When I am in meetings at work or especially work related parties, I often encounter new people whose names I want to remember and facts I might need later.
How do you guys keep up with all the information if you can’t take notes on paper? I tried to use a memory palace, e.g. the room where the meeting/party took place, but the facts and names usually fly by so quickly that I do not have the time to encode the information properly and store it in the memory palace. I wonder how you would prepare for such a situation.
Another difficulty I am facing is that I never know how large the memory palace should be in the first place.
Does anyone have experience or any suggestions? Thank you!
Cheat with the available informations:
If there is a participant list, prepare mnemonics in advance, when you meet people, then you just need to stick the mnemonic on the person.
When new (important) people are presented during a meeting, often we get the powerpoint presentation afterwards.
In our company, new hires are published on the intranet, good to learn names one by one in advance instead of having to remember 40 of them during a team event.
I look at the profile pictures on Teams (you see “family trees” of teams) to get an idea in advance of who these people are.
Be selective : don’t try to remember everybody at once. Pick a few people that you feel are the most interesting.
Make people interesting : speak about something other than work! An accountant talking about accounting is boring. An accountant going scuba diving will make an image much easier to remember.
To be quite honest my solution is to forget it, if I can’t ask about it again, it’s probably not worth remembering anyway. You may think of it as of a warning about my competence regarding your question
On the practical side of things speed is a skill thing, you’ll have to practice consistently for a long time to be able to remember quickly.
Other than toning down the amount of information, as @Hari-P suggets, there isn’t much you can do.
Other tips might include:
Learn Substitute Words for the most common names/surnames in advance. You can learn ~1000 names in 10-15 days, I think. Takes longer if you are busy. E.g. I looked up Finnish names, google says Kalevi is popular. Well then it won’t hurt to remember that it rhymes nicely with Kelvin or Cool levy.
Have ready images for dates. If you need to remember a birthday, e.g. 11/23/2000 then it won’t hurt to have “deed” immediately ready for 11, “on 'em” for 23, and so on. For such things having just one word for each of 00-99 is handy and actually pretty easy if you’re using Major.
Thank you for your quick replies and great advice. Very helpful and a reminder of what I need to work on. I’m safe with numbers, because I’ve practicing the major system for years. I’m still (too) weak with names. But I’m working on it. I use the Intranet at work, expand my knowledge on celebrities and politicians. The better I can remember the names of my colleagues, I guess the easier it will be to use their bodies as memory palaces.
