I woke up today being asked for the key to
my bike. For a moment,I struggled to put my thoughts straight.After getting
back to the frame realized I had no trace of where I had kept them “Last
Night”. And NO, I wasn’t drunk and no pot was involved. Still hastily I dismantled my locker and
found them in my front pocket of the pants that I had put on yesterday. Later
today, an hour later, I wanted my calculator in class. I checked my bag and
they were not where they were supposed to be. However, this caught me with much
less dismay as I had gone through a similar situation earlier today. Then I
checked under the bench I sat yesterday, luckily it was still there.
Now this is not anything new on my daily
routine. I tend to forget things often and then start tracing backwards. This
“tracing backwards” tends to help me recollect my bits and peices of the
ever-absent memory.
Sometimes, I enter a friend’s room and
completely forget why I walked in. Unfortunately sometimes I am bound to think
that my short-term memory isn’t so good. On the contrary I have been
maintaining good GPA and am good at other things as well. But today, I reached
that breaking point. I realised that believing that “my brain just thinks that
there are other important things to remember than where i kept my key or whom i
gave my book to” makes things worst.
To prevent this forgetfulness to take over
my daily routine, I keep a memo on my phone. Most of the smartphones today give
the “To-do-list” app and a memo along with it. That helps me keep things up to
date. Another solution that proved effective for me is to keep certain fixed
places for every item I use on a regular basis, for example the key always goes
on top of the shelf, my pen drive always on the side pocket of the school bag
etc.
However I feel this is not the right
approach to this problem. The solution that will prove to be most effective
over a long-term scenario is to “keep the mind alert at all times”. Everybody
has seen a guy who doesn’t keep memos but still exactly knows even the smallest
of the things he gave or did a week before. This is due to a routine they
follow of keeping the mind alert at all times. They have an automatic log that
runs on their head, that keeps track of even the smallest things they do.
Recalling becomes very easy after that. This is not mere talent, it is simply
routine.
Another solution is to stop multitasking
in the head. When I am doing simple things like copying a text from another
notebook, I tend to think about other “which my brain thinks important” things
and loose the alertness on what I am doing, being a small or a big task. I tend
to lose my concentration on the smaller task eventually getting me
side-tracked.
Thus, I feel I need to develop a sort of
mental check-list rather than depending upon my smartphone or any other
physical means. I like to think this because all wise/smart men have done so
and have convinced me enough that it was the right thing to do.
I'd be happy to receive any help relating to this.
Since you're declaratively happy to receive any help as opposed to the usual ask-for-help,then-belittle-contemptuosly, I think forgetting where you put your keys and forgetting what you came into someone's room to do, are two different problems that have two different fixes. When I put my all my shit in the same place,always, I always find it.
ReplyDeleteAs for walking into a room 2 floors up, finding the guy you were looking for, looking into their eyes and thinking 'what? am i doing here...', I'm just venturing a guess but it was probably because you were trying to use the time you spent walking to their room thinking about what else you need to do off your checklist. Having a deadline-focused schedule on the tasks won't have the back of your mind confused or worried about what you should be doing, so you won't be trying to use the time spent walking on thinking about what you should do next or do more or finish,because your brain knows that the schedule is taken care of. Assuming follow-up action as granted,planning is not useless, but planning without a schedule almost always is.
That being said, no-brainers like this are out there like cliches that most everyone has heard of and said 'yea i know THAT'.
So to separate this from that class of advice, practically,try putting a time slot next to the tasks on your smart-phone, even if most of these tasks hugely depend on loose factors like someone else's availability or time, which gets complicated because you're alone in this boat of managing time;Because really,how many people who you need to interact with to get your job done think about time or mind at all? Regardless, putting a time-slot on your tasks will make your mind aware and not absent,and force you to push your task-dependant people into making themselves available, which isn't really cool on your part, but if I really wanted to be cool more than I wanted to get my job done, I shouldn't have been thinking about solving my problems in the first place.
At this end of this post, this has been working quite well for me,on and off but usually on, for months