One thing at a time. Easy does it. Slow down. Hey! Dear ol' dad was right.
I ‘discovered’ how important NOT operating on automatic and NOT giving in to distractions is when it became a big issue with me, to figure out how I left the keys to an apartment I was staying in in the key-hole, on the outside of the outside door, after I locked it; and left them there an entire weekend while I (and everyone else) was away.
I had a near heart attack when I was about to return to the apartment three days later and could not find the keys or remember what I had done with them. Fortunately it all turned out O.K. The keys were right where I left them and no one had entered the apartment with them either. Our closest neighbor, whose door is only a few feet away, had gone in and out a number of times over the weekend and even she had not noticed my keys in the lock. (And security getting into the building is fairly good too.)
BUT, for me, the seriousness of WHAT I forgot, and WHERE I forgot it, led me to try to figure out HOW I forgot it.
And yes, I finally recalled there was a tiny brief moment of distraction, after I locked the dead-bolt lock on the door, when a neighbor in the corner apartment next door opened her door to give me a brief greeting. My hand left the keys in the door, as we greeted each other with a hug, and I wound up leaving the building without ever retrieving the keys - for three days.
I then began my regimen of “talking to myself”, in my head, as I do all “the little stuff” and believe at this time I do not have either small memory lapses or “absentmindedness” or plain “forgetfulness”.
Darn it; there was something else I meant to tell you. Oh well. (ha ha).