I also find my memory is nowhere near adequate to store all the information I need, but I’ve adopted the strategy of explicitly outsourcing that function to the machines; like you, I write down to-do and how-to notes etc (in text files), but things that are public knowledge like foreign language words I just rely on running a Google search whenever I need the information (or for more technical information that’s described in a paper, I download the PDF, rename it to something more descriptive and put it in a documents folder). I don’t bother trying to memorize things.
This is certainly slower than being able to recall stuff from on-board storage, but in practice I don’t find it makes enough difference to be a major productivity bottleneck. I don’t off the top of my head have a theory about why our experiences differ in that regard. I don’t suppose you have any idea whether you have an unusually large working set?
Interesting, perhaps our views differ mostly in how much benefit we believe we could get from a good memory. Some of my reflections:
When I have managed to join previously disconnected concepts during my research, it’s been productive. This suggests to me that a better memory could help me connect many more ideas and hence improve my productivity. The N^2 search over all pairwise concepts is really difficult to execute with off-board memory.
When I write papers or blog posts, I spend most of the time chasing down studies/essays/articles that I remember the gist of, but not the title, author, or journal. This suggests a better memory could significantly.speed up my writing.
Losing memories of how successful some productivity strategy was seems particularly harmful, as I could otherwise have updated from these valuable data points.
I use the write stuff down approach a lot, and one vital aid for me is a bookmark synchronizer for my browser. I even switched back to Firefox from Chrome, based on glowing reviews of their Sync. It has worked smoothly for me.
Just followed up on this thread to see what people had suggested since it was started. Clicked the link and at present, there are 1,189 reviews amount to two stars (out of 5). That’s a pretty good sized sample as far as internet reviews. Where did you see glowing reviews?
I seem to recall that I consulted online versions of computing magazines. My recommendation is primarily directed at using some synchronizer or other—I guess at that rate, you should be able to find a better one.
I also find my memory is nowhere near adequate to store all the information I need, but I’ve adopted the strategy of explicitly outsourcing that function to the machines; like you, I write down to-do and how-to notes etc (in text files), but things that are public knowledge like foreign language words I just rely on running a Google search whenever I need the information (or for more technical information that’s described in a paper, I download the PDF, rename it to something more descriptive and put it in a documents folder). I don’t bother trying to memorize things.
This is certainly slower than being able to recall stuff from on-board storage, but in practice I don’t find it makes enough difference to be a major productivity bottleneck. I don’t off the top of my head have a theory about why our experiences differ in that regard. I don’t suppose you have any idea whether you have an unusually large working set?
Interesting, perhaps our views differ mostly in how much benefit we believe we could get from a good memory. Some of my reflections:
When I have managed to join previously disconnected concepts during my research, it’s been productive. This suggests to me that a better memory could help me connect many more ideas and hence improve my productivity. The N^2 search over all pairwise concepts is really difficult to execute with off-board memory.
When I write papers or blog posts, I spend most of the time chasing down studies/essays/articles that I remember the gist of, but not the title, author, or journal. This suggests a better memory could significantly.speed up my writing.
Losing memories of how successful some productivity strategy was seems particularly harmful, as I could otherwise have updated from these valuable data points.
I use the write stuff down approach a lot, and one vital aid for me is a bookmark synchronizer for my browser. I even switched back to Firefox from Chrome, based on glowing reviews of their Sync. It has worked smoothly for me.
Just followed up on this thread to see what people had suggested since it was started. Clicked the link and at present, there are 1,189 reviews amount to two stars (out of 5). That’s a pretty good sized sample as far as internet reviews. Where did you see glowing reviews?
I seem to recall that I consulted online versions of computing magazines. My recommendation is primarily directed at using some synchronizer or other—I guess at that rate, you should be able to find a better one.