Recording to remember

The other week I was thinking that I often forget stuff. Some things are quite trivial like not remembering to watch a television program (I haven’t got sky+ unfortunately). And others are a bit more serious, like forgetting to meet someone I’d planned to at 6, only to realise after watching an episode of the Simpsons and then dashing out.

This also stretches to learning. When having my Spanish lessons my teacher would reel off some rules of when to use the preterite version of a verb instead of the imperfect. At the time the justification all make sense and I am even able to give her examples of when to use the imperfect and when to use the preterite. Yet, within a space of a month when talking about the past in Spanish I found myself thinking, ‘what version should I use?’ and then spending a few moments to remember which the appropriate version is. I wish I could just remember off by heart.

So as a result I began to write everything down. I bought a diary to make sure I didn’t forget to watch things and a note book to write things in. It started off well but soon I would forget to write and instead go back to cluttering up my mind with crap like ‘must remember that Predator is on channel 4 on Sunday’. Although I scribbled down key rules in a notebook during my Spanish lessons it was always incoherent and just randomly sat on a page. So in the end I just got really annoyed and admitted loads of things slip my mind.

That was until I thought about something my ol’ pal Ricky Rickatson wrote on his blog. In fact it was his last entry. He had got himself a Dictaphone to record ideas on. I often thought if he literally said, ‘note to self...’ like Alan Partridge does whilst driving his Rover. So I decided I’d get myself one. Not to say, ‘note to self, remember to watch Slumdog next week’, but to record certain things like my lessons. That way I could listen to it on the way to work or when chilling out. Ok, listening to my voice would be something I’d cringe at but I’d get over it.

I have to say capturing things in the moment and then having time to reflect and think about them is really good, providing you have the time. For example, you record something that contains important info such as some Spanish grammar rules. You then try and remember them but if things seem a bit hazy you turn on the Phillips mp3 personal recorder, locate the recording and play it back. I find myself rewinding and fast-forwarding until my brain has finally absorbed it. The only drawback is that it does take up time listening to a recording when you could be doing something else, perhaps more constructively.

Ok, so I haven’t solved how to remember to watch television programmes, particularly 80’s movies such as Predator, where Schwarzenegger would say such classic lines as, ‘If it bleeds, we can kill it’, but I can just about cope with that.