Taking notes is life changing.

I constantly feel that my memory is failing me more and more even for things that I put effort of retaining.
Why is a more complex topic, I'm not sure, some medical condition? chronical bad sleep? nothing wrong just this is it and everyone has this poor memory?

The feeling is like when you read some code you wrote few weeks/months ago and you can't remember anything nor why you did it this way. Well, that but for a lot of stuff.

Despite the cause I've decided to help myself and stop thinking "I will remember this, it's super important" and I began taking notes regularly. This helped me in a huge way for personal topics but also for work and technical subjects.

It helps in two ways:

1) Writing helps memorizing things, you are going through it again and you need to organize a bit your ideas to put them on paper.
2) I have a place to rest on where I can find information I should have memorized.

I started doing it randomly for everyday things, like things I want to buy for the house, places I would like to visit, places I've gone.
This Christmas I'm also writing the gifts I gave, and what I received. I hate the feeling of someone telling me "Hey, this is the shirt you gave me!" and I'm speechless for a second and it's obvious I don't remember, or to avoid giving twice the same gift.
I'm expanding these notes as I encounter situations where I regret the status of my memory.

But taking notes is also huge for me in terms of Work and research.

Some examples:

• Daily notes on what I've done in my full time job (YYYY-MM-DD). I can always come back if someone asks, sometimes I put some briefs about decisions made on meetings. Specially useful for Mondays where I forget what I did/talked on Friday.
• Notes on how I did something that I did for the first time. In my job or in my side businesses, including decisions, commands, installation processes. I find myself coming back to these really often and I think this saves my huge amounts of time, stress and frustration. It's surprising how I forget THE command I've been running twice a day for some deployment test if I have to come back to that topic two weeks later. Something that seems impossible to forget at some point just vanishes. Also, super useful for my side business where I setup something once (DB, platform, server, whatever) and I need to revisit how I did it or what resource I followed in case I have to do it again.
• Studying. I'm also taking side notes on books and papers that I later write down in the form of more structured texts. What I understood about papers, doubts, summaries. As usual, while reading I feel I understand but then if I need to revisit the paper without notes it feels like I need to re read it. Many times I read my notes and I feel surprised as I don't remembered a lot of contents, is like the note was given to me by someone else.