[pgroves]

I've never had that great of a memory. The upside is that you can have a bad memory and good note taking skills and be more effective than the 'good memory' people. Really it's just that I forget in a day what other people forget in a week so it's not that big of a gap. But some considerations:

1. Put everything in the issue tracker that you can. This includes notes on what actually happened when you did the work. Include technical details.

2. Try to push everyone else to use the issue tracker. Also makes you sound like the professional in the room.

3. Have a very lightweight note taking mechanism and use it as much as possible. I am gud at vim so I use the Voom plugin (which just treats markdown headings as an outline but it's enough to store a ton of notes in a single .md file). Don't try to make these notes good enough to share as that adds too much overhead.

4. Always take your own notes in a meeting.

5. I will revisit my notes on a project from time to time, and sometimes walk through all of them, but I'm not really treating them like flashcards to memorize. I'm just looking for things that might need some renewed attention. Same with the backlog.

6. In general, I don't try to improve my memory because I don't know what I need to know for a week vs. what I won't look at again for a year. So I focus on being systematic about having good-enough notes on everything and don't really expect to remember anything. (I do remember some things but it's random.)

[webel0]

> Have a very lightweight note taking mechanism and use it as much as possible... Don't try to make these notes good enough to share as that adds too much overhead.

Second this. I use sublime text almost exclusively for this purpose. I have one file called daily_notes.md that has everything from meeting notes to formal writing to pasted error messages and code.

Each day gets an h1 but that is the extent of formal organization. I’m actually decently organized (at work, at least) but the simplicity is all about lowering the overhead of jotting stuff down. Keeping everything in one doc makes for very easy search.

Otherwise, I try to write reminders right away with whatever is handy. Mainly: Post-its, slack reminders, and Gmail scheduled sends to myself.

[specialist]

Yes and: My life mgmt project notebook also has a habit tracker section, for all the life maintenance stuff.

Inspired by Seinfeld's "don't break the chain" calendar, but a lot more information dense. It's a big grid, tasks and day of month.

I make a hash mark for every completed task. The boxes are big enough for multiple hashes (eg walking dog 2x daily) and entering values (eg body weight).