Science Says This Is the Best (Practical) Way to Improve Your Memory, Recall, and Retention

For example, take the one about meetings. The fact that research shows meetings literally make people dumber – a 2012 study published in Transcripts of the Royal Society of London found that meetings, and how people sometimes behave in meetings, can cause you to temporarily lose IQ points – isn’t particularly surprising.

Nor is the fact most people feel the average meeting is a waste of time. A 2022 meta-analysis of more than a decade of studies published in Journal of Business Research found that 90 percent of employees feel meetings are “costly” and “unproductive,” and that they’re right: when the number of meetings was reduced by 40 percent, employee productivity increased by 70 percent.

Both findings seem easy to remember – at least in general terms, if only because they confirm what most people suspect about meetings. (In most cases, the only person who thinks a meeting is important is the person who called the meeting.)

So I conducted a micro-analysis, emailing two people I met after the ceremony, one of whom happened to be the only person I had noticed taking notes rather than photos. I asked them both what they remembered about my keynote.

The woman who took notes not only remembered the stuff about meetings, she also remembered how feedback sandwiches almost always fail to correct negative or subpar behavior, and how removing a toxic employee from a team contributes more to that team’s success than adding a superstar employee.

Researchers who conducted a study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied evaluated the effectiveness of a variety of memory-boosting strategies: taking photos, typing notes, and writing notes by hand.

As you can probably guess, people who wrote notes by hand scored the highest on subsequent recall and comprehension tests – even when people who took photos or typed verbatim notes were allowed to review those items before they took the tests.

Or maybe you couldn’t guess that. The researchers also found that “learners were not cognizant of the advantages of longhand note-taking, but misjudged all three techniques to be equally effective.”

Which makes sense. Taking a photo requires no “mental participation” at all. You don’t have to consider, synthesize, decide how you’ll capture the information in short-hand, etc. Typing notes verbatim – for example, transcribing a lecture or meeting recording – is more of a process than a thought exercise. The focus is on accuracy, not retention.

Maybe that’s why Richard Branson carries a notebook everywhere he goes. (Literally, I’ve seen it at least 10 times.) Summarizing, putting concepts or ideas in your own words, deciding not just what you’ll write, but how – all those things engage different parts of your brain, and therefore improve your retention and recall.

But don’t stop there. According to a study published in Psychological Science, people who studied before bed, then slept, then did a quick review the next morning not only spent less time studying, but also increased their long-term retention by 50 percent.

Try it. At night, take a quick look at the notes you’ve written that day. Take a few moments to remember not only what, but why. Why you’ll use what you jotted down. When you’ll use it. And why it could make a difference in your professional or personal life.

After all, if it was important enough to write down, it’s important enough to remember. And, more to the point, to do something with. Because knowledge is useful only if you do something to make it useful.