The Confusatory

Stress, memory, and a to-do list

I have a peculiar story I’d like to share. It’s about my job, my brain, and memory.

I spent the past couple of years in iOS build engineering at Apple: it’s a rather nebulous, process-oriented gig. I used Things to corral a constant influx of email, Radar, and other miscellaneous tasks (read: stuff jotted on Post-Its) into a to-do list containing, well, things to do.

Build engineering orbits around “the daily build”, and the product schedule mandated evening build shifts to keep things moving. My free time was both fleeting and scattered, and I had to force myself to relax at odd hours here and there lest I go nuts. But, I found I couldn’t: I spent my few idle moments fretting about things not yet done, or thinking about a bug I’d worked on earlier in the day.

At the same time, the quality of my work became dependent on my to-do list, on my command history and output buffers. I could take on more tasks and perform better if I let the computer record, index, and later search what I’d done. I started letting go of thoughts and tasks once I had them written down, knowing they’d be there later, in full fidelity. It felt like a tiny bit of freedom.

One day a few months ago, I came to a sudden realization. Information-centric work is something you can’t just “leave at the office”: the office is really in your head, and the computer is just a convenient mechanism for expressing and organizing your knowledge and thoughts.

The only way to leave is to forget.

So I mastered the art of forgetting.

My conscious thoughts and short- and medium-term memory have changed dramatically in the last year. Instead of having lots of ideas and idle chatter bumping around in my head, my mind stays clear. I don’t immediately jump to thinking about the day’s problems when given a moment of idle contemplation. I can still concentrate for a moment and recall the day’s work and activities, but it requires an intentional moment of focus. In other words, I’ve pushed the recollection process down and away from my conscious mind just a bit.

However, I’ve had serious trouble holding onto the more ephemeral, fleeting ideas that pop into my head: if I don’t concentrate intensely on them and jot them down immediately, they’ll slip away and never come back. If I’m distracted for even a moment by something else, they’re lost, pushed under by the new active thought of the moment. I struggle with this when I talk to people and forget what I was about to say, or think of something I want to do, only to lose it a moment later.

There’s no moral to this story, and no happy ending (at least, not yet). I don’t know if there’s any easy way to reverse this, to get better at remembering a few things throughout the day without writing them down. I haven’t thought up (hah) any way to practice this without risking losing important information or ideas, so I’m hoping that my recent change of jobs and reduced stress will help.