain even while my fingers are buying books on Amazon.com. What appears to be wasted time is really jell time. This redefinition only makes me feel a little less guilty.

Mr. Kustka assures me that the problem is not the three to four hours of concentrated work I do each day, but rather the outmoded paradigm against which I measure that work. Productivity was directly related to time back when Mr. Gilbreth was measuring things, he said, but the connection is less direct today.

“We are in a knowledge-worker world,” he says. “If you were building me a building, I could measure the number of bricks. If you were loading a truck, I could measure the number of boxes. But I can’t simply count your words. That doesn’t measure quality.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that word count is how nearly all freelance writers are paid.

Instead I focused on his more general point that it shouldn’t matter whether I wrote these words in hours or days, at a desk or on a deck — the end result is all that counts.

“The old thinking says ‘the longer it takes, the harder you’re working,” says Lynne Lancaster, a founder of BridgeWorks, a business consulting firm. “The new thinking is ‘if I know the job inside and out and I’m done faster than everyone else then why can’t I go home early?’ ”

A few companies are taking the concept of “watch what I produce, not how I produce it” even further. At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment.

There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.

In other words, what looks like wasting time from where you sit, could be a whirl of creative thought from where I sit. And, with due respect to Mr. Gilbreth, all the energy that’s been poured into trying to force everyone to work at the same pace and in the same way — it seems that’s the real waste of time.

Ah, I think you do need breaks where you can just do whatever. I realise it is difficult in the workplace because they don't realise that one person might get more done in 60% of their time than somebody else in 100% of their time (hope I've explained this correctly).

It's also difficult when you're the sole breadwinner because so much pressure is on you. Is there any chance that your partner could get a bit of part time work to take the pressure off a little? Or if this isn't an option, is there somewhere at least at home where you can just go on your own and think?

Blimey, he's been spying on me at work!

My job's tricky (or possibly I'm just making excuses for my lack of having-it-together-osity) in that I start at 0600, when generally nobody else is at work so calls can't be made, meetings can't be held etc.  What I SHOULD be doing is using that time to do little jobs like adding new photos to the library etc, but somehow I manage to faff away the whole morning, until it's late enough to make some calls and organise some stuff, then leave the little jobs til the afternoon.  Plus it doesn't help that my boss doesn't actually know what I'm supposed to do, so if it doesn't get done, he doesn't notice!

I feel guilty about the time I spent on unwork, because I genuinely love my job and know I could do more if I didn't slack off so much.  It's great to see other people admit to it too.

Tomorrow (yeah right!) I'm going to do a big, very detailed step-by-step list of stuff I need to do, coz even though downtime's important, I gotta buckle down a bit more...

Hi! This is my first post here. I have major problems with this myself, and it's even easier to slack off because I run my own freelance writing business from home. It's easy for me to "waste" an entire day reading things on the internet. I love to read and learn. From a mental standpoint I am growing, but from a financial standpoint I could be making much more money if I could just get down to work! I probably spend anywhere from 1 to 3 hours per day working. I would like to be able to work 6.5 hours (not necessarily at one stretch) each day, which I don't think is expecting too much of myself. It's tough though. There are so many other interests pulling at me! I'd love to hear how everyone else deals with this, successfully or not.