Aging, Journal Entries and Losing the Battle of Concentration!

Starting out as a person who has a lot of interests, as well as a mild to moderate case of ADHD, my concentration ability has always been somewhat dubious.

When I was in grade school and beyond, I was often caught "daydreaming" in class, and sometimes it was detrimental enough that I would end up missing important parts of tests.

However, as I've aged, I've noticed that my ability to concentrate on a single thing for any period of time has been quietly declining. Sometimes, it has declined to the point where it interferes with my ability to effectively work.

In the past, I've always been able to manage this by maintaining an intricate system of schedules, "time segments" and plans. I have also managed to be able to control it by doing what I call "task swapping," where I work a little bit on one thing and then shift to another thing and then back to the first thing... where both things are actually something that really has to get done.

My "concentration decline" hasn't yet gotten to the point where I'm sincerely worried about it, but it is definitely something I'm keeping an eye on.

So why is this topic even worthy of a blog post?

A few years back — actually during my first couple of years on Steemit — I was reading occasional posts to where people pointed out that one of the things they really enjoyed about blogging in this community was the fact that they could make themselves "notes" about milestones and events in their lives, and thanks to the immutability of the blockchain... those notes could be returned to years later to see what had really been written, previously. In a sense it is a system of "benchmarking" and coming back and checking your work.

In a sense, that's part of what I'm doing with this particular post. I'm writing about an issue (that some people might be able to relate to and perhaps also have their own way of dealing with) but I'm also creating somewhat of a "journal entry" that I can come back to and find this date and see where I am.

You might wonder how I will ever find this again, among 1,000's of posts, and the important thing when you write journal entries for your own benefit is that you add a bookmark to a special folder for such things, as soon as the post has been published!

I currently have such a folder, and it "points" back to about a dozen old posts that seemed "important" in some way.

Maybe it's not a system that would work for everyone, and maybe keeping these records will turn out to be of no particular significance. I have no way of knowing... until I revisit something in the future, and find myself being grateful that I can!

And even if that doesn't happen, perhaps our kids will find this one day, and have a chronicle of things their family members struggled with, at some point in the past.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Sunday!

How about you? Do you ever leave yourself "journal entries" about things happening in your personal life? Do you think you ever would? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2023.08.06 00:33 PDT
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