Until a short time ago, I would have identified my memory management style as something akin to archaeological layers. An archaeologist can study the items found at a particular layer and tell a great deal about the time period, possibly even nailing the layer to a very specific historical event. Similarly, they might know that a certain target layer might be at a specific depth. That’s my brain.
Memories form like layers, adding new ideas on top and preserving old ideas in the layers below. I can recall ideas based on the time of year, a reminder of an event, or even a sketch I did at the time (in school I used to doodle in class; little did I know it was a memory aid). Much like an archaeologist can identify the age of a find by how deep it is, I use context to link new ideas with older ones. I even use it to find items in the physical word: “I know I used it last month, so it’s probably under here.”
Unfortunately, there are drawbacks to using memory to store your personal knowledge base. First, your memory, like archaeological layers, can be selective in what it preserves, meaning that details can be lost. Second, memory can be delicate, as we age things begin to get fuzzy, if they are retained at all. Then it’s as if some long ago farmer plowed over the site and and destroyed the context. To continue to be productive, I need an offsite backup, as it were.
As a stopgap solution, I have a couple of note apps on my phone to capture fleeting thoughts and ideas, and occasionally some longer form of recall or context so that it doesn’t get lost in the bustle of daily life. The hard work comes in putting all of that into some form that can be used later. I have given a great deal of thought to the idea of tagging. Since adopting the concept of Zettelkasten, I need to tag or identify individual concepts so that they can be recalled later. In the ZK, tags are put into an index, and the location of notes are recorded in the index. This creates a bit of friction since I need to be a conscientious indexer. I also run into the problem of recalling what tag I might have used. When I bookmarked some websites for my home network project, were they tagged as “homeserver” or “selfhosted”? Or maybe I put it under the more general tag of “computer”? Spoiler: it was all 3. At this stage a “shotgun” approach probably suits me better than try to restrict myself to very specific words/phrases or even formal taxonomy where I have to guess/remember what someone else called it.
Fortunately, my fossilizing brain has enough spark to remember to remember things. Now I need to figure out how to remember when I want to remember.