A challenge with blogging every day is that it’s hard to remember everything that I’ve said. While the main goal is to help sharpen my thinking in broad strokes, remembering some of the details I share can be a useful thing and I’ve been finding it somewhat elusive.
The issue is similar to my “who is that person we had lunch with last week?” post, in that I’m not doing anything to actually try to help myself remember this content. I post it and move on, and often quickly forget what I wrote.
Posts from quotes
Many of the posts on here are inspired by quotes that I’ve come across, and the majority of those kinds of posts (particularly earlier in the year) were from quotes that I already knew. For example, a post in June about “less is often more” references a great quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery that I’ve know for a long time.
Quotes to posts
The problem is more recent posts where I find a great quote, write about it, and then forget the quote a few weeks later. A good example of that was the recent quote from Daniel Kahneman that I shared about being less wrong over time. Rather than just letting in languish, I’ve now put it in Anki so it’s one that I’ll (hopefully) remember when needed. It should help solve this problem.
Ultimately, the key is to make the decision to remember these quotes. As Michael Nielson has said, tools like Anki make memory a choice. Use it or not, but either way you’re making a specific decision about whether to try to remember something or not.
