Using a system of personal knowledge management (PKM) has been a huge boon for me. Just the act of jotting down all my ideas whenever I have them (Google Keep), then dedicating time to structuring/curating them into an organized format (Microsoft OneNote), and then being able to quickly access them in the future has helped my retention and creativity immensely. I just see patterns I never would have recorded or remembered otherwise. Sometimes it's a pain to dedicate a few hours every weekend to structuring all this information but I've found the long term benefit to far outweigh that cost.