Take a moment to remember the last time you attended a seminar or training class. Whether it was last week or a month ago, I am guessing that unless you took extensive notes most of the information from the class is now forgotten. Does that mean you are a bad student or have a faulty memory? No, it just means you are on the downward slope of the Forgetting Curve.

Lindsey Ellefson, editor for the website Lifehacker, wrote an article that shared ways to overcome the Forgetting Curve. First, she described what is meant by this phenomenon.

It seems like common sense that the longer you go without retrieving a memory, the harder it is to retrieve—but it wasn’t always one of those things we simply knew to be true. In the 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus studied the phenomenon and published his findings, giving the world the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. The curve is a simple graphic demonstrating how information is lost over time, but it proved that time-related forgetting is real (and has been reaffirmed by further study since).

Is it inevitable to forget? Not entirely. There are specific practices that can be done to overcome the Forgetting Curve. The first is a simple approach called Spaced Repetition.

Basically, you need to study the material multiple times, giving yourself space between each review. The amount of time you go without studying the material depends largely on how well you’re already remembering it, which means the longer you review, the longer the periods between each review should be. Reviewing your class notes for a difficult class should be done more frequently than reviewing the notes for a class where you really get the concepts, for instance.

To learn more about ways to overcome the Forgetting Curve, please read the rest of the article on the Lifehacker website.