Memory method to refine recollection (and produce progress)
Filtering to find the highlights of your daily life
As I look back at the past year, trying to recall the significant happenings of my daily life, I’m stymied. I had a bout of Covid, but was that this past year? or the year before? And what else? (Not only confusion but also blanks.)
Memory — at least my memory — is foggy. “The palest ink is stronger than the best memory.”
So I worked out a method/process to assist my memory. I used it for a while and learned from the experience, which led to some substantial revisions. The way it works reminds me of the incremental enrichment of U-235, separating it bit by bit from U-238 in an iterative process.
This method can be applied to things happening in your personal life or professional life or any long-term involvement. The only difference would be in the focus of what is recorded in the daily happenings and perhaps the starting month.
For example, a teacher would start the sequence of monthly reviews in August or September, with the year running through the following July or August. They could use the method for what happens in a particular class to see more clearly the most significant accomplishments of that class, by week, month, quarter, and/or year. Or they could consider their entire daily teaching experience to see the highlights across all their classes.
Step 1 (one-time): Prepare the log
I recommend using a spreadsheet program to support a cascading refinement of significant events: a log of two or three notable events for each day, week, and month, three or four events for each quarter, and finally the top ten for the year.
Update 2024–09–17: I have created two Google Sheets workbooks that you can copy (go to File > Make a copy in the Sheets menu) and rename for you own use. One is a workbook for the 4th quarter of 2024 — this can in effect be used for practice, a way to get experience in the last three months of this year. The other is a workbook for 2025. These are set out as described below but are ready for use. /update
I use a Google Sheets workbook with three spreadsheets titled Daily, Weekly, and Monthly. Since each entry is only a few things, one line per day (week, month, quarter) is fine, and if I ever do need more room, it’s easy to insert a new blank line. Also, a spreadsheet makes it easy to enter the dates so that the workbook is ready to receive my notes.
I keep only one workbook, but if you want a separate set of highlights (for each class, or each client, or particular committees), then set up a separate workbook for each of those. That’s most easily done by setting up a master workbook, and then copying that file for each entity whose highlights you wish to track — one copy of the workbook per class (or client), for example.
Here are the contents of the individual spreadsheets in the workbook:
Daily
Highlight the first column and select the “date” format. Enter into the top cell the date of the first day — I started on Dec 29 2023 to have 3 days of practice before 2024 began, but you can start at any time. Then for the second cell in the column, enter the formula that adds 1 to the cell above. With the column formatted as Number > Date, then the cell displays the date of the subsequent day. (Spreadsheet programs are smart enough to know about leap year.)
Copy the “add 1” formula from that cell and insert it into the cells below to get the dates for the year (thus a total of 366 rows for 2024). The result will look something like this:
Weekly
Insert a new spreadsheet into the workbook, label it “Weekly,” and use the same approach as for the Daily worksheet, except that you:
- Enter the date of the initial Saturday into the first cell — in this case, Dec 30, 2023.
- Enter into the cell below a formula to add 7 (rather than 1) to the date in the cell above.
Copy the formula into the cells below for 50 more rows to get the full 52 weeks of the year, each cell with the date of the Saturday that ends the week.
Monthly
The Monthly spreadsheet has three sections:
- Monthly Significant Events — One line per month, each line with its month name and 2–3 significant events
- Quarterly Significant Events — One line per quarter, each line with its quarter name and 3–4 significant events
- 2024 Top Ten Significant Events — Ten lines numbered 1–10, with one significant event on each line.
Step 2 (one-time): Prepare Reminders
The reason I use reminders is that, as noted above, my memory is an unreliable instrument. Reminders are the backstop to my memory.
You can use Calendar reminders, Reminder reminders, or whatever you like that will pop up a reminder at the appropriate day and time. Use the “repeat” option for each reminder to repeat as needed — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Set five reminders:
- Day’s summary. I chose 7:30 pm, you may want later.
- Week’s summary each Sunday (for the previous week — the week that ended the day before).
- Month’s summary on the first day of each month (for the previous month).
- Quarter’s summary on the first day of each quarter (or every 3 months)— for the previous quarter.
- Annual summary on the first day of each year (for the previous year). As noted, the year may not be a calendar year — teachers, for example, will probably use a school year.
Step 3 (daily): Describe the day
When you get the daily reminder, write a brief description of what happened during the day. I have set an evening Reminder that pops up (for me, at 7:30 pm, but a later time may work better for you), and when that happens, I write a three- or four-paragraph summary of the day’s happenings.
This description is just to set out the day so I can see it fully and be able, as I view it, to pick out the two or three most notable (or most non-routine) things that happened during the day.
You can just write the day description in a text file and discard it when you have identified those two or three things. It’s a working description, temporary scaffolding to help you identify the nuggets to keep. On the other hand, if you do want to keep these descriptions, a journal/diary app might be useful — or you can just use a text editor or word processor to enter the daily descriptions in a document that will grow through the year. (I use Day One on my Macbook; my wife use the Notes app on her Macbook computer.)
Step 4 (daily): Extract the day’s nuggets
Immediately after writing the day’s summary, read it over and identify two or three things that stand out in some way, and enter those into the Daily spreadsheet on the line for that date. Initially, I tried to combine steps 1 and 2, but it turned out to be much easier if they were done separately.
The idea is to identify things that are not necessarily big but are out of the ordinary. Examples: sharpening my kitchen knives, assembling a new table, starting a new batch of ferment, or finishing a book — things that mark the day. Typically these will be the small events of ordinary life, though some days will be more noteworthy than others (for example, the day I got a pacemaker). I also will note significant events in the world — for example, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, and (hopefully) the day Russia asks for a peace settlement.
Update: Lesson learned: Put significant events in boldface so that you can easily find them again. For example, if you made a significant purchase (a car, a computer, a camera), enter it as (for example) “bought Macbook Air.” Or perhaps you lost something of value: “Lost camera.” Major events are easier to find if they stand out in boldface — thus, “Broke leg.”
Step 5 (weekly): Extract the week’s nuggets
When the Sunday reminder pops up, look through the entries for the previous seven days (in the Daily spreadsheet), and enter the most interesting or notable two to four in the appropriate line of the Weekly page — the week that ended the day before. This is a list of the highlights of the week.
Some weeks straddle a month change — the first part of the week in one month, the remainder in the next. For those weeks, on the last day of the month, I enter any highlights for the week so far. That makes Step 6 easy. (I use a “|” as a separator following the early entries. At the end of the week, I follow the | with highlights for the rest of the week, the part that’s in the new month.)
Step 6 is much easier when I clearly separate months within a week. Weeks in which a month begins on Sunday or ends on Saturday don’t face the split-week problem.
In the week’s events, use the same boldface rule as for the daily events, and for the same reason: to make the most significant events stand out when scanning through the weekly summaries.
Step 6 (monthly): Extract the month’s nuggets
When you get the first of the month reminder, review the weekly notes for the previous month, pull out the two or three most interesting or notable, and enter those as the month summary on the appropriate line of the Monthly page to make the list of highlights for the month.
Step 7 (quarterly): Extract the quarter’s nuggets
When you get the quarterly reminder, review the monthly notes for the three months of the previous quarter and pull out the three to five most interesting or notable. Enter those as the Quarterly highlights on the Quarterly section of the Monthly page. Note that for a quarter, you enter “3 to 5” items rather than “2 or 3,” as for days and weeks.
Step 8 (annually): Extract the year’s nuggets
When you get the annual reminder on the first of a new year, review the quarterly notes for the previous year, identify the ten most interesting and notable events of the year, and enter those in the Annual list, one per line.
As noted, the first reminder of each year will be the first day of the month that begins your own year — for teachers and school administrators, that might be July or August or September. For one’s personal life, it would probably be January, though you might start your personal year with your birth month. The same approach works for all those applications, the only difference being the month picked as the starting month of a year.
That’s it
With this setup (steps 1 and 2) and process (steps 3–8), you will accumulate a history and record of what you have done and what has happened. You obviously can extend this approach to include (for example) identifying goals and noting the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly progress toward achieving them — see this post for some ideas on that. In that application, you would have a workbook (file) for each goal.
Set it up and try it for a month to get a feel of what it can do. I found that there is a small learning curve, but the experience teaches you quickly how to find the focus that best serves your goals.
Update: An unexpected bonus
My intention in doing this little memory project was to have a better recollection of highlights, but after using the method for a few months, I find that routinely recording the outcomes of my undertakings has resulted in visible improvements in various areas and progress where I did not expect it. I did not anticipate that.
It reminds me of a trick used by 19th-century settlers traversing the trackless Great Plains. They would drag a long rope behind the wagon. Looking back at the rope, they steered the wagon to keep the rope straight, and that kept the wagon on course. Looking back at my personal highlights — daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly — similarly helps me see the direction I’m going.
