Do we live in slow motion?

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My whole life it just seems like I can't keep up with everything.

It always took me at least twice as long as predicted to do my homework in school, both in my childhood and recently as an adult finishing college. If my instructor said the homework should take 4 hours this week. I probably took 10 to do it. Timed exams were the worst.

I can't keep up with household chores. No matter if I spend all day working diligently. Whoever I live with at the time always reach the conclusion that I'm lazy and/or goofing off and it sparks fights because I'm not.

I'm currently looking for a job and some places want applicants to take assessment tests. The most recent one I didn't even bother to take as I figure they're excluding me right off the bat despite my education and experience.

I don't realize I'm not doing things quickly. It seems quick to me. I tend to feel like I am accomplishing things until someone else comes along and make it clear that I'm not keeping up. If it was just this person or that I'd blow them off, but eventually one has to acknowledge it's true if everyone sends you the same messages.

Is there any way to improve this?

I can relate. I used to take forever to do some things. When my executive brain functions were at their worst, I'd take 9-10 hours to do my job & didn't feel like I was wasting time.. but I wasn't focused, on task, and productive. As I improved my executive brain functions, I was able to do the same job faster & faster - in less than 5 hours - and then had time to get other things done or just coast with my boss until the end of my shift.

It may not seem as if you're wasting time.. but I assure you, you are. If you were to record a video yourself doing a task over x number of hours and then watch the playback with a critical eye you'd likely find all sorts of time wasted on thinking or indecisiveness, or forgetting things and going back to them, or redoing things, or just moving slowly with one hand whereas moving quickly with two gets things done faster etc etc. If you were to analyze it with the critical eye of a manager doing a time study on productivity, you'd come to these sorts of conclusions. (Which I'm educated & trained to do, so I KNEW even though I felt productive that I was not but couldn't quite figure out why for the longest time.)

Anyways, the biggest thing that improved executive functions for me was detoxing salicylate acids from my body by not consuming them for months on end and using an epsom salt lotion on my skin. If you'd care to read more about what I've done, feel free to pm me an email address and I'll email you my story as I shared it on the forum last January.

Can you videotape yourself doing some of the things that you commonly do to see what speed it looks like to you and others? Maybe you can identify some patterns of what things you tend to do more slowly, what more quickly, or if eberrything is being done at same slow speed.

My whole family complains about how some of our relatives do things too slowly, like when we are going somewhere together, we always have to wait and wait and wait for them to get ready, but it seems like they don't really do individual tasks too slow, although slower-moving than us, but it's more that they do lots of irrelevant things with more unnecessary steps, while we do just the things that are required for getting ready.

I remember once hearing that people tend to think a lot faster than the talk/listen, like over a thousand words per minute. I remember thinking I don't think anywhere near that fast, I think as fast as I speak, maybe even slower as I often have to pause to think what to say.

I don't live on slow motion. I am just a procrastinator.

I do many irrelevant things and choose pleasure over responsibility. But once I finally start a task I get it done in no time. I write my exams in 1/3 of given time. I finish my homeworks within a few minutes.

Cleaning the house is not so easy though. With not enough mental exercise I will get distracted. For example during a room I see a lost photo and aim to put it in an album but I realize the album is all messed up. So... I gather all albums from the whole house, take out all photos(we got thousands of photos) and sort them correctly for 10h straight till all albums are done, staying focused on the task at all time and with no single break. Who cares about cleaning the house? Sorting photos is way more fun!

Detoxing is quackery.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/det ... u-to-know/

I'm very slow at doing things sometimes. Whether it's going to grab something for someone, to answer someone, or doing a simple task. but the thing is that I don't feel like Im going slow, it feels like Im going normal speed. When I blog for my website, it takes me days to get it finished - mostly because I feel like Im being distracted by every little thing, whether it's dealing with my kids, making dinner, cleaning or having to spend 8 hours at my other job... (lol)
Also when I was chamber-maiding for a hotel, I was told that I was going to slow and that I would have to pick it up - in my head I denied it, even got mad at them -- but truth is I know I was going slower and that I could have gone faster.

I know I get distracted or pulled away a lot of times. When I was young my mother told me I often would just blank out and stare. I don't think I do that any longer.

Those things aside, even if I'm in a focused setting, like a proctored exam, I still am usually the last or close to the last person to finish. And I know I'm not day dreaming or anything, I'm just completely focused on the task at hand.

I know I'm not "slow" in the usual sense people mean when they say someone is slow. I'm pretty smart and have been able to do pretty much anything I've set my mind to. I often think it's that speed versus accuracy scale. The faster one gets the less accurate they are. Maybe I'm so tied up in details I'm not moving at an acceptable pace.

Same here. I am very thorough and do not skip steps.

I'm a strange paradox because I'm slow, yet intelligent at the same time. I process things slowly, I have issues with attention, and I have a horrendous short-term memory, but I also possess the ability to think logically, the ability to memorize all sorts of random information, and a decent command of the English language. People have a hard time understanding this because normally, slow minds are associated with low intelligence. I guess you could say my brain is like a computer with a reliable CPU and a good amount of storage, but barely enough RAM to even function.

It's like I'm sleepwalking.

When I am waiting for something or on somebody else, it's like I am living in The Matrix.

Traffic lights take minutes to change instead of seconds, computers take ages to load a single page and getting a delivery (pizza to furniture) seems to take hours.

I guess I am just impatient.

I wish I could harness this slo-mo for those times when I am rushed - but it seems the quicker I try and make things happen, the longer it takes.

Temporal distortion is a real problem for me.

Much the same here. Once I begin, I'm often as quick as anybody. If it's a task I'm used to, I've probably got it optimised to be faster than most, I like efficiency. New tasks probably won't be done quickly unless I prepare a lot in advance. Though I tend to do some things the long way round, using overkill to make sure nothing can go wrong, instead of accepting reasonable risks and trusting myself to fix any problems as they arise.

I seem to think very slowly, at least on some level. It takes time for me to take on board a new idea. On the other hand, my brain can work like lightning at times.

How to improve things? Some kinds of work requires great care and attention to detail rather than speed. So I'd be tempted to go for highly-skilled craftsmanship, if the modern world still allows such things to exist. Employers tend to drive a hard bargain over production rates if the job is simple enough for them to analyse. I've heard that some kinds of computer programmers have been able to command salaries very close to the value of what they produce because their employers don't understand what the employees actually do. And although I find the whole notion of working for an employer repulsive, I can just about see myself being happy in a high-skill environment, being encouraged to do as near perfect a job as I was able. I'd need to be able to work in my own way, and arrange the environment to my own liking, to a large extent.

The only other thing is to try to re-train the brain somehow. My problem there is that I find it really difficult to think about my executive function. I can try to tidy the house, and fail without knowing how and why I failed. But if I keep trying to study it, I get somewhere eventually. I know that audible timers help me a lot, they allow me to focus freely on something else while I'm waiting for (e.g.) the bread to bake. I think it would speed things up to get somebody to watch how I work and point out things I can't yet see.

Another thing that makes me slower overall is a memory problem. I can remember facts reasonably well, but I can't so easily remember (e.g.) to do a thing tomorrow unless it's really registered as important. I also suspect I have a problem with short term (working) memory. If I decide to go into the kitchen and empty the washing machine, and then have another thought on the way, then when I get into the kitchen I can't remember what I was going to do. But I've noticed that if I keep calm and think, the memory often comes back. I'm hoping to train myself to momentarily focus a little more vividly on what I've decided to do, in such circumstances. They say that vivid impressions are retained better, so hopefully they'll be more accessible after the interfering thoughts.

The more you can discover about specifically what slows you down, the more you can work out strategies to get you back up to speed. But in the real world, the strategies won't make it all perfect, they'll just help.

I have to question this too because the rate that I complete things, jobs, tasks, hobbies, anything recreational or job related I will rush through and finish in next to no time and it makes me wonder if I am normal speed and others are slow. I used to be the same but didnt enjoy things, almost emotionless. I now however enjoy anything which keeps me busy.. but I have to question the speed of others as i seem to get through things in no time

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