The amount of things we have to remember now is more than we ever have! Jobs have shifted from being about expert craftsmanship and skill of hand to knowledge and analysis based. Even in jobs like cooking which have been around for a long time, you’re expected to know a lot more these days. Not to mention there are things that we always had to memorize like the Quran, and tiny things like todoes and meeting dates. So this begs the question: How do we remember stuff?

work smarter, not harder

The traditional way to study for an exam is to set aside a few hours and cram the curriculum into your head. This takes a lot of will power to get started with, and if you’re planning to remember this stuff for a long time, it probably won’t serve you well. Relying on will power introduces a great challenge: procrastination, which always makes things worse. And you might not have a solid continuous few hours in the first place.

So how do we remove our reliance on will power, and make it so we need less time to put all that information into our brains? Thankfully there are strategies which need less effort and may actually be better for remembering things in the long term. These concepts are called active recall and spaced repetition.

active recall

How do you train your muscles to become stronger? You challenge them! That is what we want to do for our brain. We want make it work hard to try and remember the things we won’t to remember. Sometimes we can lift up that heavy bar and we remember what we ought to, and other times it’s just to heavy and we don’t remember, but even though we couldn’t lift the bar, we still got stronger.

A way to apply this if you’re studying for an exam is to solve questions about the subject matter. Past exams, worksheets, textbook exercises, whatever you can get your hands on, You can even create questions yourself by writing them down next to your actual notes during class so that they cover the entire lesson. Then if you want to revise that particular lesson you attempt to answer the questions you wrote before. This is called the Cornell note system.

If you get a question wrong while revising, write down and turn it into a flash card. Then when you want to study another time, you can put more emphasis on the questions in the flash cards, because they are more deserving of your time and energy than other questions which you already got right. This is what I mean by working smarter, not harder!

spaced repetition

The forgetting curve is the idea that we forget stuff as time passes. I know shocking. But seriously though, how do we negate its effect?

Think of everything in your brain as having a timer attached to it. As that timer ticks, you forget what it was attached to. So now we simply need to reset the timer. We can do this by revisiting the information we want to remember. This is the definition of spaced repetition.

You could reread the content you want to remember every once in a while, but why don’t we use what we learnt about active recall? Remember those flash cards we made earlier? Make a habit of regularly reviewing them. This won’t take much time compared to sitting down for hours, and even better: it can develop into a habit, because its effortless and repeated often.

the ultimate memory strategy: not even trying!

All this makes sense for facts and the like, but surely i won’t write down my meeting dates on flash cards! for things like that you shouldn’t be the one remembering it. Look to somewhere else that’s not your brain. What do you have in your hand? Yes, I mean your phone!

If you’re on Iphone, you have the reminders app. If you’re on android, you have google calendar services. If you like neither, there are a plethora of other todo-list apps out their that make it so you never have to remember dates and tasks again.

For more complicated things like internet passwords and phone numbers, you can write them down in your notes app. Other times if the information isn’t all that dense, you don’t have to write it down at all, you can google it on demand when you need it. Working smarter, not harder!

note: writing notes down in a notes app could turn into a complex yet sustainable system. Tiago Forte calls it the second brain.

conclusion

All of us need to remember things. The best strategies for doing are active recall (which is challenging our brains to remember) and spaced repetition (which is revisiting the information regularly). If best, we should not be trying to remember, but offload that responsibility to our smart devices.

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