Anyone recognize this?

At work, and years ago at college, I'm experiencing problems concentrating on tasks. Of course this happens when tasks are tedious or repetitive, but very often this happens when things get exciting .

What happens?
I'm discovering something new, having a great idea, making an important decision and BENG! I'm off the job. Totally loose my focus and start doing something else like talking to collegues, mailing my friends, going to the coffee machine, cleaning my desk (uhm). Often it takes hours to get back to the task and by then it's hard to focus again.

Is this a common ADD trait? What can I do about it?

It sounds right to me.

Oh yeah...sounds just like me! Happened to me all the time. Medication has helped me stay on task now.

Well, I'll have to wait for that then.

I can totally relate to the "BANG!" sensation when I have a very exciting thought, although it rarely relates to work (LOL well I mostly decide my own steps/projects and not that many exciting things happen at work :p ).

But very frequently (once a week or more) while growing up, and still from time now (maybe once a month, more when I am stressed), I would have some REALLY exciting thought (tis only happens when it's a very EXTREME sensation), like an idea that I am excited about or remembering something I REALLY look forward to, and then as sudden as the idea has come up - in the same way that you walk into a room to fetch/do something and then stop and realise you've forgotten why you're there (which still happens to me on a daily basis) - I will just NOT REMEMBER FOR THE LIFE OF ME what I was soooo happy/excited about just a split second ago. I then have to step aside and do / think about something else and eventually it'll come back to me and I'll be able to think about/plan whatever it was that orignilaly came up, although sometimes it's totally lost! Same goes for very negative thoughts or bad things that come up in my mind occasionally.

I had come to the conclusion that:

a) The reason I don't get the excitment "mind wipe" much any more these days is because as a kid the world seems exciting, the older you get the less you get overly excited/happy about things (i.e. world loses its appeal/excitement factor as you grow up because things aren't "NEW AND SHINY" any more)

b) Some of these may just have been either "blips" where my brain fired the wrong emotion and then tried to recall it as good as possible, and that it is possibly a kind of "protective filter" when really negative thoughts/emotions pop up (like it gets covered up if my brain judges it to be too much to handle)

I am so like that! I'm a CAD technician so if I'm working on a project and I notice we need a detail, I'll stop what I'm doing and go do that... then notice another detail that we need and do that, for getting its site work I was suppose to be doing.

Another thing is that if I hyperfocus and spend three hours straight doing one thing. It takes about a half hour to shift gears to do something else. You too?

Shifting between task can take a very long time for me. Until I heard of ADD I couln't understand it. Concentrating on the next project will take up to half an hour and if anything happens in between I might never get to it. In my job people come to me all the time with questions and I just can't have that. At the end of the day I'm drained completely.