Mental focus
I just noticed how much effort I put into remembering what I was thinking—I do a lot of “I had an interesting idea about that which I wanted to include—what was the idea?”.
It can take at least 3 or 4 repetitions before the idea finally gets typed out, partly because I might be typing or formulating something else and then want to get back to an earlier idea.
I’d be amazed if I were the only person here with this problem. Any suggestions? Does dual n-back help?
Write a reminder down the moment an idea appears. And then (in a few days, maybe) write it up in more detail, even if as a throw-away, to elicit deeper understanding. This technology helps me tremendously.
Yeah, I hate to repeat it, but “just write it down” seems pretty sensible to me. When I’ve gotten ideas midstream for how to continue a long thing I was in the middle of writing, I’ve been known to start a list of quick notes at the bottom of the file and “push” it down as I keep typing, deleting things as I get to them.
I record ideas as audio notes the moment they pop into my head, and transcribe them later, when I’m at my desktop computer at home or at work. My ‘capture’ phase is separate from the ‘processing’ phase: when recording, I don’t bother about wording or clarity, I just want to leave enough ‘breadcrumbs’ to fully remember the idea later, when I get to transcribing it.
(BTW, can anyone recommend a good audio note app for Android which is not Evernote?)
Is there a pressing reason to avoid Evernote?
Pressing? No, but I’d prefer something better designed and built—to me, Evernote (at least the Android version) feels glitchy and unpolished. It lost two batches of notes due to a sync gone wrong (thankfully, both batches were already processed), it doesn’t lock the phone screen in response to the proximity sensor, it requires too many taps/clicks for basic tasks etc.
I have a horrible memory when it comes to arbitrary, unrelated bits of information, and that includes all sorts of ideas and quotes that pop into my head which I won’t be able to write down until later. I use a variety of mnemonic techniques to compensate for this deficiency, the most useful of which for retaining my thoughts being the link system. What I generally do is compose a mental image using a single attribute from every idea or quote I wish to remember at the time.
As a practical example, I once had a depressing quote in my mind along with a bunch of thoughts regarding education, jobs, status, and hypocrisy. So what did I do? I imagined myself as a student crying in front of a university while holding a suitcase and having a big-ass log sticking out of my eye. In another example, I had something I wanted to write something related to my mother, something about tears as signaling, and something related to transhumanism, so I imagined a female I knew as a cyborg who was nursing a baby with a tear rolling down her cheek, and recalled that image when I sat down at my computer to write a few hours later. When thoughts are still fresh, a tangential association is often enough to quickly bring them back in a much faster fashion than can be achieved by stack tracing previous trains of thought, and with less mental effort to boot.
The anecdotes do suggest this, and it’s plausible given what WM/STM are supposed to do.
For a while I had a phone with a draft feature, where I could:
Open the phone and press left+down on the keyboard, to bring up the Compose screen and select the main message field.
Type whatever was on my mind; as Vladimir Golovin says, usually just a word or two to remind me of the thought rather than the whole thing.
Close the phone, which automatically saved the message to the Drafts folder.
I managed to form a habit of looking through the folder when I had a spare moment and sorting the drafts into more specific folders. Most of them got ignored after that, but I prefer that to the constant nagging feeling of having forgotten something.
Moving messages seemed to get slower the more messages and folders there were, but it probably would’ve stayed manageable if I’d sat down and moved unneeded ones in bulk to a PC once a month; that might be easier now than it was then, since I have a smaller Bluetooth dongle that can be left plugged in to my laptop at all times.
I don’t know about thinking of things while typing something else, though; my problems have more to do with focusing on one thing long enough to type something as long as this post.
When I read something online that I think I might want to remember later, I save it to my main flash drive in the folder f:\whatnot\(subject), generally using a key sentence or phrase as the filename.
I don’t know how much of this is normal or obvious for other people.