April 14, 2006 11:36 AM

Screensucking, EMV, and logonorrhea
Posted by Douglas Eisenhartat 11:36 AM

What do you think: is daily life more, or less, hectic these days? What about life on the job, with its laptops, cellphones, Blackberries, IM, WiFi, and the like, making us on the go and in touch 24/7/365?

That's what I thought you'd say. Now, from the man who brought us the term Adult A.D.D. (aka, adult attention deficit disorder), Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, comes a book about what he sees as a new trend. In "CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone A.D.D." (Ballantine Books, 2006), Hallowell argues that the frenzy of the wired (and wireless) world is making us all display the symptoms of A.D.D., and he gives names to the new phenomena.

Here's a sample:

EMV, or E-Mail Voice. This, Dr. Hallowell writes, is "the unearthly tone a person's voice takes on when he is reading e-mail while talking to you on the telephone." Researchers at M.I.T., he tells us, have developed a program that can electronically measure how engaged people are in a conversation, giving scientific certainty to your suspicion that you are not being listened to.

To learn about screensucking, logonorrhea, and other contemporary afflictions, read the piece from BostonWorks' sister publication in New York, The New York Times Job Market.