It’s really odd for a person who studied history to not be able to remember things. But I’ve always had an issue with my memory. And it’s not as though I don’t remember things. I know all sorts of random shit. I rock at Jeopardy! But ask me what the name of that one guy who did that, and I can’t remember it to save my life.

It’s why I’ve been so focused on notes for so long. I need to write everything down, and if I don’t, I forget it.

Part of this is simply that my mind is a poster child for mental disorders of a certain type. I’m not a psycho or anything, but I do have a server case of ADD and dyslexia that causes words and letters to not come out in the order in which they’re supposed to. That has gotten better as I’ve aged, but I still spell the ’teh’ all the damn time. (Did it twice in that sentence alone). So, it’s not surprising that my memory isn’t what it should be. It’s off doing its own thing when it should be storing things on the trusty hard drive.

Oh, look, cats!

This is also why I try so hard to have systems in my life. If I can hammer things into a structure, it’s easier to put things in my brain in the order that they need to be in. That was a lot of words. I might edit that later.

The problem is that I’m good at creating systems. I’m not good at sticking with them. See: aforementioned note-taking system. It has been floating from one setup to another for years at this point. I think I’ve finally found the final form, but who knows? I could switch to Evernote tomorrow. Hopefully not, but I’ve done dumber things.

Sticking with this structured way of doing things is supposed to help. I just need to do it. I think this is why blogging has had such an impact on me. But putting my thoughts here, things slow down a little. I put more thoughts into what I’m doing and the systems I’m creating, because I’m usually telling you guys about them.

So maybe, I’ll get better at this. Maybe that will help my memory improve. I don’t know. If it doesn’t, I’ll probably not remember writing this anyway. So, I guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.

What do you do to help you remember?