You run into someone you have not seen since spring. They ask the obvious question. And you stand there with nothing.
"Not much, really. Work has been busy."
It is not true. Since spring you changed something at work, went somewhere, read something that stuck, had a health thing sorted out, saw four people you had been meaning to see. None of it arrives when you need it. Then you are on the tram home and it all comes back at once, in order, uselessly.
This is not a bad memory. It is how memory is built.
You do not store your life as a timeline you can scroll. You store it in fragments that are retrieved by cues, and the cue has to resemble the thing you are looking for. Standing on a street corner being asked an enormous open question gives your brain nothing to work with. "What have you been up to" is not a cue, it is a search box with no query in it.
Give the same brain one specific hook and it opens immediately. Ask "did you end up going to that thing in June" and suddenly you have the whole evening, who was there, what went wrong with the trains.
So the problem is not that the memories are gone. The problem is that you cannot generate your own cues on demand, standing there, mid-conversation.
The trick that works is small and slightly odd: log the meeting itself.
When you see someone, tap a tag for it. "Coffee with Anna", or just a general "Friends" tag with her name in the note. It takes two seconds and at the time it feels pointless, because you are not going to forget that you are sitting there.
That is not what it is for. It is a marker you are leaving for the next time.
In Menikki this lives on the Insights page. You search for the tag, and you get every time it was logged.
Which means the next time you are about to see Anna, you look up when you last saw her, and then you look at what your diary holds after that date. Not a vague sense of "a few months". An actual boundary, with the months since it sitting there in order.
The five minutes before you walk into the bar is enough. You are not memorising anything, you are just re-cueing yourself, and re-cueing is the part your brain could not do alone.
Meetings are the obvious one, but the same trick works for any boundary you will later measure from:
The pattern is the same each time. You are not recording the event because the event is interesting. You are putting a stake in the ground so that later you can ask "what happened after this" and get an answer.
A written diary would do this too, and better, if you kept one. Almost nobody does, and the reason is that writing requires you to be in a reflective mood at the moment something happens, which is precisely when you are not.
A tag survives that. It takes a tap, it works when you are tired, and because the entries carry structure rather than prose, you can read them back as counts and patterns instead of re-reading paragraphs. For this particular job, being able to scan is the whole value.
Worth being straight: this gives you a list of what happened, not what any of it meant. It will not tell you how a year felt, and if that is what you are after, a real journal is the better tool and nothing here replaces it.
It also only works with what you actually logged. The months before you started tagging are as blank as they always were, and no app fixes that retroactively. Which is the mildly annoying argument for starting now rather than at some tidier moment.
The blackout is a cueing failure, not a memory failure. Log the meeting itself, then look the tag up on the Insights page next time and read forward from that date. Two seconds when you see someone buys you an actual answer the next time they ask.
And "not much, work has been busy" stops being the thing you say about six months you were, in fact, quite busy living.