30 Days to a More Powerful Memory

Chapter 10. Remembering More by Remembering Less

It may seem like a paradox, but one way to remember more is to remember less. In other words, you can set up systems to help you remember a lot of less important details, so that you can better focus on what’s more important to you. Moreover, you can use these systems to help remind you of things that are important to remember now.

You may be familiar with at least some of these systems, such as the age-old advice to put a string around your finger to remind you to do something (though this doesn’t work very well if you see the string and don’t remember what it’s for). Other commonly used systems include creating files for storing important information in one place; setting up tickler files, which ...