The utmost importance of active observation
There is a phrase that I learned in business school that stuck to me: GIGO = Garbage In, Garbage Out. You cannot expect great output if the input is junk. That principle applies also to your mind. For whatever you are actively trying to know or learn or do, you have to have to pay attention to the right things and then have a quality intake. Once the right content is in your mind, then you should make a deliberate effort to remember it so it is relevant or useful to you.
In my household it used to be common to misplace car keys at least once a week. That sometimes becomes a little emergency when you are late to something and desperately looking for the car keys. It wasn’t really that we had a bad memory for where we put things. On the contrary, it was that we weren’t really paying attention when we set them down. That’s a big difference and both aspects affect the ability to recall where the keys are when you need them. Also, we probably could have been more systematic in where we always put those keys. Having a designated place to put things is a good practice. That principle not only goes for the placement of physical objects, but also for the placement of mental objects, such as things you are trying to remember.
Before you learn to apply any memory hacks, teach yourself to pay attention better. It’s best to make remembering a deliberate act. Remembering things can be something that is on autopilot, but that can fail when you are not accustomed to paying attention to certain details. It is important that you make a decision to remember certain things. Classic memory expert Harry Lorayne often underscored the point that we often fail to pay sufficient attention to information as it arrives, which explains why we don’t retain it. For example, when you are at an event or party some people forget names of the people they meet immediately. But one key is to be deliberate about the fact you are going to put effort into remembering names. Once you have decided to actively remember, then that’s half the battle. The other half is storing and recalling that memory.
There is a difference between remembering a birthday and remembering that today is the birthday. You might remember that July 2 is somebody’s birthday, but not pay attention to the fact it is July already. So practical memory requires both skills: storing the right information for ready retrieval, but also being attentive or having systems in place to prompt retrieval when necessary.
Another useful principle in paying attention is how you group or sorting inputs. If you have a systematic way of arranging inputs, then that can serve you well in how you store or recall that information.
Let’s imagine a scenario where your organization is hiring for three different jobs and you and your colleague, Julia, are part of a hiring team. In this scenario you are standing at a desk as a line of interested people are coming to you handing you an application for a job. Let’s imagine that you just take each paper application and just put it onto your desk. You might even stack them into a single, unsorted pile. All you are doing is standing there, passively taking paper and stacking it. So later, the boss comes by and asks you to provide a summary of the applications. What do you have to do to meaningfully answer the boss’s inquiry? You will have to go one by one through each stack and make some sort of assessment, then report back. That might take a while.
However, your colleague, Julia, was at her desk taking applications as well. The difference is that Julia applied a system for grouping and sorting them as the applications came in. She would ask two basic questions about each application, such as what job is the candidate interested in? How many years of professional work experience does the candidate have? She had a system where she would immediately sort the applications into one of six piles on her desk signifying which Job – A, B, or C, and whether the candidate had less than or more than 5 years of professional experience. When the boss came by and asked Julia for a summary of the applications, immediately she was able to summarize that Job C had only 5 inexperienced candidates applying and Job A had 10 experienced candidates, and Job B had 7 experienced candidates.
| Job A | Job B | Job C |
|---|---|---|
| Less than 5 years of experience | Less than 5 years of experience | Less than 5 years of experience |
| 5 or more years of experience | 5 or more years of experience | 5 or more years of experience |
Sorting the information as it came in into meaningful categories required that the second HR team member was more active than the first team member. But the result was much more useful, more impressive to the boss, and simplified the task of evaluating the resumes later, because there was already a sense of prioritization.
Back to how this applies to remembering things. When we apply a more active way of taking information in, including using grouping, sorting, and more inquisitiveness, then it will be more useful. For instance, the information as taken in will likely be more useful in real time, better organized for retrieval, and more efficient. Also, the fact that you are engaging more actively in the intake process will make it much stickier to remember.
To improve the quality of my active intake of what is said during meetings, I like to take some hand-written notes. Also, I like to doodle on my notes and do mind-maps, which help me remember how to hook new information when I’m noting it. I might never read those notes, but the process of using a pen to write things down helps me remember it better. Of course, in that case, I also have the option of reviewing the notes, which also helps.
Too often it is not memory that is the problem as so much as just being insufficiently attentive or active when taking knowledge in. But if you prepare a nice place for your knowledge, as it comes into your mind, it will find a more organized, more comfortable place to store it and then more effectively retrieve it when needed.
