Dear Red Beard and others

Many thanks to the Ajhan Brahm video link. I just sat with him for an hour and found it delightful.
He talks about how important kindness is. Loving acceptance of our present state, present self and loving the meditation is a prime indicator of how it is going.
I've been very pleased with the response you have received. I read them a few days ago and started to add to the conversation but time and login necessity slowed me down. So I went away thinking about you and your post. There are several topics to cover from my perspective.
ADD and ADHD are often over used. As a school psychologist and school counselor for 20 years I can attest that they are real. There are a variety of ways to treat it. I like Daniel Amen's www.amenclinic.com approach where he looks at diet, exercise, vitamins, neurofeedback, and medications. He also shows pictures of blood flow in the brain with SPECT scans.
Heartmath has a few varieties of devices that measure the variation in beat to beat of your heart. Using one of them you will know as soon as you start to drift away and can make corrections. There is also a device through MyBrainSolutions that does a similar monitoring. These allow you to be meditating all the time you are sitting.
Every time you return to the object of meditation you have strengthened the cortical region of the brain governing attention. Just like every time you do a physical exercise it makes a difference with the muscles concerned. So be happy if you have noticed drifting because you are meditating by returning and have increased your capacity to do so, despite present circumstances.
There are many beneficial reasons to meditate. Whenever we do so we accrue the dividends. If you want a deep experience or taste of 'enlightenment' and do not have extended time available, I suggest you participate in an 'Enlightenment Intensive.' They use a technique of koans while sitting across from another person. With another person watching we spend a lot more time on task than sitting anonymously in a group or alone. Typically about a third to a half of participants have very deep experiences in a three day event.
When your not sitting, but moving about you might try the 'Just say gone' game. It is a noting technique where you note when you notice something leaving your awareness. There are three or four areas to pick from, visual, auditory, kinetic, and emotional. I lump the last two together and use three words: see, feel, hear. These all come from Shinzen Young. If you get competitive with this noting you have to be very present tense, with no other thinking. Daniel suggested the higher limits on these might be 50 or more notes per second. LOL I have no idea how to measure that, but I do know the more notes I make the more present I am, and the more relaxed and peaceful I become. So you can pay attention to music noting with wild abandon every sound drifting out of consciousness. That could include each base beat, drum beat, each time there is a lapse of notes from an instrument, etc. Similarly from breathing to walking you can note each major change but also every minor muscle movement as it fades into history. Visually if you are walking there are so many objects drifting away peripherally. Even sitting if your thinking in pictures there are changes to be noted as you follow a thread of thought.
Ahh, so many things to enjoy. But also include noticing all the alarms, and complaints that come up during the day. Accepting and enjoying these compete life in other ways....