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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
Oh, flash cards. I’ve never used them but memory is a muscle and it must be exercised. There has to be something more fun, though.
"You are more likely to remember something if you read it out loud, a study has found" https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171201090940.h... "It turns out, any walk outdoors has the potential to unlock our brains" https://lithub.com/on-the-link-between-great-thinking-and-ob... "Older adults who consumed cranberries frequently as part of their diet saw improvements in episodic memory, neural function, and br…
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Oh, flash cards. I’ve never used them but memory is a muscle and it must be exercised. There has to be something more fun, though.
I find that the subject under study dominates my sense of fun, no matter the format of that studying.
Sleep is the key. Repeated lack of sleep has an extreme impact on cognition and memory retrieval. A few things that have helped me: #1 sleep in a completely dark room. A specialist MD shared this insight with me and it changed my life. I also use an eye mask and white noise machine. #2 use a call recording tool on your internal meetings that can summarize notes. Being able to go back “in time” to a call often has ena…
Also, if this is affecting you, get a sleep study! The money will be well spent if physicians can find possible reasons for poor sleep that can be improved - a lot of people suffer from various kinds of sleep disorders, and treatment is becoming cheaper and more accessible to the point that a diagnosis well worth it for increasing numbers of people, given the increased quality of life it can offer.
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I find that the subject under study dominates my sense of fun, no matter the format of that studying.
The trick is to effectively study subjects you’re burnt out on or no longer have that magnetic attraction to.
Quite a while ago I left my job where I was doing a mix of development as well as management of a small team. Now I'm doing indie game development and I'm getting more brain exercise working on hard problems every month than I had in a whole year at my IT job.
Since then I feel as if I have become a lot sharper than I had been for a long time.
if you mean it: fast 16 hours every day. this will boost your cognition right from the start. 23+ hours fasts once or twice a month. kills my old mans' ADHD and improves early alzheimers symptoms. reduce fat intake to your personal min requirement. controlled sleep deprivation, meaning no stress at all, every once in a while, 48 h, to 'reset the brain', no liquor, 16h+ fasts, coffee is ok. sounds like nonsense but tr…
You stay up for 48h every once in awhile? What does no stress mean exactly and how do you feel after?
By no stress I mean, no deadlines, only recreational coding and building stuff, no going through documents, minimum of screen time, best none in the night hours, puzzles and stuff are great. Nothing work related at all. Recreation is the goal. The controlled sleep deprivation is for organs, synapses, receptors.
You go hiking, talk with people through the night, write on novels or blog posts, then you go hiking again. Or swimming, or relaxed skiing, surfing, nightly museum or gallery events and weekends are the perfect time for this kind of thing.
The goal is to "empty your storage" of certain hormones and transmitters and get the respective organs and receptors to their limits, which they will barely get to after just 48 h of wakefulness, but it will be enough for your brain to notice the difference when you wake up afterwards. 'Holy shit, this is what it is / what it was like' ...
It's like getting a drop out of the fountain of youth. The boost will return after normal days and healthy sleep but work/life are crazy and TV/ads put an insane amount of obvious, subliminal, subconscious stress on our brains that we aren't aware of and that builds up in specific spaces that, after some 'amount', kind of constantly put some threshold under pressure which annihilates the boost of even good sleep, which is why you should do it regularly.
A lot of people swear on sleep but check their cabinets or ask them for their stack and you'll know ...
Because you can look away but you can't control what's ON your peripheral and so you have to get your hormone and transmitter producing organs, and just as - or even more - importantly, *the respective receptors*, to the point where they can produce and enjoy proper doses again.
Some bad analogies: Stretching is great but you need to stretch beyond a point to really enjoy the state and the progress afterwards. The same goes for strength training, we call it progressive overload. Too much is bad, especially on drugs, pain killers and stuff, but just the right amount without any additional stress and it works sustainably well.
If you know the right kind of researchers, they can certainly go beyond stones are hard and this is what 99 peoples' blood work and 4000 survey participants say.
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On the topic of white-noise machines: There are headphones out there that are purpose-built to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. My favorites right now are SoundOFFs, which emit pink noise, no apps required. I'm also going to experiment with the Ozlu Sleepbuds, which many are calling the unofficial Bose Sleepbuds III since Bose discontinued the second iteration of these buds and sold off much of the…
Having an headphone on ears for 6-9 hours continuous- isn't that harmful for health?
I've been sleeping with custom ear molds for five years prior to moving to noise machine earbuds. Hearing's fine as of earlier this year!
I also resonate with the person who said that reading out aloud helps. I start each day reading the Bible and I read out loud when my mind is overly busy. I find this helps.
I also like your comment about never being great at making decisions quickly. I often describe myself as a good thinker, if not a fast thinker. In saying that, we do tend to compare ourselves to the fastest thinkers we know. So don't beat yourself up too much :-)
Make sure not to make enemies, as they will use this against you. In that sense, try to make meetings flow and if something requires a decision from you, ask people to create diagrams and explanations in a wiki like internal page, like confluence, so you can digest it on your time to make the correct the decision. Similarly, create yourself any diagram or descriptions/points you want to discuss beforehand to take it to the meetings. Maybe make them available before the meetings as well so people can provide you with info you will have processed before the meeting and during the meeting it will be easier to make decisions. Have a good night sleep. Have a good routine and eat well. Take any food supplement you may think you require, and consult a physician if you need medication. I've been taking lion's maine recently and has helped a lot with memory cognition. Unfortunately there is no easy solution here, except to work harder to overcome your problem. An alternative to working harder is getting less tasks to focus on, manage less people, reduce the amount of workload so you can still deliver good work, or even step down from workload intensive roles, like C- ones. Or if you can't step down but have some budget, have your own sharp assistant to help you out.