Make lists

I've always had a pretty good memory. When I was in high school, everybody had this calendar book thing, that they used to record their assignments for the day, and to make note of when they would have tests and quizzes. I think literally everybody but me in my year used them. (The school handed them out on the first day, so everyone including me had one, or at least had had it during the first day of school.) I just remembered what the assignment was, and when the tests and quizzes were scheduled. I remembered my schedule, the complete schedules of all of my teachers, and the complete schedules of everyone I had three or more classes with. (We had a seven day rotation with eight total periods, seven of which occurred on any given day, except day two which had seven periods and an assembly. Almost nobody even knew the full 49 period rotation by memory. Everyone knew that day 2's schedule was X@ CAFE X where spaces indicate morning break and lunch, @ indicates assembly, and the X's represent periods. The full schedule for that particular day was D@ CAFE B, and shockingly many people needed to look it up, even though the last period of the day was ABCDEFG for days 1234567 respectively, and the skipped periods each day were F(GH)ABCDE for days 1(2)34567 respectively, so  by simple process of elimination the only possible schedule was D@ CAFE B. G@BCDEF was the second period rotation. None of the other periods had a rotation, but knowing these patterns reduced the actual amount of memorization required to the 28 periods between break and lunch each day or that information compressed into seven mnemonics.) I forgot to prepare for one quiz in the entire time I was in high school (I neglected or otherwise chose not to study for other quizzes I remembered, but there was one time when I got to class and had a quiz that was not a pop quiz that I was not expecting). It was the quiz about the life cycle of plants in my biology class, junior year.

One of the tricks of memorization is that the more related information you know, the easier it is to memorize new information. Given the way the brain is wired, this actually makes a lot of neurological sense even if it seems counter-intuitive from the perspective of information theory. The brain has ridiculously large storage capacities; it doesn't store everything it has room for because it uses the same mechanisms for storage as it does for figuring out what is important. When you've already learned a lot about a particular kind of information, that type of information is automatically deemed important, and hence automatically stored. This is also a big part of why classes you care about are always orders of magnitude easier than classes where you just don't care. Caring also flags information as important which makes your brain form memories faster; whereas, not caring marks information as less important. (Interesting question: do we learn to care less as we age? and if so how much of the relationship between weakened memory capacity and caring less can be attributed to caring less? the answer is much less than 100% changes in grey matter to white matter ratio explain quite a few of the brains changes as you age. Basically, if you're male, your brain is wired to learn new information until about the age of thirty and to optimize its use of the information you've already learned once you pass thirty. If you're female, the crossover age is a little younger.)

I have a terrible memory for location. I tried to use my little red calendar during the first week of school my freshman year, but I had trouble keeping track of where I'd put it. The worst time for me to find anything is after I've finished cleaning and organizing a room. I can't remember where I've put anything. (Files on my computer are information not locations. I can easily remember locations of files nested many folders deep in my organization of documents. I couldn't function without being able to do this because I have many thousands of files that I access once every two years or so.)

One of the things that happens to people who are able to rely on a particular skill, such as being able remember things that they've heard easily is that they are able to use that skill in places where it isn't the optimal solution. Strengths often become crutches. (Whereas, weaknesses often become excuses, which are also not good.) One of the basic life skills I never learned in high school that practically everyone else in my school did learn is how to make lists and keep track of more information than you can remember about what you should be doing and when you should be doing it. I was proud of memory. Actually (as you can probably tell), I still am a bit proud of it. I enjoyed relying on it when other people needed an external aid, so I relied on it (and had surprisingly many opportunities to show it off when other people were wondering where a fellow student or where a teacher might be at some particular time). But I missed a life skill along the way, and that life skill was making lists, so it's something I've had to be learning to do in a less friendly environment for learning than high school is.

This probably seems dumb to you. Making lists is something obvious and easy for practically everyone. Memorization was something that was obvious and easy for me. People improve at what they practice. My memory capacities undoubtedly expanded as a result of my aversion to lists. Other people's keeping track of written information skills expanded as a result of their using lists. Unfortunately for me, keeping track of written information scales to much higher levels of complexity and more arbitrary unsorted tasks than does just remembering everything. So improving your ability to rely on lists is actually a more important skill.

And that's why people should rely on lists even if they don't have to, because there is a cross-over point, where lists become better, and everything on one side of that cross-over is harder than everything on the other side, so that's the skill that needs to be so natural you never have to worry about it.