This was the most powerful idea I learned to harness over the past year.
I work in a similar Staff Engineer position and jump between lots of teams, immediately required to go very deep with each team. Then a few minutes later I need to jump to another team and dive deep into that team's problem.
One day, I was talking with my AWS rep and I said "hey do you remember this thing you told me related to X about a year ago. I can't remember what it was, but it helped me solve Y problem...". I had only a vague memory of it, and I didn't really expect him to remember much of it either. But within seconds, he started rambling off, what felt like near-exact quotes about the conversation and the links and documentation references he gave me on that day. It literally blew my mind! He had impressed me with information recall a few times before, but this was god-tier memory recall. So I asked him how he could possibly do that, and he explained LogSeq and how he records everything so that he doesn't have to waste mind-space remembering things that he would certainly forget anyway.
I tried it out, and it took a few weeks to get used to it, but saw the same benefits immediately. I find myself less mentally taxed each day because I am streaming information into my log sequence and not trying to store it in my brain. After you trust in the process, it relieves the stress on your brain to perform more powerful tasks or give you more energy. As corny as it sounds, it actually was life-changing because I instantly had more energy at the end of the day and started performing better.
There is a learning curve in the process. For example getting in the habit of using things like hashtags on anything you think might be worth searching later. But this quickly becomes second nature. There is also a secondary benefit of how scanning through your notes after or during a call can help you identify connections or ideas you may not have thought of in the moment.
Brains are good at finding patterns, expanding on ideas, and thinking creatively. But they are terrible at remembering large streams of information. By learning to harness a note tool to manage the remembering of large streams of information, it opens up our brain to do the things it is good at like expanding on ideas or being creative instead of handicapping it by trying to remember a minor tasks someone asked you to complete after the meeting wrapped up.
I've been using omnifocus since before it came out. It was supposed to be a GTD strategy for me, but honestly it just captures a lot of things, many of which just enter the inbox but never get used.
I'd say it is 90% unused.
But the other 10% really supports the important things I need to do or remember, even if I have to pull stuff out of a pile of other stuff.
I never forget things at the store, ideas for an active project are always recorded, I always have a list of movies I need to see captured from many sources, and yes... I empty my mind immediately and don't have to stress for the forgotten.
I wonder if this is how I'll avoid the ravages of age that affected the old people I knew when I was a kid. "I forget what I was going to the store for" or "what was that person's name?" etc...
Someone said "Brain is for ideas, not for storage". So I learned to not try to remember everything, but to compact them to indices (in a digital notebook - Orgmode in my case). When I need information, I simply search the index and refer back to the information. It works wonderfully.
I work in a similar Staff Engineer position and jump between lots of teams, immediately required to go very deep with each team. Then a few minutes later I need to jump to another team and dive deep into that team's problem.
One day, I was talking with my AWS rep and I said "hey do you remember this thing you told me related to X about a year ago. I can't remember what it was, but it helped me solve Y problem...". I had only a vague memory of it, and I didn't really expect him to remember much of it either. But within seconds, he started rambling off, what felt like near-exact quotes about the conversation and the links and documentation references he gave me on that day. It literally blew my mind! He had impressed me with information recall a few times before, but this was god-tier memory recall. So I asked him how he could possibly do that, and he explained LogSeq and how he records everything so that he doesn't have to waste mind-space remembering things that he would certainly forget anyway.
I tried it out, and it took a few weeks to get used to it, but saw the same benefits immediately. I find myself less mentally taxed each day because I am streaming information into my log sequence and not trying to store it in my brain. After you trust in the process, it relieves the stress on your brain to perform more powerful tasks or give you more energy. As corny as it sounds, it actually was life-changing because I instantly had more energy at the end of the day and started performing better.
There is a learning curve in the process. For example getting in the habit of using things like hashtags on anything you think might be worth searching later. But this quickly becomes second nature. There is also a secondary benefit of how scanning through your notes after or during a call can help you identify connections or ideas you may not have thought of in the moment.
Brains are good at finding patterns, expanding on ideas, and thinking creatively. But they are terrible at remembering large streams of information. By learning to harness a note tool to manage the remembering of large streams of information, it opens up our brain to do the things it is good at like expanding on ideas or being creative instead of handicapping it by trying to remember a minor tasks someone asked you to complete after the meeting wrapped up.