Set up your journal like a diary or chronology in which you make
entries in your diary each day—or even several times a day, as you
get ideas related to your memory. You might even consider including
the parts of your journal you want to share on a blog. You might
even add a section on this to your blog, if you are writing a blog on
your own Website or on one of the popular sites for blogging. If you
do turn this into a blog or something you share with others, be sure
you feel comfortable with others reading what you post. If not, consider
just posting those parts of your journal anyone can read and
keep the other parts offline. A good way to make the distinction is
to keep personal observations and thoughts about yourself in your
private offline journal; but if you have any insights about what you
can do to improve your memory—which could be useful for anyone
else—by all means, post them for all to see.
To make your journal more helpful to you, divide it up into a
series of sections, such as listed below, so you have a series of goals
for developing your memory, keep track of your successes in remembering
different types of information, and note when you experience
memory lapses. This way you can notice trends in your ability to
remember over time, chart improvements and continuing challenges,
and record insights. You can turn this study of your own
memory into a chart, with a column for each section.
For example, in your notebook you might have these sections:
1. My overall goal (i.e., what you hope to achieve by the end of
30 days).
2. My goals for today (i.e., the areas of memory improvement
you are focusing on now).
3. My memory successes (i.e., specific incidents, experiences,
and observations where you enjoyed a notable, outstanding,
or unexpected success).
4. My memory lapses (i.e., specific times when you found you
weren’t able to recall or recognize something at all or where
you remembered it incorrectly).
5. Trends and patterns (i.e., types of things you are likely to remember,
types of things you find you often forget or remember
incorrectly).
6. Memory improvements (i.e., things you find you can remember
now that you didn’t before).
7. Memory challenges (i.e., things that you are continuing to
find especially difficult to remember).
8. Memory insights (i.e., ideas and tips you have gained from
your own experiences in trying to remember things or in
keeping this journal, plus ideas and tips you have gained from
your reading or from others—including talking to people or
from radio or TV).
If you turn this into a chart, such as by creating a table in Word
or an Excel chart, make each of the above categories a column
header.
Then, enter what you feel is most relevant each day, and use
these categories to help focus your attention on different aspects of
your memory development. You can also use this journal to direct
your attention to what you consider the most important areas to
work on, so you can better plan and prioritize what to do. In effect,
you are using your central executive function, which you read about
in Chapter 1, to recall and think about what you have and haven’t
remembered and decide what to do about this so in the future you
remember more.
While the above sections may be a helpful way to divide up the
study of your own memory, as an alternative, you can make entries
in your journal as a narrative, just keeping those categories in mind
so you can incorporate these different topics in your journal as you
write.
Most importantly, write in your journal each day if you can, since
this way you can better chart your progress and stay focused on what
you need to do to improve. Then, too, you will be able to better remember
what happened on a day-by-day basis; otherwise, your images
and impressions from each successive day will interfere with
you remembering what you did the day before. You know the feeling.
Someone asks you what you did during your lunch break yesterday,
and you very likely have trouble remembering exactly what you
did—unless it was something dramatic that cut through the clutter
of many thousands of sensory inputs and memories for each day,
like observing a fight between two women in the supermarket while
you were waiting on line.
If you do skip a day, return to writing your journal as soon as
you can and try to recall what happened the day before, along with
your thoughts and insights from those experiences.
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