On dealing with forgetfulness, and my love for lists

11 Oct, 2023

A short pen is better than a long memory.

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I have a relatively scattered mind - have had it for as long as I can recall. Leaving items in cafés, classrooms or hotels, planning to talk about something just to get carried away in conversation, suddenly remembering that one thing I meant to do (never anything critical, thankfully) - I've done it all, even if it's gotten better over time.

For a long time, that forgetfulness manifested in a recurring feeling of "forgetting something", which was both frustrating and plain inconvenient - I often spent several minutes pacing around (physically or mentally) before heading out the door, trying to come up with what I hadn't done, only to later realize I was supposed to text a friend sometime this week.
Unless you can pinpoint what you're missing, the feeling isn't useful at all, so I often felt like I was out of sync with the world around me, permanently catching up to everything.

That isn't to say I'm completely over it nowadays, but over time I've curated a personal system for keeping information (a sort of digital extension of my memory, if you will) that has reduced that anxiety significantly:

The first weapon in my information arsenal is a to-do list, the simpler the better¹ - add tasks, sort them by category (do asap, do whenever free, related to activity X, so on), check as they're completed, that's it. No carrying a notebook, no looking for an app (I keep it in a widget on my phone's homescreen), no messing around with reminders, priority levels, due dates and whatnot.
The list is slightly redundant (I sometimes find myself checking tasks from the last one or two days all at once), but the convenience of having it and the little hit of pride after completing each one makes it a load-bearing wall of my routine.

Second in line is keeping a separate calendar app,² which tracks classes, extracurriculars, appointments, hangouts and all other scheduled activities. Aside from handling my reminders and keeping track of when-I-did-what, it serves as a reality check whenever I feel too unproductive.³

Lastly, lists / notes⁴! Two things I heavily dislike when switching activities throughout the day (studying, participating in an organization, personal projects, and other one-offs like packing bags for a trip or keeping a wishlist) are:

• Feeling like I'm retracing my own steps, possibly forgetting previous ideas / tasks / decisions.
• Worrying about one activity in the middle of another one whenever something important happens, often at the expense of concentrating on what I'm actually doing.

So then, keeping a list for each things allows me to compartimentalize them, store them until they're needed again, all while avoiding the anxiety of losing information. In a sense, it's the personal version of a doing proper documentation for a project (which is, funnily enough, one of my responsibilities in a research group I help run).

And hell, it works! Sure, analyzing one's anxieties around productivity on this level is a little odd (it's certainly earned me some playful flak from my friends, lol), and I'm not saying doing any of this has made me a better student, more productive or happier necessarily - but giving myself places to fall back on when memory fails has undoubtedly given me more peace of mind and partly alleviated some everyday worries.

So, if you experience any of these anxieties, maybe a similar set of tools can help you like it's helped me! Do remember that it's all trial and error, seeing what works for you and what doesn't, though - I have enough abandoned productivity apps, discarded post-it notes and journals to know.

Have any thoughts or want to roast my writing? There's an e-mail address on my home page waiting for you (in the age of platforms, this feels almost quaint - I kinda like it).

Careful with the event horizon on your way out,
-ItemizedVoids.⁵

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#void