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When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like locating the lost component that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.