Improve Your Memory

If one of your new year's resolutions is to improve your memory of people's names and details (and if it isn't, perhaps it should be), then one of my favourite little programs, QA-Coach can help you. I've been using it for about three years now as a way of learning such things as vocabulary, names of people I've met, details about my clients, current affairs, movie cast members, and anything else which I would like to be able to keep in my mind instead of having to look it up all the time.

It works by testing you with questions and answers. If you can remember the answer it asks you again less often, and if you can't remember it asks you more often. Basically the longer you have succeeded in remembering something, the longer it will be before it asks you the same question again. One of the reasons I particularly like this program rather than other more complicated memorising programs such as SuperMemo is that it really doesn't matter whether you use it every day or not. Another is that the initial learning intervals are less than a day, so you don't have to wait until the next day in order to re-learn the ones you got wrong.

I'm a great believer that the best programs (whether computer, diet, exercise, time-management or anything else) are the ones that do a good job as simply as possible. QA-Coach is an excellent example of just that.

Comments

[Pascal Venier]

This sounds like a great app. For Mac users, Genius seems to be the equivalent.
http://web.mac.com/jrc/Genius/

[Mark Forster]

Thanks for the recommendation, Pascal. The website doesn't give many details about it, so I can't tell if it's likely to work as well as QA-Coach or not.