Comment by thaumaturgy
10 years ago
1. Live simply. As I've gotten older I've found more and more value in not having too many things going on. Gradually I'm sleeping better, eating better, reducing stress, and getting more exercise, all of which is important for the next thing:
2. Memorize as much as I can. It's an exercise; I memorize phone numbers, schedules, people's names, trivia, all kinds of stuff. I've never found anything that matches the flexibility and utility of my own brain. I should use the best tool I have, and that's in my head. Technology is unreliable and constantly changing and difficult to organize and search. I've been practicing this for long enough that now I'm pretty good at it.
3. For everything else, I use a few simple systems: a few sheets of paper to the right side of my desk for scribbling and note-taking (meant to be discarded after a day or two), a pile of to-do to my left, a tab open in my text editor labeled "notepad" for longer-term stuff, and a well-organized directory of documents on my laptop with subfolders like "projects", "writing", "sysadmin", etc. -- I try to keep this directory as small as possible by dedicating time here and there to either finishing or pruning projects.
I disagree that keeping knowledge in your head isn't efficient. I think a lot of people just don't practice it enough. Smartphones and computers and everything else make it really easy to not bother. But, my brain is always with me, doesn't require batteries (well...), can store any type of information I want, and can instantly recall it without having to craft some kind of search query or organize the information in a rigorous way. It is exactly the kind of database storage we all wish we had. It never changes data formats, it never tries to get acquired by a bigger company and then shut down, and it gets reception everywhere I go. If my brain were an electronic tool, I would want to use it all the time. And, the more I use it, the better it works.
(edit: oh yeah, and pinboard. Looove pinboard.)
One of the problems of keeping everything in your head is trust. People forget! Maybe you have a great memory, but eventually it'll forget things. And it should! otherwise there won't be room for any new stuff. I don't think we have infinite storage available; at some point things have to be erased to make room.
But also, keeping that stuff in a system you can trust frees your brain to do other things. Instead of falling asleep reminding yourself to buy milk tomorrow, you can leave it to the system to remember. The system being anything - a notebook, an app, or what have you. There is some good evidence that this kind of delegation allows for more high-level thinking to come about, since your brain is more free to do other things.
Now, as you've touched on - sometimes technology screws you one way or another, and that trust is broken. So if you have no redundancy or backup or plan for that dependency, maybe you'd be better off keeping things in your head.
But you are human and your head is human by extension. it is faulty, imperfect, and not nearly as good at storing things as pretty much anything else. Even if its good now, it won't necessarily always be, and isn't in such good shape for a lot of folk. So I would not paint it in such a rosy light.
I'm curious, Have you done any experimentation with Method of loci?
Yeah, I've messed around with Method of Loci off and on over the years, but it hasn't done much for me. Probably I'd just need to put the effort in to it, and I haven't. My natural tendency has been a grab bag of sorts; if I want to recall something, I think about a category -- "people", "projects", "trivia", etc. -- to kind of prime my brain in some way I don't really understand, and then it just pukes out a bunch of stuff until the thing I'm looking for pops up. Like, if I'm trying to remember an actor's name, it goes, "face -> action movie -> movie box was dark blue at night -> heat -> Val Kilmer". It's usually pretty quick.
You're right though, brains are pretty fallible. If something's really really really important, I do have backups. Usually email, or text, or paper.
...but, honestly? I'm scared to death of old age. It scares the piss out of me. One of the things about it that really gets to me is the idea that I might be 90 one day and not recognize people I care about, or remember anything about myself, or have any idea what's going on around me. The smartest elderly people I know are all very mentally active, and always have been, so even though there isn't good scientific evidence for the prevention of alzheimer's through puzzles and brain teasers and the like, I do it anyway.
Figure out a way to cure cancer and you can be immortal-- just consume as much telomerase as you need.
> 2. Memorize as much as I can.
I agree that you should rely on your memory. However, when you die, all that information you have is gone to the world. That's why I started writing things down, for when I'm gone.
Take a look at Roy Underhill, if he hadn't started writing books and opened a school, all of the woodworking knowledge he has acquired would be gone forever (or until someone else dedicated a lifetime to finding it all over again).
Good point! If I ever do anything important, I promise to write about it. :-)
Having turned 32 this year, I can relate with all of your points.
Make life as simple as possible ("simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"). Use paper when necessary.
Also, try hard not to multi-task. It's been proven the human brain isn't built to handle it.
I agree on living simply, everyday I'm trying to do this better.
I also try to use my memory as often as possible and I think it's pretty good (I'm learning mnemonic techniques which are really fun to implement in everyday life). Yes, mind itself is reaaaallly good system, but (at least for me) not all my insights, ideas, notes etc. about particular topic are available on demand, but only some part of them. And if I don't think about one thing very often it can be lost forever. Nevertheless, thank you for taking time to write about your system and giving different perspective.
One special trick I've used is to write an idea down when I have it. Another is to write more often to unearth my ideas. What's more valuable that storing existing knowledge is generating new knowledge.
You won't reach your maximum potential if you only try keeping knowledge in your head.
What system and/or application(s) do you use to help you remember things?
I don't really have a system -- or anything that would make worthwhile reading.
I just practice, a lot. I exercise my brain like a power lifter exercises their body.
For instance, I know the names and some basic information of everyone at the bank branch I frequent. I go up, say, "Hi ____, how're the kids, did you have a good time last weekend?" It's nice for them and a little mental workout for me.
When I'm out and about, I briefly memorize random things: movie showtimes, things I heard on the radio and want to look up, prices of things in the store (so I can price-compare later; e.g. I know Safeway has my cereal for $3.99/box with the club card discount, which is slightly better than regular price but not as good as the occasional 2-for-$4.99 sale at Raley's). I try to really look at the people around me and memorize different facial features and notice different things about them, and if I'm not distracted, then I try to flip through them all mentally when I get in the car. (But this also makes big crowds more overwhelming.)
I play Go. I have a small local club with some friends, and we play religiously once a week, and I play or study more often in my spare time. It's a game where you can improve quite a lot by visualizing the game board several moves in advance, and the game board can get pretty complicated. It's a really good workout for my working memory.
When I'm reading, I try to memorize most of the previous paragraph immediately, memorize the bullet points of the previous page when I get to the next page, and the next day I try to remember the gist of what I read. If I can't, I go back and re-read it until it gels.
Stuff like that. It all sounds silly written out, and like a lot of work, but it's second-nature now. I just do it automatically.
Exercising memory is kind of a two-part process. You have to be able to put things in your brain (typically this just means practicing paying attention), and you have to be able to recall them later. I think the recall part might be the bit that a lot of people forget to do. I quiz myself all the time on what I just memorized, so my recall is pretty good.
Oddly, the harder thing I've been struggling with more recently is forgetting on purpose: there's a bunch of stuff in my brain that I don't need, and learning how to forget that stuff is a trick I haven't figured out yet.