We’ve all seen the hilarious #mummybrain tweets blasted all over Twitter…

… and all shed a tear or two in laughter at the multiple memes.

Not all soon-to-be mummies suffer from the forgetfulness that starts to appear in their pregnancies and matures along with their babies, but with as many as 80 percent of women reporting experiencing some form of cognitive impairment, mostly memory-related, during pregnancy, the question begs to be asked: could ‘Mumnesia’ be a real issue?

A quick search of “Mummy Brain” alone brings up hundreds of stories scattered over the net detailing how soon after having their little ones, many new mothers start to lose track of things. Where did they put their passport? What are their phone or laptop passwords? Millions of Mummas can relate to the fact that soon after starting their families, the habit of having to write everything down also beings to grow.

Whilst scientists have long researched and debated how memory changes for women during and after pregnancy,  the results at first glance seem ambiguous.

 A 2012 study, for example, demonstrated the cumulative effect that pregnancy can have on memory with women displaying worse memories the more pregnancies they’ve had. Astonishingly, the effects continued three months postpartum! On the other hand, a study by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that the memories of pregnant women were no worse than non-pregnant women.

More interestingly, however, is that the findings concluded that in tests conducted at home, pregnant women’s memories were in fact much worse. By this, it appears as if pregnant women and new mothers demonstrate memory deficits in everyday life, where they are juggling competing demands –  such as keeping a well-maintained house, growing a business and raising a healthy baby – but not in a staged, distraction-free environment where their attention may be less challenged.

 So, what causes the mind blanks? It has been demonstrated time after time that increased stress greatly affects memory—loss and it certainly takes no study to prove that raising a young child, can at times, be highly challenging and very worry some!  Scientists predict that the haziness can last up to a year after having a baby, however, many women do start to see some improvements as soon as they begin to adjust to their new lives and start to bring about a balance to their lifestyles.

What can be done to beat Mummy Brain and how can you beat stress? Besides laughing it off, research shows that finding peace and comfort in the small things that can be controlled can help alleviate the symptoms. Trying to keep track of everything on pieces of paper is only going to add to Mum’s frustrations when she forgets where she’s stored them all, so instead, she should take advantage of a few memory joggers. She could try writing down notes on her hands or placing them in a prominent place, but better yet, new mothers can advantage of modern technological solutions such as The Memory App. A powerful personal organisational tool that digitises all documents and notes, The Memory App allows it’s users unrestrained access to limitless mummy notes, family photos, recipes, school reports and much more catalogued in a unique method, designed specifically for ease of recall for the user.

It’s highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art save and search facility empowers users by allowing all information to be stored and searched for using personal memory tags so that they can be found easily and instantly from anywhere in the world at any time of day. So now matter where she is or what she’s doing, Mum can rest assured knowing that those pesky passwords and pins numbers are always going to be stored securely in her hands for whenever she needs them.

With one less thing to worry about, she can devote her time and emotions towards tending to her tiny human. Download The Memory App for free today!

Note-taking is one of those skills that rarely gets taught but it’s one of the most crucial skills that you’ll need during your time at university. Not only do good notes help recall facts but the actual act of writing things down helps us to remember them in the first place.

What’s more, effective note-taking isn’t one of those skills that has an expiration date, but you’re certain to use it even after you graduate when you enter the world of work. The last thing you’ll want to do after a long and arduous meeting, after all, is to sit down at your desk and have to stare at a messy, incomprehensible scrawl of notes that are no longer of any relevance to you.

So how do you break from this unproductive habit? Here are seven killer note-taking tips that will help you get the most from your lectures.

1. Organisation

First things first, the golden rule of killer note-taking is ORGANISATION. Without having a clear structure to outline your notes, there’s no logical order to follow. Setting some architectural foundations such as headlines to use as a skeleton helps to set out and categorise the key takeaways from your lecture or meeting.

Once your basic building blocks are in motion, use bullet points and not paragraphs of text to summarise the key points of each topic.

2. Don’t Take All Your Notes in One Location

Research shows that sitting and working in one place for too long actually hinders productivity and drains motivation, so embrace the digital age that we live in and work remotely from new locations. Why not summarise two pages of your lecture in the library and then relocate to your Student Union for round two?

You also don’t have to sacrifice your social life. As we’re living in exciting times where we’re always connected, you can now work with your social plans and not around them. For example, if you’ve got a coffee date that you don’t want to miss, arrive an hour early and do a power hour. You then have time to sip your latte without having the guilt and pressure looming over you that your work is incomplete. By planning out your tasks in different intervals, you can set yourself deadlines and work in small but beneficial bursts. Remember, constantly changing your environment refreshes your mind, body and brain, making you more productive as a whole.

Simply having all of your important documents in one place so that you can access them instantly from anywhere gives you that flexibility. Allowing instant recall of everything from everywhere, straight from your mobile phone, The Memory App is a powerful technological solution that empowers the remote work ethic. What’s more, the innovative personal organiser allows you to save and categorise all notes using your own unique memory tags so that you recall a specific photo, document or video file in seconds using labels that make sense and are relevant to you.

3. Record Lectures

The problem with typing up notes in lectures is that often you’re so focused on jotting down important information that you end up missing the next part and spend the rest of the class playing catchup. Worse, you’re not actually paying attention to your professor and that means that you’re losing valuable opportunities to understand what’s being discussed, or your chance to ask questions about anything that’s unclear.

The best way to combat this? Record your lectures and instead of writing down all the details, you can scribe the main points and then go back, listen to the lecture and add in details or fill in any gaps.

4. Take notes by hand

A study conducted at Princeton University shows that note takers retain more information when they write down notes by hand in lieu of typing. This is due to the fact that laptop users tend to transcribe what they hear verbatim.

Those who take notes by hand, however, cannot write fast enough to copy word-for-word and so they’re forced to pay attention and process what’s being said and to pick out the most important and relevant information.

5. Always come prepared.

Before you come to your seminar, make sure that you’ve taken the time to review notes from previous lectures. This will ensure that you’re fully up to speed with the topic being debated and can write notes building on from foundational understandings of that subject.

In addition, by going over your notes before your lecture you’re making sure that any prominent themes, concepts or ideas that are essential to grasp the essence of the module are at the forefront of your mind and therefore will be integrated where relevant with your new notes.

Stick to the old adage: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”.

6. Write shorthand

Did you know that the average student writes 1/3 word per second while the average speaker speaks at a rate of 2/3 words per second? This means that in order to transcribe as much as you can from the dictation, you need to adopt the shorthand strategy for note-taking.

While it might seem like a difficult thing to do, remember that your notes are just for you and so you only need to use a code that works for you. For example, I often use three dots positioned in a triangle to denote the word therefore (∴), and an inverted dot triangle to mean because (∵) and while to most readers this wouldn’t make a lot of sense, when I go over my notes, it’s easy for me to understand what these symbols represent.

So, if you understand that “wd” means would, or a plus sign means “and”, then shorten away!

7. Colour-code

Many people find that adding a splash of colour to their notes helps to make information easier to remember. This is because memory is at it’s core a cognitive process and colour is the most powerful stimulus for the brain, affecting many areas of the mind allowing for greater recall.

The association of a particular colours can trigger certain responses, for example, the use of warm colours such as yellow, orange and red can have a greater affect on attention than cooler tones such as blue or grey.

Using colours that sit at opposite ends of the colour wheel is also important as the high contrast attracts more attention due to the high visibility and therefore influences memory retention.

Effective project management is the cornerstone of all successful business operations. Whilst tasks and objectives vary across different industries, knowing how to manage and coordinate the planning, budgeting, execution and evaluation of each assignment is a vital skill that is essential to every profession.

 To make the mammoth exercise more manageable, there are now heaps of helpful applications available that are geared towards providing a user-friendly solution to empower managers, allowing for the efficient delivery of projects on time, promote wastage reduction and streamlining of processes.

 Of all the tools available, here are five of the best project management sidekicks that will enhance tasks management.

1. Slack for Communication

Essentially a collaborative instant messaging tool, Slack is a freemium service used by teams in workplaces that allows for one-on-one chats between associates, as well groups across various departments. It’s best used a platform through which to exchange quick messages about specific areas of a project’s development, eliminating the time wasted waiting for email responses and streamlining the entire workflow in the process.

Being a fully functional cloud-based service, it allows for collaboration across multiple devices and platforms, enabling users to upload, share and search all content including all image; PDF; document and spreadsheet files, as well as conversations from anywhere in the world.

It also integrates with a large number of third-party services including other software and project management programmes such as Asana, Skype and Trello, to heighten over organisational communication.

2. Asana for Task Management

Allowing users to visualise goals, track their time, assign priority and urgency to tasks, and get immediate updates, Asana is an intuitive task management system that was created specifically for teams looking to improve their collaboration processes and track their work.

Individual project goals and milestones can be input as a simple checklist, ordered by date or deadline, but most importantly, can be structured as dependencies so that one item can’t be completed until the dependent sub-tasks are finished.

The programme also has a calendar function which graphs the team’s tasks right onto a dashboard to allow for reporting.

3. Aha! for Gantt Chart Capability

Another cloud-based programme to enhance collaboration, Aha! allows users to set their vision based on market and customer insights and links key strategic goals to the system’s features so that business objectives can be tracked through the project’s development.

One of it’s most sophisticated features is it’s Gantt Chart capability, which charts a visual representation of all projects tasks scheduled over a specified length of time. This enhances project planning and drives strategy by illustrating a production roadmap to share with coworkers and clients.

While there are several contenders for the Gantt chart crown, Aha! is one of the most innovative solutions that balances advanced project management features with a straightforward, easy-to-use interface, and also includes the ability to capture ideas submitted by customers and employees in order to aggregate suggestions for features to be added to the product in future iterations. These can then be mapped into the production line.

4. Trello for Kanban Management

A hybrid of a project and task management system, Trello is a comprehensive Kanban-style programme that allows users to organise all of the components for a project in minutes.

Fast, flexible and best of all, free to use, through the workflow users can create boards to visually lay out all to-do tasks horizontally into columns arranged in progressive development stages.

This gives users a bird’s eye view of the scope of development and progress can be tracked from start to finish easily. Items within each column or “list”, can be dragged and dropped onto other lists and reordered to prioritise tasks and set the pace of development.

Colour coded, digital sticky notes that are searchable and shareable, are arranged in this manner, with reminders set to ensure that the tasks are delivered on time. In addition, users can also add supporting details to these notes, comment and invite comments for each task, and assign responsibilities to collaborators.

5. The Memory App for Organisation

A powerful organisational tool that digitises notes, documents and multimedia files, The Memory App is an innovative personal and professional organiser meets one-stop project -cum-life management shop that enables users to save and categorise all notes using their own unique memory tags.

Allowing for the instant recall of a specific photo, document or video files, The Memory App uses an innovative and sophisticated search system devised through neuroscience and linguistic intelligence to automatically create personalised labels in natural language that makes sense and is personally relevant to the user. As a result, all of the information that you will ever need is readily available at your fingertips at all times.

 Available and operational in all major languages, The Memory App is a safe and secure solution that cuts time and cost wastage from organisational inefficiency, in order to streamline management and achieve objectives and goals much faster. Try The Memory App now for free.