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Comment by GEBBL | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I would say the process of note taking is an important part of my retention.

I refer to my notes a lot. I worked with a guy who never took notes and was able to remember everything. I’m not that smart!

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And it stops that one important thing being forgotten.

E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc.

Also I quite like writing a list at the end of the day for tomorrow. For me anyway get the day going well as its laid out there for you fresh, until the new fires arrive!

>And it stops that one important thing being forgotten. > E.g. You having a busy day with 12 fires to fight, you remember 11 but forget that 1 someone text chatted you and you said yes right before person 2 came to your desk and added another etc.

Funny, I believe in the exact opposite: if you forgot about the 12th, it wasn't as important as the first 11th. By not adding things to any list, I let my mind dynamically curate the priorities and expunge cached entries that I'd like to rationalize as "important"... but that aren't enough for me to bother remembering them.

Forgetfulness can be a wonderful tool, because there will always be more things you may want to do than time. So instead of trying to achieve the impossible, I use this wonderful tool that comes factory installed in all human beings!

I think the GP referred more to those people who write down a lot but (almost) never refer to their notes or review them. For many people, after several years they will have a giant repository of hundreds or thousands of notes with very poor organization and the value decreases rapidly because they can't find anything anymore.

Note taking is a memorization ritual for some people. Notes taken but not reviewed have still done their job if it helps the person remember.

That’s true for me, but I’ve found that the easier and more streamlined my note-taking apparatus is, the less effective it is at helping my memory to congeal. I just keep a scrap of paper handy and jot stuff down occasionally. I’m trying out a Techo this year, so that’s a step more sophisticated. Handwriting seems to be the important bit for me.

I've found hand written notes to be important for me. I have dozens of filled notebooks in my office that I've never read again. The act of writing things down by hand helps to lock them in my brain. I've tried to take notes electronically, but I find I don't retain as much. Something about pen to paper helps me retain information.

True, up to a point. Taking one of the sibling comments as an example, by the time you have accumulated 20.000 notes the older notes will definitely start getting "crowded out" if you don't review them.

Not really - I have old notebooks of notes that I havent thrown away but I also dont review - they are just musings and historical records, really you could throw them out but I like sometimes paging through them and looking at stuff I did.

New notebooks get a label on the front and only when they are full or I retire that hobby do they go in the notebook bin.

For sure.

I think there are two types of memories, and two types of notes as a result -- there's specific figures where you might only have to remember it for a couple days, and the exact value might be important, so that note/memory's value is very temporal. Then there's the stuff like problem solving strategies, where hopefully that information is integrated into your brain at some deeper level. The former might never be looked at again if it turns out you don't need the figure, the latter might never be looked at if the integration was successful.

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