I have a friend who is super smart, but street-smart not book-smart. He was always on-the-go, self-employed and highly, highly networked before the internet as we know it. Basically, any time we were together he was also working, swinging by for office supplies, kinkos, clients, venues; all stops required different items or orders-of-business (including remembering to make all the stops themselves.)
He had an easy tactic for remembering everything (not exactly the sequence, but all the items, from which a sequence could more easily be ordered, anyway) which was brilliantly simple: don’t memorize the items themselves, memorize the number of things attached to the location/person.
We need 5 things from Wal-Mart. I need to get 3 things from Bob. When you get there, you easily remember a few (the first and last, according to the OP theory) but knowing exactly how many more are in the middle allowed him/us to rapidly recall everything even though we took no notes and only vaguely mumbled them all once when we counted them up at some earlier time, and then he’d say “OK, that’s FIVE things from Wal-Mart!” And also, sharing the number with who you’re going to be with is an excellent redundancy. I like notes and lists, but they weren’t practical for him and he didn’t need them anyway.
Not exactly rocket science but I never came up with it myself in the 25 years before his influence (maybe that says a lot about me, but still) and it works works works.
seems related to something I saw from a completely different context recently:
