Our digital realm maybe mixes map for territory. And the point here is to make marks on the territory and throw the map away. Kind of makes me think of Lucy Suchman talking about navigating as situated action rather than planful analysis.

The only benefit is you can't be gas-lit intentionally because you are always gas-lit, so you believe nothing. :-)

I can never decide whether I have a terrible memory or whether I just place a very high premium on maximizing my working memory. But, either way, I try to keep as much "to do" sort of knowledge out of my head as possible.

One of the main ways I do this is by ensuring everything goes in a logical place. I don't usually have to remember where I put things because I just ask myself, "Where would past me have put this?" and the answer is usually where it is.

Alas, I have a wife with ADHD, so my house is sort of like living in an Etch-a-Sketch where objects are randomly relocated when I'm not looking.

Exocortices would be great if the modern technology was there to support it, but the current paradigms make memory-access too slow and unreliable to be worth the agency benefits, especially since current brain formats need internally-stored memories for default-mode idea generation in the background and can't make good use of location pointers for dreams.

I do it all the time with that because I know otherwise leads to catastrophe.

I want set a tell a woman I was going to be late for a date because I couldn't find my car keys. For some unknown reason I'd put them in the grocery bag and put the grocery bag directly into the refrigerator. It took me hours to find--hours I hadn't planned on because I usually put my keys in the same spot to avoid the nearly certain trouble that happens when I assume my future self will just remember what I did.

I may take it to literal.

> When I need to remember to throw trash away, my wife or I put the bags right at the foot of the front door.

Not so obvious but difficult. As someone whose partner has severe ADHD, I can assure you that if the author wants to imply that no memory capacity is necessary to make this simple construct work, he is wrong in my opinion. It takes a “shallower” (?) form of memory to link something like this (you can definitely link it -- I do it similarly - I call it routine)

> To keep track of how many hours I've worked in a day, I move Lego bricks from one side of my computer's monitor to the other at every periodic break.

I think it's clearer in this case. The whole thing only works because you have memorized that the lego bricks on one side of the work table mean a certain thing.

In the end, it's a bit about rewiring your neurons because the original wiring didn't work well enough under real conditions.

when i want to make lasting changes in my life i now think about IF -> THEN triggers and "wire" them. Since I'm very principle driven (a bit on the spectrum) this makes it easy for me to maintain routines (but also problematic when I can't for $reasons).

I really liked the post and dont want to badmouth anything.