Attention Span

Never took Ritalin. Adderall, or Vyvanse.  My guess is that if my childhood occurred now, I'd have a prescription.  Might have even done better in college and beyond medicated, as my ability to stay at task always challenged me.  Instead, I compensated, doing multiple small tasks, choosing a medical specialty where patients would come at short intervals without my ever having to stay focused in the OR or other procedure room for hours.  Yet there is also hyperfocus, similar to Flow, getting absorbed in a project without intent, then pursuing it to completion, sometimes to the neglect of more important things.

After depending on my timer, whether to exercise or focus mentally on something I might not have tackled at all, I engaged in two episodes of absorbed attention.  It had been my intent to tackle the clutter in my basement as a semi-annual project.  Work for 25 minutes three times a week, my usual approach.  Instead, I asked myself how much I could get done there if I did only that for an afternoon.  So downstairs yesterday, half an afternoon.  No timer.  I still thought in small segments, culling a box of artwork, going through unselected boxes where I could separate like things.  Tools went one place, hardware another, painting supplies someplace else.  Recycling went into a dedicated box.  Stuff for the weekly trash pickup into a plastic kitchen bag inserted in a supporting plastic receptacle.  And onward.  Did OK.  Worked for about an hour and a half without once checking my watch.  Put calendars from ten years ago and a box of jars into recycling.  Good effort.  

Later, it was my monthly day to log expenses.  Signed onto my credit card and banking sites with a sheet of loose-leaf paper.  Then each charge for the month of June written by date.  Then transfer to Excel by category, playing with the sequence of columns to make data transfer easier and making a big mistake that had to be corrected as I went.  Then wife's cards logged the same way.  At the end a query to my wife on some expenses in which the categories were not obvious and in which I think what was spent may not have been the wisest purchase.  No interruptions.  At the end, all completed, that loose-leaf page went into the annual folder behind last month's expense log.  Then I had Excel calculate how much I spent in each category this quarter and for the half year.  No surprises.

What I was able to do for these tasks, or maybe for yesterday afternoon irrespective of the nature of the task, was to string together multiple small efforts without interruption.  It's possible.  Perhaps this can be applied to other things, a half-day writing instead of a focus session, a half-day at My Space instead of a few short bursts over three days.  I do this when I drive, paying attention to the highway for about two hours at a time.  I sometimes succeed this way at the supermarket, though more often I go from aisle to aisle or department to department.  And when I make an elegant dinner, my attention is sustained, though the various tasks, whether making one dish or a single process such as chopping, are often put into short compartments of a few minutes each.   This would change my Daily Task List a bit, some things not appearing at all on the page some days to allow for concentration on other things. Worth experimenting a bit more.