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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the missing component that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.