> The challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family: I've experimented with using Anki to store (non-sensitive!) questions about friends and

> The challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family: I've experimented with using Anki to store (non-sensitive!) questions about friends and family. It works well for things like “Is [my friend] a vegan?” But my use has run somewhat aground on thornier questions. For instance, suppose I talk with a new friend about their kids, but have never met those kids. I could put in questions like “What is the name of [my friend's] eldest child?” Or, if we'd chatted about music, I might put in: “What is a musician [my friend] likes?” I was on a boat and learned someone's name, and said to her "I'll try to remember it, but-" she cut me off and said "stop telling yourself you're bad at remembering names, everyone does that, then they can't remember names!" I'm aware of the self helpy concept of self actualization and all that and couldn't help but internally roll my eyes a bit, but it did make me think: damn, I really am bad at remembering names, seriously bad, worse than anyone I've ever met in fact. Someone will approach me at s grocery store, call me by name, and start reminiscing with me about things we did together that clearly were fond memories for them, and throughout the whole conversation I'll have no memory of the person's name or any of the things they're talking about. This has happened greater than 20 times in my life, so I was worried I maybe had early onset Alzheimer's or something, but two psychologists have told me It's probably just a symptom of my severe ADHD. So I put my foot down, fuck it, I'm not forgetting people anymore. I made an anki deck on my phone with three fields: picture of their face, name, and basic info about them, maybe times we've hung out etc. The "question" side is their face, answer is name and description. I started throwing in people immediately after I met them and backfilling people from Facebook events and Line chat groups. I'd lift their profile pics or whatever else. It's pretty fuckin creepy to be honest and if I ever get caught reviewing the deck I'll be really embarrassed, but it's working extraordinarily well, and I haven't had the far more embarrassing moment of forgetting that the person I'm talking to went to a baseball game with me once or whatever. Some might say "well clearly that person and event just didn't matter to you if you don't naturally remember them," to which I say I will genuinely forget entirely what I did yesterday sometimes. Something's messed up with my memory and anki is able to fix it, just like daily outline journaling every night has fixed the thing where I'll just forget an entire day.