Fully agree with both of you, especially about writing even simple things down, because it's usually the simple thing I didn't write down that trips me up.

The hardest part is making sure my notes are always up to date, which sometimes means rewriting them to make it easier to tell at a glance what my responsibilities for the day will be.

I've also found that I sometimes remember the first letter of a word even if I can't remember the word itself, so I also keep an index by letter of medium-term information. For instance, I might remember that a contact's name for a work project starts with S, so I flip to S and see his name is Steven. It'll also be filed in a project-related contacts list so if I can't remember the first letter, I can at least skim until I see the name.

I've just started experimenting with transcribed voice notes combined with a local LLM to help me write high-level summaries as well as helping create the index. Still needs work, though. I always have to double-check the outputs to make sure the LLM didn't miss anything important.

Side note: LLMs, even relatively small ones, are really good at helping me find a word via a vague conceptual description of what I want to say. Quite helpful, because on bad days I run into a missing word several times a paragraph when writing. When that fails, I use a related words site and drill down finding closer and closer words until I see the one I wanted.

I learned thinking too much about it makes it worse. Just have to do lists that are ephemeral that you'll rewrite and start over 5-10 pages from now. Just pencil and nice small notebooks that are portable is more important than my laptop or phone most of the time for work

I try to keep things simple because any attempt at a complex/heavy process will never become a habit. But what I find is, even the act of writing something down means I will remember it.