Dr Hallowell

C-State and F-State

Excerpted from CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and about to Snap! : Strategies for Handling Your Fast-Paced Life

C-State is clear, calm, cool, collected, consistent, concentrated, convivial, careful, curious, creative, courteous, and coordinated.  On the other hand, F-state fracures focus and is frenzied, feckless, flailing, fearful, forgetful, flustered, furious, fractious, feverish, and frantic.  It can also drive on to utter the famous f-word.  In C-state you have found your rhythm.  In F-state you have lost it.

It is easy to move form C-state to F-state.  For example:

It is midnight in New York.  Jeff sits alone in his office.  He is finishing up a proposal he had intended to write during the day, but well, stuff got in his way.

First, he was buttonholed as he came in that morning by his boss, who asked him to participate in a conference call to Germany that ended up taking two full hours.  No concern was expressed and no allowance was made for how this might upset his day.  He was simply left with having to get more work done than there was time to do it in, at least at his ordinary, already brisk pace.  So he started to spring.  He tore through his emails like a backhoe, gouging out words and whole sentences, clawing to get the bare essentials before moving to the next email, responding only when absolutely necessary, tagging some to be dealt with later (but when?), pounding the keys on his keyboard as if they were stuck rocks, biting his tongue, pursuing his lips, uttering various curses under his breath, becoming both angry and overwhelmed at the multitude of requests the emails disgorged while in the back of his mind feverishly resenting that his boss had dragged him into the conference call without the least concern for the rest of his day.

Once through the emails–flagging dozens he would need to tend to before the day was over–he started to work on the proposal he had to deliver the net day.  ten minutes into that task, an important client called and said he was emailing Jeff a memo upon which he needed his opinion right now because the material was highly time sensitive.  Downloading the memo, Jeff looked aghast at its length as the little blue bar on the screen took forever to fill and complete.  How was he going to pore over all that and give a responsible opinion “right away”?

Turning from a modern Jimmy Olsen into SuperExec, Jeff squinted and furrowed into hyperfocus mode.  He asked Kelly, his assistant, to bring him a triple–three shots of espresso with milk.  Knowing the drill all too well, she tried to speak some calming words when she delivered the infamous triple.  It usually portended a bad day.

The memo was complicated.  Still, Jeff thought he could find a way to compose a reasonable answer.  But was it a $600-per-hour answer, an answer he would be confident enough about to put in writing and attach his name and the firm’s to?  Tension mounted in his forebrain as he absently scratched the back of his neck, gulped his caffeine, and rapidly tapped his pencil on the leather border of his blotter.  Finally, biting his lip, he took the plunge and put fingers to the keyboard to draft a reply.  A paragraph into it, he stopped without knowing he’d stopped and stared at a blank piece of paper to the left of his keyboard, doodling on it with his pencil as he did so.  When he snapped out of his daydream, he looked down and noticed that he had doodle in ornate script the word DOOM.

Flustered and unable to clear his mind, he went back online to recheck his email.  Intending to spend just a few minutes on this to give himself a breather, he instead spent an hour.  Kelly then interrupted him to inform him that Dagmar Fitch had arrived for her appointment.  Cursing the keyboard, Jeff stood up and went out to meet his client.

That meeting chewed up two more hours.  Dagmar loved to talk, and Jeff couldn’t cut her off.  In the current climate, it was imperative to keep clients happy, especially wealthy ones like her.  At least the two hours were billable.

After he bade farewell to Dagmar, giving her shoulder a confident, reassuring pat, he went back to the memo, all to aware that tomorrow’s proposal waited silently like a fiend, as yet untended to  There was no time to spare on fine points in the memo, so he composed an opinion as best he could and e-mailed it back to his client with a note.  ”Sorry this took longer than expected.”  Total turnaround time had been four hours.  And he was sorry?  That’s the practice of law in modern life.  Life had been so much easier when opinions had to be mailed or messengered; at least then there was a cutoff time beyond which the messenger would not come, at which point delivery had to wait until the next day–which meant completing it could wait as well.

Just as he was settling back to attach the proposal, a junior associate popped in with a complex question that a senior partner had declared Jeff–and only Jeff–should answer.  Of course, it had to be answered right away.  Jeff begged off, saying it would simply have to wait until tomorrow; but after the junior associate left his office, the guilt in Jeff rose to such a pitch that he cursed again, called the junior associate back, and turned his attention to the question.  The kid was right, it was complex, but two hours later Jeff called the junior associate and gave him his answer.

By now the day was totally shot.  He had not written one page of the proposal, Kelly was cheerfully packing to go home as Jeff looked longingly not at her body but her job.  Wouldn’t it be nice? And why not? Not bothering with the all too obvious answers to that last question (money, power, advancement, intellectual stimulation, prestige, destiny, upbringing, lack of alternatives, the horse having left the barn…) Jeff sighed and got back to work.

He was in F-state now, distracted by all that had happened that day, annoyed at how his time had been stolen, irritated with himself for being pushed around so easily, but at the same time knowing he had to be flexible to do his job.  His mind ricocheted from the proposal to these other concerns and boinged back again like a ball in a pinball machine.  Anxious that he couldn’t get the proposal done in time, fearful of what that would mean, determined somehow to do it, angry that he was in this position, he kept working, his efficiency about one-quarter of what it normally would be.

His focus fracturing like a crack spreading through ice, he found it increasingly difficult to keep his mind on the proposal for any significant length of time.  He had to keep pulling his attention back to the computer screen as if redirecting a somnambulist.  Sleepwalking through the proposal, no longer efficient, he strained with his last few neurons of useful brainpower to somehow keep on task.  He was on automatic pilot, propelled by ancient instincts of survival.  By daybreak, miraculously, the proposal was done.

Welcome to our overloaded world, in which time and attention can be depleted before the day’s work has even begun.  Welcome to F-state.

F-state resembles attention deficit disorder.  In ADD, the brain races and can’t stop owing to its genetically set wiring.  The chief problem with this race car brain is that its brakes do not work well.  It’s got a Ferrari engine for a brain but Chevrolet brakes.  It can win races if it develops adequate brakes, but it will crash and burn if it doesn’t.

The challenge of modern life, even for people who do not have ADD, is to learn how to put on the brakes.  In order to cope with the many demands of everyday life and the information overload each day brings, a person needs to be able to stop and think, to pause over one point long enough to extract what matters before moving on.  Otherwise the day becomes a blur in which no significant work gets done.  Lots of energy gets expended, but it is mere sound and fury.  In order for the energy to get focused, a person must be able to put the brakes on incoming stimuli and outgoing impulses long enough to concoct a complex thought.  Life is a powerful accelerator these days; what separates the successful from the frustrated is the quality of their brakes and their ability to use them.  As mentioned earlier, a summary of the symptoms of true ADD looks like a description of what many millions of americans contend with today even if they do not have true ADD.

© Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Next Steps:

Learn about how to preserve C-state, and get it back from F-state if you lose it, in the rest of CrazyBusy

Watch a series of videos Dr. Hallowell made for VideoJug, discussing strategies and tips for keeping up with today’s fast paced environment