Remembering the Important Things
Mnestics and other reminders
A couple of years ago I was at a post-conference retreat in Australia. This was a fairly intense retreat1, with some fairly intense people, and one of the evening activities was a game2 called Hot Seat. One persons sits in the3 Hot Seat, selects a question-spice-level, and answers personal questions asked by the other participants4.
During their time in the Hot Seat one of the attendees, let’s call them Jarred5, was asked what their core values were, and without hesitating or slowing down answered “Apotheosis, Home, Works”, and then on a follow up question clearly outlined what each of these words meant for them.
This shook me.
See, several years earlier I’d outlined my core Directions, they were part of my monthly review, and for a while I’d had them on the wall above my desk, but every time someone asked me about them I’d struggle6 to bring the words to mind.
Here was this set of values that I said were most important to me, and I couldn’t even remember what they were! And here, in front of me, was someone proving it didn’t have to be that way.
Of course I talked with Jarred about this, and about his Journey, and what he does to Remember. He’s since written all about it over on his substack. It’s a great read, and I recommend you check it out. Go on. I’ll wait.
In his write up, and in our conversation, Jarred used a quote that’s stuck with me:
Humans can forget anything. It's okay to forget some things, because we are mortal and finite. But some things we have to remember. It's important that we remember. Write to yourself something which will make you remember.
- There Is No Antimemetics Division
Now, in the context of the quote there are literal paranormal entities making you forget, but I think the message holds for our more present context7. If we want to remember the important things, like who we want to be, and how to be that person, just trying harder8 isn’t the way to go about it. We need to put a system in place so that we remember on our schedule, not at the whims of our fallible human brains. We need to write something down, and we need to regularly read it.9
How I remember
I think advice like this is a little like advice on how to organise furniture in your room. I can tell you where I put my bed and my desk, but you have different furniture, and a different room, so it’s probably useful for me to talk about my decision making process too.
Mnestics
Taking a leaf out of Jarred’s book I started building my reminders with some morning Mnestics. I’d previously tried all sorts of morning routines around exercise, and cold showers, and yoga, and meditation, and eventually (usually quite quickly) these fell by the wayside. This time I wanted to build something that was easy enough I would still do it on my worst days, and at the same time I wanted to shift the focus from having a routine of Doing something, to instead reminding myself who I wanted to Be10.
To that end, I decided my Mnestics would be a single page at the front of my journal. In the best case scenario I would get up, meditate, stretch, and then take my mnestics, but the minimum viable version would be to grab my journal without even getting out of bed11.
1) Directions
I start every morning with my Directions, remembering the very thing that kicked off this whole process for me. I remind myself of the person I want to Be and Why I want to do the things I want to do.
2) Questions
After reminding myself who I want to be, I ask myself some questions about the day ahead. In the interests of keeping this simple12 I don’t write the answers down, but I do encourage myself to be as specific as possible.
First off I check in with how I’m feeling, this question is a more recent addition, after realising that I’ll have different energy (mental and physical) on different days, and that this will have an impact on what my day will look like.
Only then do I look at the day ahead (consulting my journal, calendar, and task list as needed). It’s worth noting that this is intended as an overview more than a work plan. I’m trying to get a feel for if the day will be a busy day, a relaxed day, a social day, etc, as well as reminding myself of any fixed events or other things that /need/ to happen.
After that, a reminder that finding Joy is a priority, and that I should be able to explicitly state at least one moment every day where I can be present and joyful.
Then onto challenges. There’s a level of pre-mortem to this, and while I don’t need to have solutions or answers to all the challenges as part of my mnestics this is often a useful reminder to think about how I’m setting myself up for success.
Finally off the back of thinking about challenges I need to identify one specific thing I can do in order to live my best life. Often (by design) this is in response to one of the challenges13. Completing this question does not require actually doing the thing. The idea is that if I remind myself who I want to be and why, and then directly point at something I can do to live a better life, I will want to (rather than have to) do the thing. This works most the time…
3) A Final Reminder
I first set my mnestics page up while on a 16 day hike, with plenty of Space to reflect on what sort of system would encourage future Tom to live the best version of their life. After laying out the Directions and the Questions I had a few lines left at the bottom of the page, and decided the cherry on top would be a direct reminder to myself. But what to say? If I could tell future-me one thing every morning, what would be most impactful? Here’s what I came up with:
Every minute and every day, you get to choose how you Respond to being Alive.
This choice defines your life, and determines the impact that you have.
Choose wisely.
Anki
The next tool I use to remember, and a recent addition to my kete14, is the flashcard app Anki. Now Anki is reasonably powerful and customisable in how it works, but I have a very simple use for it: a flashcard deck of around 17015 cards called “Reminders I thought were important”.
Every morning, after I’ve taken my mnestics16 I open the deck and see seven randomized17 cards containing takeaways which I’ve previously recorded. These might be ideas or quotes from workshops or books, potentially useful tools or concepts, or reminders for life. For example:
You can drag events in google calendar
The edge is where the magic happens
Sleep is actually kinda important
“What if I’m wrong?”
What is the air that I breathe? Where and with who am I spending my time? Where am I directing my attention?
[During the training] Do the thing that you want people to do at the end
When I [prompt], I will [action]
Be still and know
I’ve been collecting these Takeaways for years, in random notes and more recently in my Knowledge Management System in Notion18 and recently realised there was little point storing them and not regularly reviewing them in some way, because most of them aren’t things to remember and check as a resource19, they’re things I wouldn’t even remember to refer back to. Anki has been fantastic for bringing these things front of mind on an occasional basis.
The medium sized stuff
So Mnestics and Anki (and my Cycles of Reflection) are my main tools for remembering the Big Important things in life, but what about the more day to day important things?
Automated reminders are key
I’ve got a whole Life Management System in Notion that I’ll write more about in the future, but this is not a post about Notion20, so instead I’ll continue to skirt around the edges of that rabbit hole.
In my Task Management System21 I have a category “Not Currently Prioritised”, where tasks go to die. Sometimes I think I want to do a thing, and months pass and I don’t do the thing, and I realise that I don’t want to do it enough to actually do it now but maaaaaybe I will want to do it in the future. So it gets filed away in Not Currently Prioritised and then I never ever think about it again.
Only, I want to think about it again at some point, so I have two ways of automating that process:
Sometimes, usually when there’s an obvious time to reassess, I give the task a due date, with a built in notification on that date22.
Every three months I have an automatically generated task that tells me to read through everything that’s Not Currently Prioritised and decide if anything should brought back from exile.
I try to have similar workflows in other parts of my life: I snooze emails that I want to act on in the future, I add notifications (and email reminders) to important calendar events, I have an alarm23 that goes of at 3pm every day and reminds me “now might be a good time to meditate”, and another alarm nudging me to wind down in the evening24.
The core idea here is that if I want to remember something important, I put a system in place to remind me at an appropriate time, because just trying harder “is for suckers and the self-deluded.” 25
If you’ve made it this far, this is your strong encouragement to do the same.
Think about what is important to you, and think about how you can set yourself up to remember.
Ngā mihi,
Tom
Think Corporate Retreat over Mindfulness Retreat
I use game in a very loose sense of the word here
Usually metaphorical, in our case directly in front of a fire
I recommend using this activity with caution
Because that’s their name
and occasionally have to pull out my phone
I was going to say more mundane context… But what could be more important than REMEMBERING WHO IT IS YOU WANT TO BE
I have many thoughts™ about trying harder as a method. Instead of falling down that rabbit hole I’ll give you a single quote: “One thing I've learned is not to trust myself to 'try harder'. Trying harder is for suckers and the self-deluded.” - CGP Grey
We need to do life on purpose?
With the expectation that starting with Why would be a powerful reminder and motivator that would lead me to actually do the things I wanted to do
Having built the habit I can now go through the process without even consulting my journal, or necessarily opening my eyes, though this does tend to be worse for maintaining focus
and being prepared for my laziest self
For example I might identify a challenge of spending a lot of the day at my desk, and decide the specific thing I can do is set a series of alarms reminding me to stand up and stretch
and counting
Or sometimes later in the day when I’m doing my flashcards for Te Reo Māori
For those who know Anki: I’ve explicitly set this up to not do spaced repetition. Every card has the same chance of showing up every day because I’m not trying to memorise these things, just remind myself that they exist and were/are important to me
But this is not a post about my Knowledge Management System (KMS), or Notion
That’s a different tag in my KMS, but again this is not a post about Notion…
Did I mention that. I feel like I should mention that
It’s like a to-do list wearing a tuxedo
This due date isn’t intended as a day to do the task by, it’s purely a reminder that the task exists, and often the response to the notification is to bump the due date back by up to a year
With nice chill music
Both of these are framed as reminders, invitations, or circuit breakers rather than as requirements