Ever wondered why you keep forgetting everything? Specially something that you just learnt yesterday?

You are trying to learn something new, putting in the effort, pushing long periods of uninterrupted time where you are completely focused on the task at hand only to allow everything to evaporate from your mind a couple of days after? If you don't have an elephant's memory, this has probably happened to you. And it sucks!

You read a book of your favorite author, it's a page turner and you devour every simple sentence, paragraph, chapter. In less than 3 days you finished the book, 2 months have gone by and you barely can remember the plot, the main characters and why the heck you spent 3 days glued to that book.

If you are like me, you are probably puzzled. Why does this happen? Is it just me? Well, I guess no, because I know a couple of people that have the same issue. So why the hell does this happen?

The 24hr memory drainage 🧠

The psychologist Hermann Eddinghaus became the first psychologist to study the memory challenges related to learning a new topic.

According to literature, and to his experiments, there are a couple of very interesting aspects with regards to our memory:

• Forgetting something is more accentuated within the first nine hours;
• Items forgotten can be relearned faster than new ones;
• We forget about two-thirds of what we learn in 24 hrs.

So how do you try to solve for that? What happens if you are trying to learn a new field or research a new topic? Are you only going to retain one-third of that information?

Fortunately Eddinghaus observed a couple of interesting traits about our memory and I reckon this could be very interesting if you are learning something new:

• Repeated learning sessions over a longer interval improve memory retention of that subject;
• Topics at the beginning and the end are most easily to be remembered;
• Any material that is study beyond mastery is remembered longer.

In short you need to keep practicing and pushing through whatever you are trying to do no matter what. Well, obviously this is not that simple, but you get the gist, "practice makes perfection".

The case for 100 day projects 🏋️‍♀️

This is a very simple concept to help you with anything that you're trying to learn or even do. Enter the 100 day project, where you commit to doing something consistently for 100 days straight while sharing it daily.

The point here is straightforward ... get out there and just do it! Don't overthink, follow something that you want to do, commit, engage in the process, put in the work. You will be surprise with what you can achieve.

Most people share their progress on instagram, twitter or FB, but it really doesn't matter where, as long as you share it with a group of people so that you feel that accountability and "pressure" to keep working towards your goal.

About my 100 day project 🧘‍♂️

I still want to continue to learn more about web development, how to create digital products and how to design for tomorrow. For the past 2 years I have been learning react. Now it is time to put all that to a good use. Well, I hope :)

But first I need to do one thing ...I seriously feel that I need to learn the basics of design, how to compose the best UIs, learn how to use color in an effective way and how to deliver content wrapped in a great experience. By and large that is why I decided to go trough the crash course from Design+Code that goes by the name, UI design for developers.

I actually started today... just have a look at my cool wireframes 👇

#100DayProject, Day 1 / 100: learning to build wireframes in Figma.

The overall plan is simple:

• Go trough the course and learn how to build great UIs
• Write up the product specs, design wireframes and UIs (go and validate them)
• Iterate, iterate, iterate
• Build, build, build
• Launch the potential unicorn product driven startup 🚀

Yes I know, the plan doesn't sound realistic! However at the end of the day I just needed commitment to start, to push myself into learning something new and not think too much about the output.

Remember, it is about the process, putting the work at learning something new and to make sure you are able to retain as much as possible.

As part of the plan, I will be sharing progress on a weekly basis. If you don't want to miss a thing just sign up for the newsletter, I promise not to span you and that you can ask me anything you want about my #100DayProject.

Hope to see you around!