You Will Never Forget Your Keys Again

Ever got onto the bus and realised you forgot your earphones? Got to your car and forgot your keys? Forgot where you kept your keys? Forgot where you kept the remote? I’m sure it’s happened at least once and it’s fine. It happens to the best of us. We’re human. We all make mistakes.

But what if I said there’s a way to completely eliminate that aspect of your life. You will never forget your keys again. We will NEVER misplace them again. Wouldn’t you be interested?

If you’re reading this line, you probably are.

Psychologists have come up with this concept called “Prospective retrospecting”. I know. It’s an oxymoron in its literal sense. But here me out. This will make sense. Prospective retrospecting is an act of analysing everything that could go wrong in the next activity you are about to do before doing it.

It’s similar to planning your next activity but in this case, plan for the worst case scenario. Prospective retrospecting can be applied using a method called “pre-mortem”.

This method, if used effectively, could completely eliminate your possibility of missing out on anything in your future.

How does this work in your brain?

This concept was first believed to have developed by humans several centuries ago to remember enemy territory and location of fruits and vegetables in a dense forest. It has also been used by animals like squirrels to find nuts in the woods.

The hippocampus region of the brain is responsible for this activity. Humans and other mammals have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The hippocampus belongs to the limbic system and plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation.

This spatial memory can be used to our leverage to improve our productivity.

This can be incorporated in a simple way like maintaining a bowl to keep all your keys or assigning a specific place in your house to keep your essential day-to-day items.

It’s as simple as that.

Assigning and maintaining your essentials at a specific place for an extended period of time perfectly exercises your spatial memory and slowly transfers your short-term memory into long-term memory.

Once a long-term memory is practiced longer, it sub-consciously registers this thought into your brain which acts, well, sub-consciously.

This is yet another example of the fact that the answers to the hardest questions in life lie right in front of your eyes.