There is a very specific question that has the power to erase months of information from my brain.

Three innocent words.

"Can you give me an example?"

The frustrating thing is that I usually have examples.

Lots of them.

I can remember conversations while folding laundry.

I can remember incidents while driving.

I can remember concerns at three o'clock in the morning when I'd much rather be sleeping.

But put me into an important meeting and ask me for a specific example, and suddenly it's as though someone has deleted half my hard drive.

Maybe it's just me, but the perfect example never arrives when I need it.

It arrives afterwards.

Five minutes later.

Halfway home.

While unpacking shopping.

Or at two in the morning when absolutely nobody is asking questions.

The meeting ends and suddenly everything comes flooding back.

The incident.

The date.

The conversation.

The important detail I forgot to mention.

And all I can think is:

"Well, that would have been useful an hour ago."

For years, I thought this meant my memory was poor.

Now I think something different.

I think many parents confuse knowing something happened with being able to retrieve it under pressure.

They're not the same skill.

During important conversations we're doing multiple jobs simultaneously.

We're listening.

We're thinking.

We're managing emotions.

We're processing new information.

We're deciding what to say.

We're reading other people's reactions.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, we're also trying to remember something that happened six months ago.

Honestly, it's remarkable that we remember as much as we do.

There was a time when my personal filing system could best be described as chaotic.

I had emails.

Screenshots.

Photographs.

Voice notes.

Documents.

Random notes saved on my phone.

And folders with wonderfully optimistic names such as:

• Important

• Really Important

• School

• School New

• Current School

• Miscellaneous

For a long time I believed the challenge was remembering information.

Eventually I realised the bigger challenge was remembering where I'd put the information.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that knowing something happened and showing something happened are completely different things.

Knowing exists in your head.

Showing requires structure. [The_Full_P...des_3_to_7 | Word]

It requires:

• Dates

• Context

• Documents

• Emails

• Notes

• Evidence

• Chronology

The problem is that life doesn't happen in neat chronological order.

Life arrives in fragments.

An email here.

A conversation there.

A photo.

A report.

A screenshot.

A comment that seemed insignificant at the time but suddenly matters months later.

As parents, we can often see the whole story because we've lived it.

Trying to explain that story to someone else is much harder.

Many parents walk into important meetings carrying months or even years of observations in their heads.

We assume we'll remember the important parts.

Until somebody asks us for an example.

Then the pressure kicks in.

And that's often the moment memory becomes least reliable.

Not because we don't care.

Not because we weren't paying attention.

Usually because we care deeply.

The more important the conversation feels, the harder retrieval often becomes.

This realisation is one of the reasons I eventually created two separate tools.

Too Many Tabs and SENTracker solve different problems.

Too Many Tabs helps with the remembering problem.

The noticing problem.

The "I don't want to lose this thought" problem.

It's a place for observations, brain dumps and concerns before you know whether they'll become important.

But sometimes life moves beyond noticing.

Sometimes you need evidence.

You need documents.

You need timelines.

You need information organised in a way that another person can easily follow.

That's a completely different challenge.

And that's where SENTracker comes in.

These days, I think about something I call the Meeting Test.

Could I walk into an important conversation tomorrow and easily retrieve what matters?

Not every detail.

Just the important things.

The relevant examples.

The key documents.

The useful context.

Because credibility shouldn't depend on having a flawless memory.

Important conversations deserve better support than that.

One of the most helpful lessons I've learned is this:

You don't need to know whether something is important before you save it.

You don't need a perfect filing system.

You don't need colour coding.

You don't need folders that would impress an auditor.

You simply need a way of capturing information before it disappears.

Future-you can decide what's important.

Current-you just needs to make sure it survives.

That's a much kinder standard to live by.

If you've ever left a meeting and remembered the perfect example five minutes too late...

If you've ever known something but struggled to explain it under pressure...

If you've ever stared at a folder called Miscellaneous and immediately regretted your life choices...

You're not alone.

The problem isn't that you're paying insufficient attention.

The problem is that you're carrying a lot.

And perhaps the answer isn't expecting more from your memory.

Perhaps it's creating a system that supports it.