Finally worked-out one of the reasons I’ve been so fundamentally and astonishingly unable to concentrate at work.

And it’s a classic CLASSIC case of forgetting something.

Last year when I was working for Hellstra, I found that the environment I was in was not at all conducive to working. For one there were lots of people talking like they were deaf. For two there were not one, but THREE radios on people’s desks playing radio fairly audibly. And none of these radios were on the same station.

My solution at the time was simple: White Noise. No, not some bizarre def-metal rock band (from the gagralaca mind-zones, who are not only believed to be the loudest rock band, but the loudest noise of any kind in existence; sorry, channeling Hitch-Hikers Guide there).

So, white noise; it helped me focus, it helped me drown out the background crap, and aided my concentration astonishingly.

Why I forgot it is part II of this problem; the ADD I was diagnosed with late last year. I dispute the name (It’s not Attention Defecit, it’s Attention overload; we pick-up everything), but the diagnosis explained a whole lot of stuff, and I got some good tools and information to deal with the issues of an over-sensitive mind.

Which I promptly forgot. Just like with sugar (I eat some, I eat some more, then get all depressed and wonder why).

So, now I’m back on the White Noise bandwagon, and suddenly all the external influences, noises, music playing at A’s computer, people’s phones on speaker-phone because they can’t be arsed holding the handset up to their ears while on-hold, tennis balls bouncing, people walking past, people chatting nearby, conversations across the office, the nice guy who’s in the call-center actross from my desk talking to his callers… well, all of that is pretty much drowned-out.

Why not then listen to music, you might ask.

Well, because I listen to music.

Read that again, you might get it.

If you don’t, I’ll explain. Music: I enjoy it. Basically it’s another distraction. The tracks click over and I am distracted by the lyrics, the beat, the good guitar licks (why are they called licks btw; there’s no tongue involved is there?), the point of the music… and it dislodges the creative part of my brain and I get all sorts of story ideas.

Do I get any work done listening to music?

Not really.

White noise on the other hand isn’t a beat, isn’t rhythmic or anything else. It’s just constant sound. It’s not squeaky or changing, it’s not water pouring down a river, it’s not waves on a beach; both of these create an image to my mind you see, which leads to the aforementioned creative outpourings.

Not that creative outpourings are a bad thing mind you; especially when halfway through a second book and one third into the third in a series which one hopes will make me almost embarassingly rich and leave me with no option than to demand they wheel Parkie out of cryogenic freeze because he’s the only interviewer who I’ll speak with. It’s just that when I’m at work, I’m being paid to do shit, and that shit isn’t being done at present.

Not anymore however; now I’ve found a 20 second MP3 of white noise on Freesound. A quick download later and I had it in iTunes playing on an endless loop.

And thus I can concentrate again.

The only other way I’ve found to concentrate is to stay late at work when there’s no-one else around. Don’t want to do that anymore; it eats into my Being At Home time.

I’m officially weird.

Being ADD, it means I spend much of my life totally bored off of my nut. It’s a bit of an issue when you’re being paid by the hour.

Then, when the pressure’s on, you can perform feats of productivity the likes of which even god has never seen (10 points for the first person to recognise where I got that quote).

Take today.

I spent the hours between 10 and 4 bored and doing odd bits of work, being just as productive as many… then I got a deadline… impossible actually. I had to document something I hadn’t even seen, on an application that didn’t work with the particular functionality. And I had to do it by 5.30 (when I wanted to leave for Bikram); they needed the material for training tomorrow.

“Leave it to me,” I said.

I zipped over to the appropriate people, asked nicely (but not too nicely) for help getting access to the functionality. A couple of mis-fires, and I had it on my desktop.

Then I clicked into high-gear, creating 5 Wiki pages in the space of an hour.

To put this into perspective, the generally accepted norm for documenting a piece of UI functionality is about an hour a window or function.

I actually missed my Bikram deadline, but only because I decided to document the last window while on the high. I can do a double tomorrow (I’ve got a stack of things I want to do tonight anyway).

And you know, I’ve been told in the past not to rush things. A former employer took me aside once and said “You know that job I gave you, it should have taken you the rest of the afternoon. You’ve got to slow down.”

I didn’t say anything to that, but felt oddly put-down. I can’t help the speed I can get things done, and when I go, I go properly. If I know how to do something, I can do it very, very efficiently.

Take my time at a former employer – the ex tech-writer took 18 months to create a manual. I wrote a manual on an application (albeit somewhat simpler, but nonetheless complex in what I laughingly call UI design) in 2 weeks; 3 with corrections and reviews.

They liked me, but not enough to pay me what I was worth. I left that job feeling totally unappreciated and — in some ways — betrayed.

And here I am again, getting-off (though not in a rude way) on the adrenaline of a deadline.

Potentially this is another reason why I felt so awful when I lost the job earlier in the month. I was gearing-up for the work, I’d worked-out how to do it, how long it would take and planned it out in my head (which I find interesting and engaging), then they started screwing around and eventually said they didn’t want to work with me.

I took it personally. Something I’ve really got to stop.

There was a point to this blog entry, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.

Oh,  I’m a yellow apparently, and I rock and am amazing, or so say the two people who desparately needed the material. So that’s nice to know

Deep breath and sigh.

So here I am, lateish to work again, and bugged by something that’s beginning to raise its head out of my memories again.

It’s been a stressful 30 days or so; the move, the colonic (which was good, I highly recommend it; but it still took a fair bit out of me), 17 days straight of Bikram, arsehole ex-housemates refusing to pay rent on rent day, and announcing they had issues with my moving out a full 15 days after I did-so (fucking passive-aggressives!)…

All sorts of things have poked and prodded me, and now I’m sitting here in a bit of a blue funk (I won’t say the “D” word, because (a) it’s not that dark, and (b) even a whiff of that word has insurance companies running for the hills; never EVER say the “d” word to a doctor if you’re feeling a bit down or crappy btw!).

Where was I? Oh yeah.

So I have issues. Lots of them. Most of them sit quite deep and don’t bother me until a set of circumstances (see paragraph above) stress me out and then they start to bubble up, like  salmonella in a jar of food… bubbling… bubbling…

And now I’m here; had a good old scream in the shower when I realised what it was that had been bugging me. Don’t know what the neighbours might have thought, but in this new place, it’s not like they’re the other side of two panels of thin plaster and wooden-frame is it?

So I’m in a financial hole, thanks to the ex house-ies; I’ve contributed of course because I’m not particularly good at saving cash. I’m feeling fragile and really just want to stay at home, but can’t afford to and know that if I do that, I’ll just dig myself deeper.

I take responsibility easily…

One of the things that’s come out is the issue of confidence.

For various reasons which I won’t go into here (mainly because it would end-up as a rant about the past; boring) my confidence isn’t really as strong as it could be.

Having been diagnosed ADD last year helped with this somewhat (so, I’m not being deliberately thick, and I’m not an idiot; I just interpret things differently and at higher speed…) but every-so-often, I get to a point where the confidence falls into a gelatinous heap, spreading thinner and thinner and therefore vulnerable to anything that comes along; emails from a friend yesterday — which were in-fact not that bad — had me running for cover and trying to identify if she had a problem with me; she didn’t… we cleared it up… and I — as always — felt like a total idiot afterwards. This happens a lot. I interpret something as “A”, when it’s actually “B”. I wonder sometimes… I really do… but I just need to eat properly (protein, no sugar… oh damn. oh DAMN. I just realised what probably did this. IDIOT!!! I bought a vegan chocolate yesterday. And ate it yesterday. And here I am in the hole wondering why I feel like crap.

IDIOT

IDIOT

IDIOT

IDIOT

IDIOT

IDIOT

<sigh>

Anyway, where was I?

Identifying the origins — within myself — of this issue were easy; being regularly undermined by parental figures who refused to believe my reasons for things, and repeated denials that when “A” happened, I didn’t do “B” as they were insisting… well, these took their toll after, what was it, 20 years of regular (though not constant; that would be unfair) disbelief, yelling and oppression.

I’m much better than I was. My mind would like me to be able to dump it all, but it’s difficult. It’s not like throwing it all in a box and putting it out on the path for the rubbish collectors to pick-up and take away.

And seeing as I’ve just performed the purge of my life, ditching clothes, furniture, rugs, pictures, and burning a set of diaries from a period of my life which was uber stressful, it’s a little frustrating to find there’s *still* crap left behind.

No, not frustrating, boring. Really boring. I’ve been over this stuff before. I thought I dealt with it. It feels like one of those really manipulative ex-friends you might have managed to dump 2 years ago, suddenly turning up on the doorstep wanting to chat and continue the relationship… it’s actually like my father continually and relentlessly emailing my address and not taking “no” for an answer (just like he always did… never met anyone in my life who just wouldn’t leave things alone, he just had to have his own way… bizarre).

So here I am… Deep breath Lisa, smile (rueful)… breathe in, breathe out.