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Starting your own business is like going back to school. As a business owner, you have to learn new processes, learn how to market, understand your accounting system, and be able to remember a client's name at the drop of a hat. Stretching your brain in all these new ways at once can feel like trying to take a drink out of a fire hose. Simple tricks and exercises called mnemonics can help you learn and remember important new information with ease.
The first step to successfully making use of mnemonics is being self-aware of your memory. Try to pay attention to which details are harder for you to learn and which ones come easier. Maybe you are great with names but you struggle remembering the best process for balancing your accounts accurately every month. Understanding where your strengths and weaknesses are will help you focus your energies in the right places and use your strengths to your own strategic advantage.
External cues are probably the most basic and commonly used memory aids. Tying a string around your finger to remember to write back to a customer, or making a list of tasks to complete are both great examples of external memory aids. These methods are simple and effective, but not always the best solution for everything you need to remember.
If you're on the go, or you need to learn to remember something without the aid of external cues, acrostics and acronyms are excellent memory-aiding options. An acrostic is a sentence in which each word is indicative of another item you have to remember. Many music students learn the acrostic: "every good boy does fine" to remember the line notes on the treble clef: e, g, b, d, and f. An acronym is a word in which each letter is indicative of an item to remember. The acronym "roy g. biv" is one everyone learns to remember the order of the colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
One great way to remember people's names is to associate their name with a visual cue or word play. For example, if someone's name is Matt Smith, you can think of him working in a blacksmith's shop, forming large chunks of iron into fuzzy bath mats - it's totally absurd, but really, the more absurd, the easier it will be to remember. Visual cues like physical characteristics are great for matching names with faces. Remember, the more distinctive and absurd, the better.
If you need to remember to do something, like pick up the dry cleaning or vacuum the car, it's helpful to visualize yourself doing it. Then, when you are driving past the dry cleaner's, the visual cue of driving there will help you remember what you needed to do.
The more you practice using mnemonics to improve your memory, the easier it will be to invent great mnemonics on the spot, and the easier it will be to remember things without the aid of mnemonics in the future.
About this Author
Courtney Buell is a writer at Professional Marketing International. Prior to joining PMI, Courtney obtained a bachelors degree in Humanities and wrote for various print and online publications in Salt Lake City. Professional Marketing International helps people achieve their dreams.
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