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Sunday 24 April 2016

Time for a break from reviewing

Over the past 4+ years since I began remembering every day that passes, I have repeatedly found the methods I have developed have collapsed as the number of days has grown. It seems essential to review the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags at intervals to stop them from fading. I've been doing each image at least once a month using various patterns for selecting the images.

The current method is falling apart. I have been failing to complete the more detailed review of the images pinned to my mental calendar for the most recent 6 months. My practice has been to review two days per week to entrench these images, before they move into less frequent review patters.

So today being Sunday, I would review the images for Saturday and Sunday of each week. Tomorrow I would review the images for Sunday and Monday. The overlap helps to reinforce the connection between consecutive days for long-term sustainability.

More recently, I have only done this every other day. So I might have a break on Monday and instead on Tuesday review Monday and Tuesday images. This covers all days of the week, but without the overlap. That didn't seem an issue as the two-day window shift by a day each week.

More recently still, I've missed doing the review twice and so been faced with using a three-day window to cover missed days. Sometimes I've not even managed that and so have simply run through the whole of the past month or so, just to make sure I don't loose those days.

It seems something has to give. Maybe it is time to give up on the more detailed 6-month review. Do I have the confidence to rely on the in-depth review of the past month only?

At the same time, I've hit a problem with my longer-term review. I had already made this more manageable by splitting it into two. One day, I would review two-days-per-month from the end of 2011 to end of 2013. The next day, I'd review the same two days for each month from the start of 2014 to date.

Today I was to review the 24th and 25th of the each month of the earlier years. But I hadn't completed yesterday's review of 22nd and 23rd of 2014 to date. I was trying to catch up, but it was proving too distracting. So I've stopped.

I'm going to have a day or two off reviewing all except the past month.

Then I'll try a memory reboot, taking a few months each day and reviewing consecutive images. It will take around 16 days to do this reboot, then I'll see what to do next.