Comment by mapt

This is not an effort or desire-mediated performance, it is a focus-mediated performance. Some people find that cognitively more difficult than others.

If you are the type of person to intensively multitask, to occupy your short-term memory with different trains of thought in a holding pattern, you will tend to sacrifice command skills - if your memory is already busy reading and writing on all available channels, it isn't going to pop up "You have something in the oven" or "You were holding a pen a minute ago and you set it down on the second tier of the brown bookshelf" or "You need to get the kid from school". The internet & smartphone era has unlocked a degree of hyperstimulus that can veer into the pathological for those of us with our brains wired a certain way.

This is also a thing if you're doing things at a 'normal' degree of focus but your memory is impaired (number of operational channels reduced) in some other fashion, through age-related cognitive decline or some types of medication or chronic sleep deprivation or a TBI.

This is the ADD trait. We are chronically late to important events, we lose things all the time, we frequently accumulate a thousand browser tabs, we jump from thing to thing as they come up. Forming subconscious routines is difficult, and when we do it, we often allocate them only the barest muscle memory - I lock my car regardless of whether it's already locked or should be locked (bringing in groceries) because my macro for leaving the car is to lock it. There are pros and there are cons to this cognitive style. But it's certainly not a matter of DESIRE to do things or CARELESSNESS.

What helps? I find:

* Writing things down, especially notes.txt

* Snapping pictures of things as easier form of notes

* Scheduled phone reminders

* Getting sufficient sleep

* Getting more than sufficient sleep - leaving an extra hour in bed to think about things, plan your day

* "Bookmark all tabs"