At the weekend I sometimes put my phone away just to relax so I miss my calendar reminders. Even though I have the same event every week I forget because I’m relaxed. What else can I do to remember to attend the online meeting? Times of the week don’t have much significance to me.
I found I can link locations to actions quite well. For example, I can link my toothbrush to tooth floss or I can link my keys to a door handle etc. Then when I see that situation, I get reminded to do the action. But for times, I’m lost with what to do.
It’s a issue about habit, people without scheduling habit are likely no alarm clock habits as well.
Umm, try to mark schedule once you firmed a meeting, or request other participants call you that day.
it is, which means we are also aware of its limitations. Our memory is basically one big book, and the art of memory focusses on how to most effectively write in that book. One thing that it is limited in, is reminders. You can’t write things in a book and expect it to remind you of it, you have to open the book itself.
However, Antelex is also onto something with his comment on habits. You might forget a few times at first, but down the road you will be able to better remember that you had to do something that day. Something that can help with that is actually visualization.
Let’s say you have a meeting on saturday, at 13:00. You can already visualize taking a walk during the morning, no phone, but you do bring a watch. You then maybe go out for a meal at 12:00, so visualize that. After the meal, you head to your meeting. Visualizing all that turns it into a plan. Walk until 12:00, eat until maybe 12:45, then meeting from 13:00. Or mind is pretty decent at those.
In the extend of that, it helps to plan things after certain rituals in your life, hence I put it into my example to be after lunch. Maybe you have a weekend morning routine where you wake up, eat, brush your teath, go for a run, shower, and maybe some other things. Generally, at the end of the routine it will be around the same time. You might always start your routine between 7:30 and 8:00, and it ends between 9:30 and 10:00. That means you could plan a meeting at 10:00 and visualize it as a part of your routine that day beforehand.
It might not be waht you expected, but I hope it helps
Make like a “timeline-palace”, where every time is a memory spot. But in order to not forget your timeline-palace, you’ll have to make a habit of scanning that palace, like, every 10 minutes at least. So it could be a habit of “checking your routines palace”.
Without any habit of checking your appointments-memory-palace, you run the risk of forgetting.
So you could just have one habit, and that is the habit of remembering a memory palace. If diligent enough, you might never forget things.
There are some limitations on this habit though. For one is the frequency/time spacing. A habit where you check the memory palace every 1 minute might be interrupting. But I could see a 10-minute habitual scan. You’d have to limit the number of memory spots in this palace to probably less than one minute, or else it might again become interrupting or burdensome.
I could really see a 100-loci memory palace that you review every 10 minutes. I’d think of it like your human computer RAM, keeping awareness as much as possible beyond the CPU/short-term.
To train this habit, I think that I will set an alarm for every 10 minutes and review my memory palace, for maybe 1 week/month until hopefully I will not need any alarm and spontaneously do it every 10 minutes. It might partly be based on circadian rhythms.
I think what you might mean is, for example, having an image for each day of the week. Example, Moonday for Monday.
Times are numbers, so you can use the major system.
So, meeting on Monday at 4 with the executive committee.
Moon tearing into a big chunk of meat (meating, on Moonday) that it skewered on a golden arrow (arrow in the major system is 4), that it is using to roast the meat. Since the meating is with the executive committee (exec), then the moon grabs an egg from many marked with an “X” on them, and cracks it over the meat for each bite.
To remember, you start with Moonday to review what you have coming up.
My solution would be to plan a day in great detail in google calendars, then have a watch (I have to check whether that’s possible with my Casio) beep at the times a new event starts as planned in google calendar.
Remembering the tasks should be easy with the method of loci- I‘ll see whether another link to the time will be necessary. I will try that out tomorrow and will give an update. I imagine that to be pretty cool though, I‘ll be like the guy from the Sherlock TV-series. He basically did that. His watch would beep and he knew what task would come next.
EDIT: Right… I work in the hospital on the covid station so no watches. A habitual scan seems a bit exhausting- I‘ll try to use my PAO-number system to stand for times and connect to the tasks I have planned and put that in a memory palace. Asking myself whenever I happen to look at a watch what and when is next on my list will hopefully be enough.
Here’s what I do. In the morning, when I review my mental calendar and realize I have a meeting coming up, I put on a special ring. (my Magic Appointment Ring). Then, every time I feel that ring or notice it or fiddle with it, I am reminded of the appointment. When the appointment is done, I take off the ring. That system has worked very well for me so far.
We can also use Lorayne’s method to remember appointments, which leverages the Major System and basic linking (for the type of appointment) which pretty well everyone knows. Harry Lorayne & Jerrry Lucas. “The Memory Book”, 1974. (Chapter 14 in the book I have).
Use a digit for the day:
Monday =1, Tuesday = 2, Wednesday = 3….Sunday = 7 Use a digit for the time (from 1 to 9).
Thus: Lion: Monday at 2:00. Lily: Friday at 5:00
One probably already knows whether the appointment is in the morning or afternoon/evening (natural memory).
(If not, it can be made explicit by using dark blue in the linked picture as PM. The lack of it indicates AM).
For 10, 11, and 12.
For 10, Lorayne suggests using the ‘S’ sound (there is no zero o’clock) Case: Sunday at 10:00
For 11 and 12, one can continue the pattern. Cadet: (What is the day and hour?)
OR
Consider 11 and 12 as 1 and 2, but use a peg-word other than your Major System Peg Word.
E.g. Mat (standard peg word): Wednesday at 1:00 Meat (non-standard peg word): Wednesday at 11:00
The Basic peg words always represent day and hour For minutes: Create a non-standard peg word image
Most people can get away with 15min, 30min, and 45min after the hour appointments. In this case make up a standard (e.g. a 25c coin for a quarter past the hour), etc.
If you have made the appropriate associations, then reviewing the peg words (12 of them) for Monday the night before will bring to mind Mondays appointments.
It’s all good but as I say, it’s not the event I need to remember exactly. It’s the same time every week. I can remember that. But I always fall asleep beforehand or remember halfway through the meeting or at the end. I do this every week, for weeks on end.
It’s ridiculous because I can remember to wake up a minute before my alarm clock on occasion.
I was thinking that if I were your supervisor, and this was an issue, I would be thinking along the lines of a lack of interest…it may not be to do with memory as such, but perhaps with motivation.
Perhaps you are just not interested enough in whatever it is that you are doing to want to go to a meeting. Afterall, meetings are boring enough on their own.
Take a look at what Erol created for days of the week
and if you follow the links you’ll find a mnemonic for remembering times. I found another one for time (I’d give credit but don’t have it in my notes, so apologize for not doing that) that I use. It’s based (roughly) on the location of cities and the numbers on a clock.
12-Minneapolis
1-Chicago
2-NY
3-DC
4-Charleston
5-Miami
6-Dallas
7-Phoenix
8-LA
9-SF
10-Portland, Oregon
11-Seattle
1/2 past-split the image in two
quarter-past - add a quarter (coin) to the image
quarter to-add a Colt 45 to the image
I’ve used this technique to remember a meeting on the fly, but never for an entire day’s worth of meetings. Perhaps (as others have suggested) using the above and a memory palace.
If you find it easy to link kinaesthetic actions to remind you then I’d capitalise on that. Create a memory palace (Movie Location) in which to store your appointments. Then link a physical action to remind you to run through the palace and check upcoming appointments. Like a mental alarm call if you like. So for example if I was to use making a cuppa as a trigger, then every time I was waiting for the kettle to boil I would go to my Movie Location and see if anything had been placed in the diary.
