How to Quickly Improve Your Memory

Yea, yea, you've been told to meditate and sleep well. But here's how to quickly improve your memory especially for school and work, or even grocery shopping.

1. Ditch the Planner - Challenge your brain to remember things. If your brain needs to remember things, it will develop more to do so. The many memory aids we use may affect how well our memory works without these tools. If you use an agenda book or planner for school or work, try to remember things instead of writing them down. At home, go through each subject and try to remember the assignments. If you can't remember, call a friend. After a short time of doing this, you will be able to mentally note any homework easily. You can then go back to using your planner only for when there are more than say, 10 things to do in a day. Or use it just to remember your tests dates or your appointments etc. Just use it to remember one type of thing.
2. Read - Reading works your short term and long term memory (you have to remember what happened on the last page and in the last chapter). Not only is reading good for your memory, it has been proven to overall boost your intelligence.
3. Sing a Song - Mnemonics (Memory Tools) such as singing make remembering anything much easier. The sillier the song/rhyme/abbreviation is, the better. To remember numbers (such as a locker code), make a mathematical equation out of the three numbers, or remember that they add up to, for example, 53.
4. Have Fun With It - Memory games will help you associate memory with fun. For example, try to remember a certain license plate number at different times of day. This can also be used as a quick check to see how much you are improving.