Subj : Memory loss
To   : All
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Thu Mar 27 2025 01:56 pm

I've dealt with elder care for some time; my grandparents both lived
into their 90s, and I saw their decline. My father passed away
relatively early - he didn't have cognitive issues.

My mother has been diagnosed with dementia and had been suffering from
some memory loss for some time. She's in a memory care facility now, so
we're able to visit instead of supporting her living alone. It's made
the time we spend with her more about spending time together and not
supporting her in daily tasks, which is refreshing.

It makes me think of my own mental state. I can claim some decline at
times, but nothing out of the ordinary - the name of an obscure actor
that doesn't come to mind, that kind of thing.

I thought about what I would do if I knew my memory was declining (and I
was aware of it...) and I thought about writing things down. I wonder if
it might be a good idea to carrying a notebook with me?

I was one of those binder-carrying cultists in corporate America in the
1990s - walking around with a Franklin planner, a 7-ring binder with a
whole system of refills ranging from calendar pages, pages for tracking
down your values and goals, long term projects, contacts and more. They
were the internet we carried around before there was an internet.

The Franklin plan involved sitting down and figuring out what was most
important to you - your governing values. You then came up with long
term goals, intermediate goals that were stepping stones to the big
goal, and plan and prioritize your daily tasks with those values and
goals in mind - the idea being that you easily accomplish the tasks that
align with who you want to be.

I have a shelf full of leather journals I keep, but I rarely refer to
them, and they're unstructured.

I wonder if it might make sense to revisit the notion of a paper daily
planning system again - writing things down commits things to memory,
it's much easier to pull out paper and write things down, and you'd have
an easy reference of what happened yesterday, the day before, and so on.
And, what you had planned tomorrow.

Whereas using a phone and electronic means takes that memorization and
data away from you and stores it away for your use, writing things down
feels like more of a tool to improve your mind.

I've been feeling swamped at work, and one of the things that the
Franklin system compels you to do is force-rank your tasks. Mark them A,
B, C, then rank all of the As A1, A2, A3 - it's an old system that ranks
back to the 1920s.

With digital tracking systems, I feel like I capture all of the tasks
but there's no way to prioritize everything coming in to deal with.

I shopped around for planner systems. New, they've gone way up in price
as paper planning becomes a niche, but used there are a lot of nice
binders - some models I remember from the 90s. I wonder if paper
planning might not be worth an experiment for 30 days, if anything for
nostalgia's sake.







.... An easement is the abandonment of a stricture
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