If you interact with something regularly, you remember how to use it. You don't need any reminders, you're just up to speed on it passively. This is how most of life is. The most important things to you are this way: you don't forget how to get to work if you drive there every day. But some things you interact with infrequently. Everything in your life is fighting for cpu time. Some low priority tasks only get cpu time every few months. Maybe, every few years. For thoughts or habits or memories or passwords stored in your brain, forgetting is akin to deletion. You lose all handles to thoughts you no longer remember. There's no trace to come back to. Maybe you would recall if you were reminded, but it's slipped past the event horizon of your universe and whether there are neurons technically in your brain that hold the patterns they're inaccessible to you forever. Physical items stay in the physical world. They have memories attached to them, and often they have intentions behind them. A book you bought but never read, a closet full of hobbies you haven't touched in a few years. Maybe a home linux server you painstakingly set up and now dont remotely remember how to administer. There's a [[garbage collection]] angle here if we're just talking about Marie Kondo-ing old stuff, but once you do that, you are likely left with some low priority items and their associated thoughts, memories and goals you'd like to keep as part of your life. They're important, but they don't get the priority timeslice. Companies have a way of dealing with these kinds of problems: maintenance routines (or practice drills). You can't rely on fallible human memory to do every important task, you must do the real world version of spaced repetition and exercise those low priority items at regular intervals. This furthers your purposes (say, you go and use those skis at least once a year, furthering your goal of skiing), and it keeps the memory fresh as well. A personal maintenance cycle could look like: - Mundane: Take everything out of your closet clean it and put it back in again every 6 months. Have offset cycles for every closet to keep it manageable. - Log into your homelab once a month, update the software, fix what breaks - Every quarter: go through the stack of books on your shelf that you intend to read and read a chapter of one of them - Maybe you decide you dont like the book: throw it out - Maybe you get hooked and keep reading: great! - Maybe you find you're content to read one chapter of Albion's seed every quarter for the next few decades - Every 2 months: Restore a cloud backup of your photos. Check that you can, that the sync is still working and up to date and that nothing is corrupted.