Scary realization: more and more often, I’m finding I have no useful recollection of the details of conversations I’ve had in the recent past. You might have sat with me in a meeting last week, say, and we may have come to perfectly lucid agreements on what steps we’d take next to advance whatever project was at hand. But lately the chances are increasingly good that when you ask me about them next, those action items will have escaped me. I’ll probably recall that we spent some time in a meeting together, sure. And maybe even that we had arrived at some mutual understanding, too. But little else.
This is really inconvenient, not to mention frustrating. At first I thought this condition was a symptom of the sheer number of projects I deal with each day (lots), but more and more I worry it’s just a function of getting along in my years. Office life is making me old.
Misty Water-colored Memories
This made me think of how it used to be customary for those who worked at The White House to keep diaries of their day-to-day meetings (in the days before such diaries became inevitably subpoena-able). Not that my job responsibilities are remotely comparable to anyone in that realm of public service, but I think I now understand at least part of the motivation behind work journals: everything is forgettable until it’s written down.
Reluctantly I’m coming to the realization that I need to start writing everything down if I truly intend to hang on to their particulars later on. I need to take the time out after meetings to actually record what happened and what conclusions were reached, what decisions were made. I need the right software to do this, something simple and flexible, and that allows entries to be tagged and easily searched, so I welcome all suggestions. And what the heck, to run the software, let’s just say I need a MacBook Air to carry around with me to do this, too.
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