Smart question. My approach to this is more about mitigation than problem solving. I agree that your body works against you at time (or more). Your main problem is poor unmanaged human memory. The sad part is that your brain isn't controlled by your consciousness. Countless times I wish I had a switch in my brain to instruct it to set my memory on high priority when doing or learning important stuff. So far, wishing didn't help me evolve my brain, but few practices helped me mitigate the problem. I am talking about taking notes. I have been doing this for years and with time I learned to make this process more effective, efficient and pragmatic. I still have notes since I was ten years old.
The faintest ink beats the strongest memory.
The following points I am glad to share with you:
- I do understand that this might be tedious and time consuming especially in this fast pace century, but discipline yourself and accept that you need to lose those few minutes taking notes for the sake of the future.
- Have you database of personal notes well organized, easy to access and close to your point of reach at any time (and I mean anytime). Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with some idea in my head and I write it on my android app (Color Note). I used to take notes on paper but I gave up on that because you cannot carry this with you all the time and more importantly it is mostly impossible to index data on an ever growing notebook.
- My main notes database is a folder on my pc with all my observations, conclusions, important projects ... I do have a one large note file for programming tricks and practices I learned. I decided to keep this in one file for easy access and faster search, and please if you do this, do tag any new input.(using any characters you like) This is a great approach to achieve a manual human indexing. Ex:
-Javascript anonymous function #javascript:
(function func(){alert(1);})()
I wish I can debug my brain, correct some glitches and make my aging memory young again. Sadly I cannot but I am always researching the problem of aging memory.
Even though I am sure I haven't done this problem any justice by keeping this short, I do hope I did convince you to start this good habit.