How to Never Lose Another Memory Again

Author: Dan Shipper and Kira Deutch (Superorganizers) URL: https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-to-never-lose-another-memory One-line: A profile of “MC,” who logs everything significant he does every day in Workflowy — a low-overhead, un-opinionated Daily Log as an external memory, in the lineage of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Chronofile.

Highlights

• Story of MC who keeps a Daily Log
• He wants to remember everything so he can push himself to keep getting better.
• Buckminster Fuller was a genius inventor, Mensa president, and an architect, best known for inventing the geodesic dome. Like MC, he also chronicled everything he did, starting at the age of four. Using a scrapbook Fuller nicknamed the Dymaxion Chronofile, he wrote down what he did every 15 minutes. Inside his journal, he stuffed everything from newspaper clippings to dry cleaning bills.
• It was his life, in 140,000 pieces of paper. And here is MC’s life, in 50,000 bullet points.
• As MC scans the page, there’s one line about Fuller’s scrapbook that catches his eye: “This is said to be the most documented human life in history.” MC laughs. “Challenge accepted.”
• I started using it to plan everything day by day: who I was meeting up with, what restaurant we ate at, what podcast I was listening to on the way. Eventually it evolved to the point where I was just recording everything significant I did every day. Once I got a job, I was doing more things, and I ended up using Workflowy for that too.
• As the music writer Ted Gioia said, “If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output.” One thing I try to do to help “manage my inputs,” to borrow Gioia’s phrase, is each morning I try to pick one of each of these to do that day.
• Workflowy isn’t opinionated, to borrow a term from the programming world. There’s not many guardrails or templates—it’s just bullet points, allowing me to log and file things away quickly and not think about it in the moment. And then I can turn to the app whenever I need to check on something or spontaneously reflect. So many other tools have a lot of mental overhead, where you have to learn a new system full of complex features you don’t actually need. You don’t need that when what you want to do is fairly simple.
• If I don’t remember to write it down, there’s a great chance it’s getting lost. It’s gotten to the point that Socrates predicted where Writing replaces our memories. It’s kinda bad but mostly good, I think…

Connections

• Daily Log — MC’s everything-logging practice is exactly the bullet-timeline habit Kyle keeps (this very file was split from one).
• Workflowy — the low-overhead, un-opinionated bullet tool that makes the habit sustainable.
• Writing — the Socratic worry that writing replaces memory, reframed as a feature.
• Forget Forgetting. Build a Zettelkasten. — the complementary “don’t trust your memory, externalize it” argument Kyle read the same day.