Too many meetings, especially the recurring ones. Domination of spoken culture instead of written for collaboration.
Lack of proper sleep and rest. Working outside of your normal brain activity hours.
Sudden fire drills - "unforeseen" audit with deadline next Tuesday, a security vulnerability mentioned in TV and you needing to redeploy/upgrade everything ASAP.
I have sometimes wondered if this was just me. Glad to see it listed. I can’t count the number of times that “oh yeah, we talked about that and decided xyz” or “do you remember where we landed on abc in that meeting?” in a distributed environment.
I can’t force others to communicate about everything in writing, but I’ve learned to take detailed notes of my own thought processes and to write down everything important that happened in a meeting or conversation immediately after it finishes.
Same for me and even if you have notes you will get "thats not what i said", "thats not how i remember it", etc.