Anki (or similar). Spaced repetition is the most underrated tool I know of. And I barely use it: 8 cards per day, probably 1.5 minutes total with a noticeable bump in ease of professional life
Ah.. I thought it was more of so you could practice remembering stuff. Like some people remembers what somebody said in a meeting 3 months ago and some don’t even knew we had a meeting about it
You know, funnily enough, as someone who considers themselves to have a good memory, I cannot for the life of me remember most meetings, or most conversations for that matter in any sort of verbatim.
What I do focus on is remembering key details, as well as key emotional responses and postures. I try to take away from any sort of interaction any 1) new details that I find to be important and 2) how they reacted to other bits of information.
This helps me create a sort of holistic picture of a person, which I then take with me to my next interaction with them. I find this ultimately more useful than remembering the actual things said, as for the most part the counterparty does not either. However, their fundamental emotional posture(s) and motivations rarely change that quickly and having that knowledge helps me shape conversation faster and better.
My understanding is that "learning memorization" is really the process of learning to do the work to memorize, through explicit strategies like spaced repetition.
I don't think people become better at "effortless" memorization. Instead they learn what it is they need to do if they want to remember something.
It's possible to get to the point where you can become better at effortless memorization, but that takes a LOT of work. I studied 6 languages in high school and undergrad, and by the time I was in my senior year (taking Arabic + Chinese concurrently + over a decade of cumulative language classes) I remembered pretty much everything and reviewing for things like formulae/terms in other classes wasn't necessary.
It wasn't a process so much as an accidental by-product of what I was studying. By the time I left high school, I was taking German, Latin, and French. In undergrad, I expanded that to include some Old English, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. You can't get around memorization to learn languages.
The reason my memory ended up so nuts is that I was only interested in the nuts and bolts of the language, so I didn't continue on with French when it became about literature, I just picked up a new language instead. After a while, languages become more about things like context clues, but at the beginning and intermediate stages, you have to memorize a lot. Since I wanted to go for linguistic breadth (since I was interested in how languages were related/how features travel), I did the memorization stage of language learning a lot.
So I'd say it's down to consistency and longevity of practice. I used spaced-repetition as my main technique, but it's really down to spending 1+ hour a day for 8 years on memorizing.
You also have to keep up with it, or your memory degrades. It's been a good 10 years, and I don't have nearly the memory I used to.
I've been working on an app [0] for the past few years that attempts to synthesize note card style note taking (a la zettelkasten method) with spaced repetition flash cards. Spaced repetition is the single most effective tool for efficient memorization that I've discovered.