When eating discounted foodstuffs I need to be quick otherwise all the savings are eaten by mould. I spend my days racing mould. I suspect this is a factor in past weight gain. I am aware something is about to go “off” and so I overeat in an attempt to consume the food before it goes to waste.

The days also race by. I am amazed time evaporates as quickly as it does. The week simply melts away. Very little seems to be accomplished. I have installed a time tracker on the phone so that I can measure where the time goes. Early indications are that I spend a significant portion of the day in the preparation and cooking of meals.

I know I am slow. I know I must act in a very deliberate fashion lest I make mistakes, or become frustrated. I also know that I exert a great deal of effort and push hard, yet this seems to make no difference. In fact it appears counter-productive in that it leads to frustration, a blow-up, and a time out.

I am developing a sense of my “boundary conditions” and believe what I need to do is to slowly, but constantly, push on the performance boundary to increase my skills repertoire. And, while this next thought sounds totally goofy even to me, I need to bring my driving frame of mind into the living room. I need to see if I can develop a 100% total task fixation with absolute attention to each detail.

Having written that, I realized I do not really do this with driving. I deliberately exclude details by choice of route and travel time. I travel on a few known routes for which I have acquired a sense of the potential hazard locations. I am able to dedicate 100% to the drive as it has a specific start and end point with no route being more than 30 minutes in length. I can maintain concentration for that 30 minute period (although during my last down period I found this was not true, that my mind was wandering and I was loosing task focus. My response was to cease driving, or greatly minimize all driving.)

I was able to maintain concentration for the trips to Montreal. This was extremely difficult and, on return home I immediately went to sleep I was so drained. During the drive, I cranked down the windows and froze myself into wakefulness.

The most disheartening thing is finding the errors I make even when I devote full concentration to the task. That and the fact that I always appear to have more tasks to complete then I manage to accomplish.