Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember someone’s name when you first meet them? Or why you can’t recall a key statistic on demand? Or even why, mid-sentence, you have completely forgotten what you were going to say?

Well here is a fact that blew my mind this week: only 2% of us can genuinely multi-task.

I know.

So good news for those of us worrying we have early onset dementia. Although bad news for those of us frequently sitting in front of a bank of screens, sneaking a peak at our WhatsApp whilst half-listening to a colleague’s conversation! And that’s before we listen to the running commentary in our head on what we think about all of the above.

The truth is most of us don’t have a retention problem, we have an attention problem. We bombard our brains with so much information, from external media to internal dialogue, it’s hard to hold on to what really matters in the here and now.

For most of us, if we want to be at our best or at least, not feel like a complete idiot, the challenge is to focus on one thing at a time. It really is that simple and that difficult.