I was initially going to call this post “Attention Span” but I decided that didn’t accurately represent the topic of this post. I wanted to write about how I tend to get bored with hobbies or projects relatively quickly (anyone who could’ve been bothered to keep track of my various blogs would testify to this). I decided that this wasn’t an issue with my attention span per se, as I will often stay focused on something (e.g. a conversation or a movie without distraction). It is more to do with hobbies (blog writing, model building, beer making etc.) in that after a random period of time I’ll want to find a new hobby, even if it’s as simple as a new blog with a different focus. Ironically blogs really are designed to be a flexible, often random collection of thoughts or ideas, varying from one post to the next. I think part of the boredom resolution is in setting up the blog.
Anyway, I decided that my issue needed to be quantified a little better, so I’ve come up with the “Boredom Attainment Index”. The idea is that if you quickly become bored you have a low boredom attainment index (I’ll call it BAI from now on) and if you can keep the same hobby for 42 years you have a high BAI. For example if you get bored with something whilst you are still in the process of deciding what to do you’d have a BAI of 1. If you’ve been making paper airplanes in your spare time for the past 25 years you’d have a BAI of 10. In the next few weeks/months if I don’t get bored of my BAI concept I’ll quantify the scale further.
Perhaps you have some ideas about how the BAI should work or stories about your pastimes and how they fit into the BAI, I’d love to hear them or put them in my blog (if I’m not bored of it by then).
Nanto Cielens
Lost In A Blog 