Are we losing our ability to remember?

Let me tell you an anecdote about my personal experience. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar. As the years went by, I began to realize that a lot of the managers/mentors I had worked for and looked up to when I was younger simply did not know what they were talking about. You're too easily distracted -- focus, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, they would say! But they would never talk about how the left hand of the organization and the right hand of the organization didn't agree. And I began to wonder if they were making things up in order to deflect blame away from the leadership structure which included themselves.

Of course, that sinking suspicion turned out to be generally true. When I worked at hypergrowth companies with great leaders (rare to find and whom I must say I somewhat took for granted), guess how often I found it hard to focus? Very rarely. Now, what about all the other places with organizational dysfunction? Oh, it was VERY hard for me to focus. Borderline impossible, really.

It turns out that my to-do lists, my "productivity hacks" my treasured knowledge bases -- all of them were a very specific kind of procrastination I was doing to maintain some semblance of control trying to get work done in an organization that made questionable decisions over my head. I was trying to avoid having the hard conversations with the people who made those decisions because they were stressful and risky and if they went the wrong way I would have to leave. Which I did on more than one occasion.

But since that point, my brain went from being "a weird place" as you phrase it, to being a place that works on my behalf. Let me tell you, it took a lot more work, but it's a lot more convenient this way. You spend a lot of time with your brain -- 8-16 hours of conscious time every day of every year. If it's not playing nicely with you, it might be worth investing in turning it around to work on your behalf. It can take a while (probably 6 years on my part), but I assure you that it's worth the effort. Some of that will pertain just to you in particular -- exercise, seeing a therapist, yoga, mindfulness training, what have you. But some of that will be directly changing your environment.

Changing your environment means working in an environment where you aren't forced to be distracted. Many jobs page you with BS at odd intervals and make it hard to engage in deep focus -- that, or you're turned into a ticket jockey with very little time or agency to think deeply about how to solve problems. Alternatively, your living environment can contribute to this -- are you stuck with housemates or a family which is constantly making it impossible for you to focus? If so, it will be hard to focus no matter what /you/ do until you take out the environmental aggressor.

And beyond that, if you're going to use a tool to help you focus, I'd recommend a schedule builder [1] rather than a to-do list. To-do lists often feel a lot more helpful than they actually are -- it's not a good thing that it feels so "fun" to check off an item. Compartmentalizing your day into intervals which you use to focus on various kinds of work is the ideal because it makes it easier to build the habits you want to build. Habit formation is the key to long term success at just about any pursuit in life.

https://www.nirandfar.com/todo-vs-schedule-builder/

That sounds less like "we are consuming more information than we need" and more like "we don't know how to deal with the information we are presented with" and there's likely some training that could be developed to mitigate this issue.

My memory is better now than ever before. I find it even knows how to forget things I don't care about! Great feature.

I like the idea he raises of Google or search in general being an extension of our memory.

I think as technology evolves, we may see a better version of this idea. The ultimate version of this would be what Connor Macleod is gifted at the end of Highlander 2.

He has this ability to see people's thoughts and help them work together to solve huge problems in the world.

We have lots of chat apps that give us instant communication, but it is not very organized or easy to search like the idea of direct access to someone's thoughts.

Whenever I do a SEO workshop I ask 3 questions to my audience:

  * How often did you Google this week?
  * What was the last thing before the last thing that you Googled?

For the first question, I get laughs. For the second one blank stares.

Later, I shoot another question:

  * What is the last thing you read, that you googled before, top to bottom?

For the last question everybody looks at their feet.

The use case I optimize websites for is:

  * Users do not know when they Google.
  * Users do not know what they Google.
  * Google is an extension of their thinking.
  * They do not read what they find. 
  * It just need to move them forward in a way.

We are all users.