If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
If you’re in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says “Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don’t snozzle as well as they should.”
More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn’t take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.
If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it’s helpful to think “I want to remember all of it, not just most of it.”
I do this currently, basically writing a stream-of-consciousness regarding whatever I’m doing, in a window right next to where I’m doing the actual writing/coding. Helps for context-loading, as you said, and also prioritization. Have barely begun applying this, but it’s my new central default working method for most things.
A good idea but too general to be good advice.
More specifically (not an exhaustive list):
If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
If you’re in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says “Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don’t snozzle as well as they should.”
More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn’t take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.
If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it’s helpful to think “I want to remember all of it, not just most of it.”
I do this currently, basically writing a stream-of-consciousness regarding whatever I’m doing, in a window right next to where I’m doing the actual writing/coding. Helps for context-loading, as you said, and also prioritization. Have barely begun applying this, but it’s my new central default working method for most things.