Is my forgetter getting better?

Rebranding a company is a daunting task. Unlike many things in marketing, you can't easily 'iterate' your way through a brand launch. You flip the switch on a newly branded website & hope that all of the research led you to make the right decisions.

My team at Levelset (formerly zlien) did a masterful job launching a new brand into an established company. I still remember the moment we unveiled the brand to the employees, confetti poppers in hand and streamers in the air. I remember how we dimmed the lights and had a single slide with the new company name and logo. I remember how our executive team talked about what the new brand meant for the company going forward.

In the moment, I didn't want to look at the slides, I wanted to see the reaction our employees had - and not just their facial expressions, but their body language. These fleeting moments have a way of imprinting themselves in our memories, so we create big events to commemorate the milestones.

But, I have fewer and fewer of these memories in a video conferencing world. I'm not writing to advocate working from home vs. in person but just to note an observation:

I don't remember as well on video calls.

There's a fair bit of research that shows that 'place' has a large impact on our memory. And in business, our memories are critical for making quick decisions based on previous experiences.

While I love working from home and avoiding the daily commute, I believe the increase in video conferencing has come at a cost of remembering key business discussions. Just think about the various video calls you had last week - what do you remember about them? Sure, there are some details or decisions that you may remember, but it feels like I remember less than half of what I used to remember during in-person meetings.

When every meeting occurs in the same 'place' - your home office, it has become increasingly difficult to remember the differences. The light is the same, the smells are the same, the sounds are the same, the food is often the same, and the visual surroundings are nearly identical minus a few different Hollywood squares. How can our brains possibly distinguish one meeting from another? I think this is why we notice so quickly when someone calls into a call from another room in their house - it's such a small change that it stands out.

What can we do to remember more during video calls? Should we move around to different locations in our house? Should we work from various coffee shops? Like many of you, I have a fairly established office setup that doesn't travel easily - two monitors, a webcam, a microphone, hard-wired internet, a full-sized keyboard, etc. While I could take my laptop and work in another room, I find that I miss the established setup in my office and am not as productive as when I'm in my home office.

When my wife was pregnant, she had a case of pregnancy brain and she would forget small details like where she left her keys, etc. I used to joke that her memory was fine, but her forgetter got better.

With video calls, my forgetter just got a lot better! So what can I do to remember more details during video calls?