Tuesday Email: The Advisor’s Forgetting Curve

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

It was a Sunday morning in late November, and I was sitting in my home office with a highlighter in one hand and Tiago Forte's book in the other.

I'd just underlined what felt like the twentieth insight in an hour.

The margins were full of notes. My brain was on fire.

By Sunday evening at dinner, I couldn't remember a single one.

Not the insight.

Not the page number.

Not even why it had felt so important twelve hours earlier.

This kept happening.

I'd finish a book, close it, and within days it was like I'd never read it at all.

The same with newsletters. Podcasts.

I was consuming information only to watch it evaporate.

And the strange part? The more I consumed, the worse it got.

Adding newsletters to my reading list didn't compound my knowledge—it diluted it. My curiosity had outpaced my capacity to hold onto anything.

So I stopped.

Not reading, exactly.

But I stopped trusting that reading alone would get me anywhere.

There was this growing suspicion that without a system to capture and retrieve what I was learning, every hour I spent consuming was essentially time I was donating to forgetting.

I stayed stuck there for longer than I'd like to admit.

Waiting for the perfect system. Researching note-taking apps. Watching YouTube tutorials about "second brains." Never actually starting because I couldn't figure out how to start correctly.

Then I came across a concept called PARA—a knowledge management framework designed by Tiago Forte that organizes information by actionability rather than topic.

I remember the exact moment it clicked. I was standing in my kitchen, phone in hand, reading an article about how PARA connects insights to active projects. And something shifted.

The problem had never been my tools.

I had quote-capture apps, digital notebooks, and a CRM full of client notes.

The problem was that none of them talked to each other. Information went in but never came out—at least not when I needed it.

PARA gave me the connective tissue.

Within weeks, the same tools that had frustrated me became useful. Not because they'd changed, but because I'd added a process to make them work together.

That's when I realized something that's shaped how I think about technology ever since:

Tools without process create information hoarders, not information users. It's the difference between a library and a landfill.

This matters more for advisors than almost anyone else.

German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered that humans forget nearly 50% of new information within one hour of learning it. His research has been replicated for over a century, and the results hold. Memory doesn't fade like a dimming light—it collapses like a sandcastle at high tide, with the middle washing away first while the edges briefly hold their shape.

We tend to remember how meetings start and how they end.

Everything in between competes for mental real estate that's already overcommitted.

Now consider what you're asking your brain to do: hold the intricate details of 150 different financial plans, family dynamics, estate considerations, tax situations, and emotional triggers. The human brain evolved for survival on the savannah, not for this.

This is why a CRM alone doesn't solve the problem.

A CRM is a warehouse, not a workshop. It stores everything you've collected, but builds nothing from the parts. You can pull up a client's file when you need it, but the system doesn't help you connect what one client said about Medicare concerns to the three other families quietly worried about the same thing.

Knowledge management is different. It's about connecting people to content and content to context. It's the difference between owning a phonebook and knowing who needs to call whom.

The advisors I see thriving aren't the ones with the best memory. They're the ones who've stopped pretending memory alone will carry them.

They use AI to capture what they'd otherwise drop—the messy middle of conversations.

They use knowledge management frameworks to make that data actionable.

And they build habits to retrieve insights at the exact moment those insights matter.

There's no silver bullet here.

AI doesn't relieve us of work. It allows us to do what only we can do.

I still have Tiago Forte's book on my shelf. The highlighter marks are faded now, and I couldn't tell you which insights I underlined that Thursday night.

But I can tell you what they became—because they're woven into how I work, how I write, and how I show up for the people counting on me to remember what matters.

Forgetting is human. Building systems that remember for us is what makes us more useful than our biology alone would allow.

The best is ahead!

-Matt