I wear bifocals all day, every day. They are, quite literally, the thing that lets me see clearly. And yet at least once a day, I take them off for some perfectly sensible reason – cooking something steamy, wiping my eyes, no idea really – and a few minutes later I genuinely could not tell you which room they’re in. What follows is a full retracing of my steps around the house or the office, squinting slightly, trying to reconstruct my own recent movements like I’m solving a very low-stakes crime. Kitchen. Was I in the kitchen? Did I put them down near the kettle. No. Try the desk.

There is something particularly undignified about needing the glasses to see clearly, and also needing to see clearly in order to find the glasses!

So it’s from this extremely credible position (a person who cannot reliably keep track of an object she is wearing for most of her waking life) that I’ve been doing some thinking lately about how we help people learn new skills, adopt new technology, and build new ways of working in their jobs.

Turns out it’s not just me

Because here’s the thing. If I can lose something that’s on my actual face, what on earth am I expecting when I ask someone to sit through a one-hour demo of a new tool and then just… use it correctly, from memory, unprompted, six weeks later?

There’s a well-known bit of research called the forgetting curve (first described by a psychologist named Ebbinghaus back in the 1880s, and reproduced many times since) that gets cited a lot in workplace learning circles. The commonly quoted version goes:

without reinforcement, people forget roughly 50% of new information within an hour,
70% within a day, and up to 90% within a week

Ninety percent.
Gone.
Within a week.
That’s not a stat about particularly forgetful people. That’s just what brains do, by default, to new information that doesn’t get revisited.

Which reframes the glasses thing for me a bit. It’s not that I’m unusually scattered (well, I am also that, separately). It’s that forgetting quickly is the default setting for everyone, and the interesting question was never “why do people forget,” it’s “why did we ever expect a single session to be enough for it to stick.”

Designing around it, not fighting it

I think about this a lot in the context of getting people to actually adopt something – a new way of working, a new platform, a new habit at their desk. We put a lot of energy into the moment of teaching: a great session, a slick demo, a compelling case for why this new way is better. And then we quietly expect that moment to survive contact with someone’s actual week… inbox, meetings, three other priorities, glasses somewhere in the house, metaphorically speaking. It mostly doesn’t, not because people weren’t listening, but because that’s not how memory works for anyone, including the very engaged, very motivated people in the room nodding along.

If we take the forgetting curve seriously, it changes what “good” learning design actually looks like. It’s less about cramming everything into one excellent session, and more about building in the return visits. This could be a nudge a few days later, a small prompt to try the one thing that mattered, or a reason to open the material again before it’s fully gone. The habit or the adoption isn’t built in the session. It’s built in what happens after it, deliberately, on a timeline that respects how fast the good intentions from that session are actually fading.

So what hope do we have?
Genuinely, more than it feels like in the moment. Not because we’re going to get better at remembering (I am not going to stop putting my glasses down somewhere inexplicable) but because once you stop expecting memory to be the thing doing the work, you can design around it instead. Which is, I think, the more honest and more useful question than “why can’t people just remember this.”

Anyway. I need to go retrace my steps. I was definitely wearing my glasses ten minutes ago.