Staying on the tightrope of attentiveness is challenging with ADHD. I construct semantic trees either in my head or on paper to make this easier. The trees allow me to "keyframe" the information to reign in drifts in understanding and focus. ![[IMG_0486.jpg]] The tree is basically a mind map with pictures of an intentionally small amount of key elements of what I'm listening to. Above is my tree for the plot of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. Looking at this, it probably doesn't make much sense and that's more of a feature than a bug. Having practiced this again and again, I learned the best way to do this is: # What I prescribe 1. Flashbulb, quick to draw visuals. The more time you spend thinking about the visual, the less you are paying attention. I found it was helpful to allow myself to come up with visuals that were incredibly crude and short-lived: They didn't need to make any sense after a couple hours had passed. In the above diagram, a top hat is a symbol for Willy Wonka. In another tree, it's fine if it means "magic" for that context. If what looks like a sun icon is good enough for me to remember it means "golden ticket" then it's good enough. 2. Two children for each parent, limit yourself to three levels. Personally, I found this amount of information nearly goes beyond the comfortable threshold for maintaining it in my mind without losing focus. And if nothing else, keep it simple. # What this is good for I find this particularly useful for following along on the details of a meeting and even recapping with the details in between the semantic points. This is not great for long term memory so I wouldn't replace meeting notes or other structured, publicly shared documents with this; of course it wouldn't make sense to others anyway. This also helps to step in and help people refine their explanations. I'm often going back to previous semantic points and asking if there is more to know between them.