Unleash the power of medium-term memory
Thanks to technology, long-term memory is less valuable than ever. Now medium-term memory is the new super power. Start doing this right now.
I had an English professor in college who was in her 80s. She used to admonish us students about using digital and paper organizers to remember appointments, contact information and the details of projects, assignments and to-do items. If you rely on those methods, she warned, you’ll lose the capacity to remember all that.
Her solution, which she acquired long before “organizers” existed, was to literally memorize everything — to build the mental capacity to turn personal data into long-term memory.
Nowadays, our reliance on digital prosthetic memory — essentially outsourcing our memories to cloud servers — has massively expanded the amount of data we can recall. To remember something, we just search for it.
It’s no longer practical to memorize most arbitrary information for long-term memory.
Short-term memory is still useful. Short-term memory is something you remember for up to 30 seconds. You look up a phone number online and remember it just long enough to dial the phone before forgetting it forever.
Intermediate-term memory is something you remember for up to three hours. Before going out for a coffee, you memorize your hotel room number so you can find your room when you get back. But a week later, you have no memory of that room number, and no need for that memory.
Long-term memory is something you remember for between 30 minutes and your entire lifetime. Your social security number. Your family’s and friend’s names and birthdays. That sort of thing.
What these memory duration types leave out is something I call medium-term memory — something you want to remember for between 3 hours and 3 months. To me, this is now the most valuable form of memory — far more valuable than long-term memory.
For those of us who are content creators and trade in facts and ideas, as well as people in sales and marketing — everybody, really — remembering things for days, weeks or months before forgetting them is super valuable.
How many times have you been struck by a great idea in the shower, only to forget it by the time you’re dry? How many times have you felt unprepared for ordinary meetings? How many times have you learned a new word, phrase, concept, idea or fact, only to lose it again?
Over twenty years ago I worked as editorial director for startup called Portable Life based in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley — a content, lifestyle and resource site for business travelers. The company was founded by a serial entrepreneur, who had an incredibly effective system for medium-term memory. The man was in meetings constantly, and always had the facts and ideas in his head and the ability to capture new ones. He functioned like someone with a photographic memory. In fact, he just had a really great system for medium-term memory.
And his system was surprisingly low-tech. He used to carry a small deck of index cards in his shirt pocket. He would scribble any incoming facts, thoughts or ideas onto one of the cards. Every day or several times a day, he would re-write some of these ideas onto new cards. He was constantly re-writing, revising, deleting and expanding upon his index card notes.
This system kept the content he wanted to be current fresh in his mind or, if not, easily accessible. Once a fact or idea was either firmly installed in long-term memory or deemed no longer relevant, it would be left off of the fresh cards.
My own system is based loosely on his. Here’s how to use my system for powerful medium-term memory, and why it works so well.
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