Ideas so far:
- chunking: works sorta well, requires upfront cost to learn the concept, another cognitive cost to use the concept properly, and remember to do so in-context.
- DNB: not much, if any.
- spaced repetition: I said "working" memory.
- writing things down: helpful, has time and depth costs, unclear how useful it is for learning new things.
- whiteboards, notebooks, etc: Somewhat helpful, but has similar problems as writing, plus it doesn't help as much when trying to grok a concept / know when to apply it.
- just-in-time knowledge systems: I'm trying to build an incredibly-hokey "concept database" to do a bit of this. The main problem is still usually "knowing which thing applies to a given problem", plus the above problems with writing things down.
As usual with my threads on this sort of topic, this is looking for wacky/anti-inductive/risky methods only.
A good idea but too general to be good advice.
More specifically (not an exhaustive list):
More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn't take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.
If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it's helpful to think "I want to remember all of it, not just most of it."
I do this currently, basically writing a stream-of-consciousness regarding whatever I'm doing, in a window right next to where I'm doing the actual writing/coding. Helps for context-loading, as you said, and also prioritization. Have barely begun applying this, but it's my new central default working method for most things.