On Forgetting... and How Not To | by Julian Bond
I’ve never suffered from writer’s block, thank God! Give me a title and away I go. However, memory is a different thing entirely. I came up with a blog idea while I was in the office kitchen, putting the milk back in the fridge while reflecting on work – I’m both task-focused and reflective. That was a couple of weeks ago, and now it’s gone! Will it ever come back, especially in time for blog four?
In the meantime …
I’m very interested in memory, its limitations, and its foibles. I know that if I had the right ‘key’, everything would return, but I don’t know what the key is or where it is. It’s locked away, like a computer password in 1Password (see How to Optimize Your Passwords and Increase Security for more info). A previous partner used to ask me if I remembered things we’d done together, if I said ‘No’ (oops!), she’d continue until she mentioned the key and that unlocked the memory – ‘Ah yes’. The birthday cake she made for my 59th birthday was a good, or bad, example.
Can we remember? - I used to head up a grants team (awarding approximately £5 million each year). We received hundreds of applications each year, each one with multiple pages of application forms, annual accounts, CVs (for educational grants), and evaluation reports on the previous year’s funding. As far as I know, no one ever counted the pages, though the office printer did as we scanned everything to produce huge ring-bound volumes of paper. How glad were we when we started using SharePoint instead? My colleague was phenomenal, it seemed like she read everything. As a team leader, I decided that life was too short to do this, and I wasn’t going to work 9-hour days either and left it to her and the grant committee members (I don’t think they read everything either). But then she remembered it too! She’d say, this application is for such and such, don’t you remember? Er no, I have other work too.
One of the productivity books I read along the way, may have been ‘Getting Things Done’, told me not to fill my brain up with stuff, that’s not what it’s for, and it’s not a hard drive. See what happens if you only use your brain to keep track of everything … It’s for processing, not storage. I’d always lived and worked in this way to some extent, but things began to transform for me as I relieved the pressure on my memory, relying on it meant not getting things done because I didn’t remember. Of course, my colleague never seemed to forget anything but was very impatient with the rest of us! She was impatient with projects too – ‘Don’t trouble me with anything new or different, I have work to do.’
I got rid of to-do lists and used my calendar instead, filling it up with work, nicely organised but flexible too. I have a great sense of relief when I open my calendar on a Monday morning and it tells me what I should be working on. It’s very projecty (autocorrect corrected this word the first time I used it), I even use a version of Critical Chain, moving activities forward if spaces emerge (I love a cancelled meeting!). Some quick, and hard to forget (!), tips:
- Make good use of every 30-minute block in your Outlook calendar.
- Always have a notebook with you, either to note the current discussion or other (unrelated) things that have come up - clearing the stuff that you’ve suddenly remembered out of your brain so that it doesn’t distract you.
- After a meeting, sometimes the next day, go through your notes looking for action points and deadlines. If they’re simple and quick send an email to either complete or begin the process, or add a task to your calendar.
One of my colleagues (we’ve actually only done a tiny amount of work together, he’s in a different team) said to me recently – ‘You have a reputation for efficiency.’ It’s a good reputation to have, and largely due to remembering to get things done. The only downside is that people keep offering me more work! I’ll split the credit for my efficient reputation between me and the project management apprenticeship. And my brain has space for writing blogs, I didn’t expect to be writing this one.
In closing, look after your brain, don’t overfill it, and try out my tips for not forgetting.
Julian Bond is a Project Funding Officer for the Methodist Church based in London and has recently completed the Multiverse Project Management Apprenticeship, with Distinction. He is writing for the Apprentice Lens as part of the Blogging Team. Here’s more about him:
"He loves writing about all kinds of topics, recently being inspired by a weekly writing challenge on work during the pandemic. He brings a wealth of work experience and concern for people’s well-being together. He has also written various book reviews. His writing can be found on Medium.com."