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alexflint comments on I want a better memory. - Less Wrong
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I also find my memory is nowhere near adequate to store all the information I need, but I've adopted the strategy of explicitly outsourcing that function to the machines; like you, I write down to-do and how-to notes etc (in text files), but things that are public knowledge like foreign language words I just rely on running a Google search whenever I need the information (or for more technical information that's described in a paper, I download the PDF, rename it to something more descriptive and put it in a documents folder). I don't bother trying to memorize things.
This is certainly slower than being able to recall stuff from on-board storage, but in practice I don't find it makes enough difference to be a major productivity bottleneck. I don't off the top of my head have a theory about why our experiences differ in that regard. I don't suppose you have any idea whether you have an unusually large working set?
Interesting, perhaps our views differ mostly in how much benefit we believe we could get from a good memory. Some of my reflections:
When I have managed to join previously disconnected concepts during my research, it's been productive. This suggests to me that a better memory could help me connect many more ideas and hence improve my productivity. The N^2 search over all pairwise concepts is really difficult to execute with off-board memory.
When I write papers or blog posts, I spend most of the time chasing down studies/essays/articles that I remember the gist of, but not the title, author, or journal. This suggests a better memory could significantly.speed up my writing.
Losing memories of how successful some productivity strategy was seems particularly harmful, as I could otherwise have updated from these valuable data points.