The curious case of a Wandering mind

My mind kept drifting away. I was trying hard to sit and concentrate. I was fidgeting. It’s so difficult to make yourself to sit and listen to something which you are actually forced to listen to, something which you have to listen  to ,and for something which you don’t want to listen, that too for 4 hours without a break.

             Just the previous day I was conversing with my friend as to how she sits and concentrates at her CA classes for like 9 hours at a stretch! It’s so hard.

  So after this conversation with her, the next day while I was sitting at a session, I decided to keep a track of how many times my mind keeps wandering away like in an hour. More than listening to what was happening in the session, I was keeping track of the numbers, and how it kept increasing an increment of one every five minutes. (Yes really short).

            Here is the list of things, where my mind wanders to during boring conversations or classes:

1.      Night out /Hangouts with friends

2.      A single pizza eaten by 8 of us( when broke)

3.      A flirtatious exchange of smiles with a stranger.

4.      Finding money in your old jeans.

5.      Lazy weekends

6.      The chocolate larva cake

7.      Reading old emails.

8.      The crazy pictures taken.

9.      The conversation you just had , totally oblivious to world around

 My mind wanders in abstract, goes back in time, fast-forwards to the future – moving from one edge of wishful thinking to the next. This happens especially when I’m sitting at a session which goes on more than an hour.

While at engineering it was easy to get away from those boring classes, even if you weren’t listening, as each class would not last more than an hour.

There, we knew the trick to escape those sudden encounters from your professors while in class. The best tricks were to Zone out, try and remember the last sentence he said, just in case they shoot a question at you to prove you were listening. I had developed a talent of having one ear listen to what they say, but think about something else entirely. Then, if he called on me, announces important information, or the class reacts to some exciting - or not so exciting - news, ("There's a test tomorrow", or "No homework!") you can replay what you just heard with one ear, and you won't have missed anything.

The easiest one was to draw or doodle things on notebook, be it cartoons, shapeless blobs, and anything else that tickles your fancy. Glance up at the professor often, so it seems like you are paying attention and writing down everything.

Reading novels was another way. This was pretty simple and most feasible way, though I wouldn’t suggest this as it reminds me of the day I got  caught in class for reading Chetan Bhagat’s ‘The three mistakes of Life’, and he made a big issue out of it, as he saw the F word while he was rummaging through the pages.

This blog post started off something to do with my attention span, but it turns our that I’m listing more about things-to-do when you don’t want to listen to boring lectures.

             Concentric circles! My friend suggested. Try that! “According to a research drawing concentric circles would help increase attention span”, she said. And she laughed at her own idea, and concluded that I was normal and would not need that.

  When I listen to such advice, especially when they conclude that I don’t need it, I tend to try them. I did try them. Two, three, four, five concentric circles, and boom!  My attention towards concentric circles died.

            Later when I was describing this entire ‘short attention span syndrome’ to my friend , I asked her as to where her mind wanders off while listening about DFSort, Database, Redefines….or whether she really concentrates??

            She glares at me for a while and gives me a blank expression and asks ‘What were you just saying??’!!!