During the event that sparked this post: (Easier to remember metadata about a sequence of numbers than the numbers themselves), I didn’t have my phone nor a notepad on me.
I had the strong feeling that this metadata idea was something I wanted to record, remember and think about later. My next thought was, I don’t have any way to note this down now… I am not confident that I’ll “remember to remember this” later.
I managed to continue pinging this idea to keep it alive until I was able to note it (here), but it essentially meant continuously thinking about it and related thoughts the entire time. The few times I let myself think about other things I nearly meandered away until it was almost unrecoverable.
It’s almost like I have a memory address for a given piece of data and if I lose the pointer there’s no way to recover it. Two bad case scenarios are:
- What was that thing I wanted to remember? It’s sort of about XYZ but there was an interesting angle that I can’t recall now!
- [worse] I don’t even remember that there was something interesting to recall.