We all have them. Those friends and associates so knowledgeable about a particular subject that we defer to them whenever we have a question related to it. Maybe your friend Cindy is a travel junkie that has been seemingly everywhere. When it comes time to plan your trip to Thailand you know she’s the first person to ask about sights worth seeing.
It gets much more mundane than that as well. There’s probably someone at your place of work you rely on for relevant work-related updates.
It doesn’t make you some sort of information leech. It’s known as transactive memory and everybody does it. In fact, somebody probably borrowed your brain at least once today already.
So what is transactive memory? Simply put, it’s the shared store of knowledge within a group. It’s a system that minimizes how much we have to remember. Instead of holding everything you need to know, with transactive memory you rely on others in your social group to hold particular information so you don’t have to. It’s similar to how we use to-do lists, but instead of relying on an app to remember information we might forget we use people we know instead.
This often plays out in how we remember things. Everyone can recall an instance (probably several) where we couldn’t remember a specific recommendation but could recall who it was we got it from in the first place. There’s an element of transactive memory at work there. We didn’t retain the information because at some subconscious level we figured we could get the suggestion again at a later date from our contact.
This isn’t just limited to remembering what we don’t write down, it can also improve how we find the things we’ve recorded.
Tags are a great way to curate information. Maybe you’ve saved a restaurant to a to-do list that’d be great for date night. You can put a ‘date night’ tag on that restaurant note (if your app allows), and the next time you search your notes for ‘date night’ the tagged ideas it will show up. This can become super complex depending on your personality.
Tagging can be a lot of work and you can go overboard. Too many tags isn’t the problem, it’s remembering them all that’s hard. This puts a lot of people off. Often, people avoid the benefits of tags altogether because they don’t want to have to remember all of their tags.
This is where the psychology around transactive memory can help. From tagging experts to tag avoiders, here’s one tag you’ll like. Names. If you’re not already doing this it’s worth a try. Whenever you get a new piece of information to save from a friend, tag that information with their name. This could also work for names not belonging to people you know (websites, business names, etc.), but it’s optimal when used for real people.
You’ll have a much easier time recalling a great book suggestion from a friend by their name than remembering which tags you placed those recommendations under.
It may not replace your entire tag system, but it can certainly help reduce the number of tags you have to use. And for those that are interested in better to-do curation, this is an easy way to get started.
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