Forgetting something, though not to the extent of amnesia, lol, can be very frustrating and often times happens when we need to remember the most.
It doesn't matter if it was something we've read countless times nor what we sing with... When it hits our "forgetful button", we freeze, battling to remember it like we've never heard of it at all, it's very frustrating I must tell you because I've had my fair share of moments where my memory lapse caused significant inconvenience to me.
One particular instance stands out or let's just say it was the most recent; a time I forgot the details of the mnemonic I made. This day almost got me crying in the exam hall because I anticipated that particular topic and did a great work in trying to memorize them yet, when it mattered the most, I had nothing to show for it.
It was on a Thursday morning, the day for my surgery exam. Surgery was one of the hardest courses we faced as medical student because it actually a bit difficult trying to explore the human body, from the level of body systems down to the cells.
One of the consultants who taught us made us understand that because of the bulkiness of surgery, he had to make use of mnemonics and it worked perfectly well for him. He had a mnemonic for almost everything you can think of. I decided to adopt this method because honestly, it made writing essays less difficult, unknown to me that it could work against me too, lol...
That fateful Thursday morning after my night readings, I was suspecting questions from breast cancer because of how ranpamt it is because as they say in medical schools, "common things occur common".
The challenge was that we weren't taught this topic until it was few days to exam because the consultant incharge of the topic was also teaching at John Hopkins University, United States of America, so he fixed it when the lectures were over despite knowing how hard it was.
I read this particular topic multiple times trying to cram all I could but it was just too volatile followed by the numerous other topics to revisit.. crash reading was never my thing at all.
Sitted in the exam hall waiting for the exam scripts to be shared while praying for the areas I read to come out... It finally got to our desk and I was extremely happy to see few areas I revised.
I rushed to the breast cancer question and wrote down my mnemonic immediately but froze when it came to filling in the detail. I thought it was just temporary and that I would remember once I attempted other questions. But after finishing the rest of the paper, I still couldn’t recall the details.
"How could I forget that! Damn! I don die, Jesus.." These were the things that ran over my head and shivers ran through my spine, it was crazy honestly. I ended up going for another question rather than gambling the meanings, lol.
I never did any mnemonic thing till the exam ended, lol.
Here are some methods I implore to reduce my forgetfulness in academics and life as a whole...
Early Preparation:
For everything in life, making early and prompt preparations is always the hack to go about it.
Academically, when you start reading early, you might not be able to pour the handouts words for words, but, you sure will grasp the context of the topics and can put them in your own words even when the mneumonics disappoints you.
Creating A Checklist:
Making a list of everything you want to achieve is a good way to reduce forgetfulness.
Ticking the tasks you've done makes you know the ones yet to be attended to and seeing them not ticked will always remind you that you have something left to attend to.
Setting Reminders:
Alarms could come in here too. They help you stay organized after allocating time to every task you want to do.
Delegation:
In office setting, delegation could be a good way. There's division of labour for a reason and when you've delegated the tasks to different persons, they give you the liberty to focus on all of them even without being at the forefront.
We are not machines and forgetfulness can happen to anybody; however, when we take drastic measures to avoid the frustrations that comes forgetfulness, it will help us a lot.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day 👍
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When my brain decides to go to forgetfulness avenue, I get upset because the information I need is immediate. Things like this happen a lot but the check list and alarms help me to not forget somethings.
It's always annoying my dear because the timing is always very bad... Just that time you needs them the most
Yep, adopting those measures could be helpful
Yeah
Thank you so much