I’m not necessarily talking about mistakes you’ve made which have caused significant emotional pain, and you’ve learnt an important lesson from. I think these tend to be easier to remember. I’m more referring to personal processes you’ve optimized or things you’ve spent time thinking about and decided the best way to approach that type of problem. …and then a similar situation or problem appears months or years later and you either (a) fail to recognize it’s a similar situation, (b) completely forget about the previous situation and your previous conclusion as the best way to handle this type of problem, or (c) fail to even really think about the new situation as a problem you may have previously solved.
Anyone else frustrated by this?
Do you have any strategies you use to overcome this problem?
Something that might help is writing things down. For example, if you had a notebook where you wrote down things that you had figured out, every time you came to a conclusion, and any details that might help you remember why you came to that conclusion. Then, whenever you encounter a problem you can read over the notes in the notebook from a variety of topics, and see if any of them match. Also, if you keep it updated frequently then when you go to write something down that would be another opportunity to review the notebook and see if anything matches something else that’s bothering you.
Or if physically writing things in a notebook isn’t something you want to do, sending yourself an email could work in a similar way.
In general, I’ve found that writing things down helps with remembering things.
I’m not sure how much this would help you in particular, but spaced repetition, when done right, should jog your memory and make you work to recall something just before you would have forgotten it.
In order to learn and remember to apply useful concepts, I have an Anki deck containing the following:
[Forgetting Important Lessons Learned]
Does this happen to you?
I’m not necessarily talking about mistakes you’ve made which have caused significant emotional pain, and you’ve learnt an important lesson from. I think these tend to be easier to remember. I’m more referring to personal processes you’ve optimized or things you’ve spent time thinking about and decided the best way to approach that type of problem. …and then a similar situation or problem appears months or years later and you either (a) fail to recognize it’s a similar situation, (b) completely forget about the previous situation and your previous conclusion as the best way to handle this type of problem, or (c) fail to even really think about the new situation as a problem you may have previously solved.
Anyone else frustrated by this?
Do you have any strategies you use to overcome this problem?
Something that might help is writing things down. For example, if you had a notebook where you wrote down things that you had figured out, every time you came to a conclusion, and any details that might help you remember why you came to that conclusion. Then, whenever you encounter a problem you can read over the notes in the notebook from a variety of topics, and see if any of them match. Also, if you keep it updated frequently then when you go to write something down that would be another opportunity to review the notebook and see if anything matches something else that’s bothering you.
Or if physically writing things in a notebook isn’t something you want to do, sending yourself an email could work in a similar way.
In general, I’ve found that writing things down helps with remembering things.
I’m not sure how much this would help you in particular, but spaced repetition, when done right, should jog your memory and make you work to recall something just before you would have forgotten it.
In order to learn and remember to apply useful concepts, I have an Anki deck containing the following:
http://mcntyr.com/52-concepts-cognitive-toolkit/
https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d#.qtvgobrvk
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