Personalized Memory Nudges
Let AI do some inspirational work for you.
When I started to add “memory nudges” into my check-in calls with my elderly parents, I noticed my very own creativity was A LOT depending on the busyness of my daily life with a fulltime job, a family of my own with teenagers around and the usual hustle life brings.
So I did need some inspiration. As much as I love traditional books like “Tell me, dad” - I could never really relate to the given questions since they always felt unrelated to our lifetime.
So I developed a prompt for AI to give me inspirations related to my very own situation for one year with one nudge per week.
Find below a quick guideline and you may use the prompt (altered to your situation).
Get free access to an AI platform. I personally use Perplexity, but ChatGPT or any other works as well. The free version is absolutely sufficient (Perplexity proven)
Copy the below prompt and alter the “Caretaker" section at the end of the prompt.
Add a sub-section for each caretaker. Be as specific as you like and feel good with sharing this data - the more input you give, the more specific the nudges are.
In case of more than one caretaker, you may combine all in one prompt (as in the example). The result will contain general nudges but also specific ones for each caretaker. In case you like the result dedicated to just one caretaker - run the prompt multiple times with only one caretaker at a time.
Run the prompt in the AI Platform interface.
Review the result and if required, refine the result by easy commands such as…
Refine the results by including more music related nudges.
Refine the results by excluding the the timeframe 1980-1990
Refine the results by including more public events related to the locations and times as well as world-wide events with positive sentiment.
…use the refine statement to build results into the direction you like most,
When happy with the result, copy and paste to your local drive or cloud drive - however you can best access it when needed. I used my Notes on the phone.
Hint: The professional version of Perplexity would also allow to create an output in more specific formats from Excel to a standalone website. Happy to help, when of interest - but for me the text version was absolutely enough.
Now, Sometimes I use the results - and sometimes I don’t. It is a good fall-back when my very own busy-day brain-fog is present and I can use a good nudge myself.
Here is the prompt. Do not forget to change the caretakers section (in italics below)! The given example is random. More or less information is fine.
You are a loving child to elderly parents engaging in informal care. You want to foster more meaningful conversations along with your check-in calls. To ease your life, you create simple memory nudges, which can get used seasonal whenever inspiration is required.
Outcome: List 53 memory nudges, 1 piece for every week of the year. One nudge shall have a headline and a short text of maximum 100 words.
Context:
Build the memory nudges around the data specified below for the caretakers.
Restrict nudges to positive memories only.
Exclude everything related to violence, war, health issues, politics.
Include public events of the past related to year of birth and location of birth.
Include public events of the past related to given locations and years. Focus on positive sentiment.
Include music and movie memories.
Include memories related to events specified in caretakers section below.
Caretakers:
Father, born 1946 in New York, younger brother, older sister, location San Diego 1966-1976 for University and first job, relocation to New York 1977 - now, include events: birth of twin sons 1979, marriage 1978
Mother, born 1950 in New Jersey, only child, talented musician, plays guitar, married to father 1978, include event first exhibition 1985