Are You Forgetful?

I’m about as qualified to give advice on memorization techniques as I am the latest Paris shoe fashions (though I do know someone who could probably help you there ;), but I do use one little trick that some of you might find useful – particularly if you travel. I’m certainly not claiming that this is any revolutionary technique, or is worth the low low price of $19.95, but a friend of mine told me that they’d used it successfully, so maybe you can too.

It works like this: when I travel, I often have a difficult time keeping track of the things I need to do before I go – like feed the cat, pick up my dry cleaning, backup my laptop, etc. Too often, I used to leave home feeling like I’d forgotten to do something – something important. But now I try to make it simpler: I no longer try to just remember everything I have to do, I just a running tally of how many tasks there are and try to remember that. So now, before I leave home, I know I have to do n things. What’s interesting is that I’ve found that when I bundle mental ToDo’s in such a fashion, the individual tasks themselves become easier to remember. And if I forget what one of them is, I know that and know how many things I’ve forgotten. I use this little trick in other ways as well; if I’m travelling and leave my hotel room, I try to remember how many different items I’ve brought with me – wallet, phone, and optionally camera. Then when I need to see if I have everything, I just count what I have on me. I can’t tell you how many times over this has saved my camera, which I would have left otherwise.

Of course it would probably be a hell of a lot easier to just write everything down ;), but I’ve never been able to maintain ToDo lists for very long. It’s just not a sustainable behavior for me for some reason. So while this may seem like a rather absurd practice, I figured given that it was useful to at least one other person it might be to you.

For those that are worried that I’m straying dangerously into the Self-Help category, don’t worry – I’ve got a very finite numbers of such suggestions 😉