TLDR When we both want to tell something to each other, it’s useful to give a gist or at least a keyword on what we want to tell to each other so that we won’t forget about it and move on.
Bad Case of Forgetfulness
Since few years back when my wife studied abroad, we often have a lot of things we want to talk about to each other. And more often than not we forget what we want to talk about when we listen to the other story first (to be fair more often it’s me that forgot). Either because we’re too engrossed to the other story first, or just plain forget about what’s on our mind since our thought just moved on. With this frequently happening, there were times when I felt like I’m not heard enough, or felt that I don’t need to tell her anything that’s happening in my life. But after telling her my thought about it, it seems more like a bad case of forgetfulness on my side, and she did (and still do) care about what’s happening with me. So, like a good nerd that we are, we devised a system to help me remind her and myself about what we want to talk about.
Write it Down
The first attempt is simply to write it down. There are a lot of study that mentioned writing things down can help with memory, and obviously i could refer it back when I want to tell my story. It works for most of the time, but there are times that this fall apart. My writing sucks. Like, really sucks. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell any letter in word that I wrote down hahaha. Also there are times that I simply couldn’t write things down, either I forgot my trusty notebook, or simply I’m driving and currently talking to my wife. So while it works well for some occasion, it often fails too. So I searched for another alternative
Just Mention it Out Loud
Not in the sense of screaming out loud, but just mention it mindfully and purposefully to make sure both me and my wife heard it again. I don’t know why it works, but sometimes just by mirroring or repeating the words make it stick better to my mind. In this case when both of us want to tell the other a story at the same time, we agree to each mention the gist clearly and let whoever to start their story. Then after it ends, somehow we still remember what the other story gists is. But sometimes we cant tell the gists of the story so succinctly or simply we unconsciously just start the story while telling the gists. So the latest iteration of this is to use a keyword instead. We both exchange keyword that one another must remember then we start the story and by the end we still remember the other keyword and tell the other story. This is not only useful when we both have story we want to tell at the same time, but also when we’re not in situation we could talk/discuss about something and want to remember it. We just asks for keyword and later when we’re in a condition to talk we could continue the discussion.
Wait, ain’t that Caching?
That’s what I thought about recently, especially since I’m thinking about caching in my workday a lot more. We simply share our cache key, and later when we want the content again, we use the key to retrieve the content. And as cache should be, it doesn’t last for a long time. That is if the key is not used within a day or two chance are the content already long gone, or the key expires. In those cases writing it down works better since it’s analogous to flushing the data into disk. For long term usage.