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When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment 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 cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.