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A few minutes ago I was sitting around wondering what I should write. It was then that I realized that it was close to 4AM. I back tracked a bit and took a mental inventory, and noticed that most of my best posts had been written sometime between 2AM and 5AM in the morning.

I guess the delirium from lack of sleep allows the mental juices to flow all the better. The point, and the real purpose behind that tale was that at the end of the day we all want to learn how to maximize our potential. Since this is a blog about Web 2.0, I’m about to share with you some tips about how to make your life better through technology — starting with your memory.

Is This A Religious Experience?

Alright, from the beginning know that this document won’t really make you any better, in fact, the time you spend reading it could probably be better spent reading my productivity article or actually doing some work; however, some of the tips presented here will help you integrate technology into your life in a way that might someday improve it. I’m going to start from the top down, and by the time we reach the end I hope to have created a better person.

Get Your Head In The Game

We live in a push and pull culture. We sit in front of our computers and information is thrown at us. If we are lucky, we will have developed mechanisms to either limit or organize that information into palatable chunks. How do you improve this? Well, you either have to discover a way to take in information more quickly or retain it better. Lets start with the low tech solutions and make our way up.

Take A Journey

Hiking

OK, now pay attention for a moment. I’m about to teach you how to memorize vast amounts of information effortlessly (insert big, phone car salesmen grin). Fine, it will take practice but this really does help. It’s called the Journey method.

Lets say, for example, you had to memorize a great big list of Web 2.0 names. For the sake of the example — Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Squidoo, and del.ici.ous. One way would be to call up each of these companies and tell them to change it to something that is actually relevant to human beings, the other would be to take a journey.

Imagine walking through your house, and the first thing you notice is that the lamp bulb in your room is flickering. You decide to go out to the store, and on the way to your car you hear a bird twittering away. It’s 1AM and when you arrive at the store, some random bohemian types are sitting around spouting off haiku’s about some giant squid. You go inside to get the lightbulbs, but on your way out you pick up a delicious Snickers bar.

The trick here is that the story gives your mind an anchor, remember when you were a little kid and you had to learn the state capitals or some-such using mnemonics? Think of this as the Web 2.0 version of that. You peg a memory to somewhere familar. Since the story is kind of silly, it’s much easier to recall than the random list of words. The contents of the story has the information you’re trying to remember inside of it. Neat, huh?

I Think The Cavemen Did This

Buy yourself a good old fashioned notebook to jot down your free floating thoughts. Pen, paper and ink can sometimes out-pace technology pretty substantially.

If that seems too easy, never fear, their is a vastly more complicated low-tech solution that I am going to introduce you to. It’s called the Hipster PDA, and it was coined by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders.

How It Works

Go to your local supermarket and purchase a stack of index cards.

Clip said index cards together with whatever you have available.

Carry your new PDA around wherever you go.

Huh?

Think about it, if you have a note that you want to jot down — now you have that scrap of paper that you have always wanted. Not only that, but because it’s an index card and because you used a clip instead of a staple, these note-cards are detachable. At the end of any given day you will have a nice stack of ideas, To-Dos and little notes to yourself that you can file in whatever complex organizational scheme you wish to come up with.

Alternately, if you are so Web 2.0 that the thought of actually going outside to purchase note-cards makes you a bit ill, take a look at PocketMod. It’s like the note-cards, but you can download it.

Get With Tech

Vending

Alright, if that is a bit esoteric for this audience — the next part of this guide should be right up your alley. Another way to remember large chunks of relatively random information is to take notes. Since most of the information you run across will be presented to you in digital form, there are a couple rather simple tools that you can use to make your life a bit easier.

Google Notebook

This is dead simple. You highlight text, pictures or whatever else you might want and you right click. In a few seconds this information will be stored in a notebook for you to pull up whenever you need it. There are some rudimentary organizational features attached to this as well. If you want a really easy way to keep track of stuff, this is a place to start.


Backpack

Backpack is the utility knife of organizational tools. It allows you to make pages and add pictures, files, calendars, To-Do lists and pretty much anything else that you can think of. It takes some getting used to but once you start making pages you’ll find yourself hooked.

I have a page for all the projects I am working on, and To-Do lists attached to each. It is a really nice way for me to check up on myself and figure out what I’ve done and what still needs to be finished. Most importantly for the frugal is that most of the functionality is free. For the geek who has everything, an upgraded version of Backpack might be the perfect gift.

Collaboration

All this time, you have been trying to store information in your own brain like a sucker. Honestly, that is so 1995. If you want to know where the future is, it’s in storing your random bytes and bits online. Here are a few tools that can help you do just that.

VYEW

When I first ran across this I was pretty impressed. After using it for a while I was stunned at how useful it is. It’s an online whiteboard in the best sense of the word. VYEW allows you to share content and create presentations in real time, collaboratively. With this, you could store your latest presentation online, have it proofed by your editor friend across the country and pull it up for your tele-conference to those clients in Nepal without skipping a beat.

Slideshare

Upload your power-point presentations and share them. This is less of a memory tool than a, “Oh crap, I forgot my flash drive and now I am going to get fired.” tool. You never know when technology is going to go bad, so sometimes it’s better to store the important things in multiple places.

Get Some Hardware

If there is one piece of hardware I can suggest to any geek on the go, it’s a smart phone. These things are becoming more and more powerful and more and more essential to any geeks arsenal. They are a combination telephone and PDA, marrying the best parts of each — usually for a relatively decent price.

If I were to recommend one smart phone to you today it would be the Palm Treo 700. I’m not in the business of product reviews, so I’ll pass things over the someone the people who know their hardware better than most — the reviewers at CNET.

Following in the footsteps of its older sibling, the Palm Treo 700p picks up where the Treo 650 left off and adds a host of features to make this top-notch smart phone even better. Improvements include EV-DO support, a 1.3-megapixel camera, dial-up networking capabilities, and increased memory. Of course, all isn’t perfect (still no Wi-Fi), but the Treo’s winning combination of form factor and performance is hard to beat.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Alright, here are a few practical tips for improving your memory. If you can remember these, then maybe the tech solutions will be unnecessary, but don’t tell anyone I said that. If not, you might want to bookmark this article so you can take a trip down memory lane.

Improving Your Memory

  • Pay attention
  • Involve All Of Your Senses
  • Relate Information To Known Facts
  • Organize Information
  • Manage Your Stress
  • Eat Right
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