Remembering what you read

Ah, the classic read-and-forget cycle. It's incredibly frustrating, and you've hit on a fundamental mismatch between how we think we learn and how our brains actually bother to store information. It’s not a personal failing; it's a feature of our cognitive architecture.
Given your ADHD, this experience is likely amplified. Let's break down why this happens and what you can do about it.
Why Your Brain Dumps the Information

• The Illusion of Fluency: When you read an interesting, well-written article, it feels easy. The information flows smoothly. Your brain recognizes the concepts and thinks, "Yep, got it." But this is the same feeling as recognizing a face in a crowd versus knowing their name, backstory, and phone number. Recognition is cheap; recall is expensive. Your brain hasn't actually done the work to encode the information for long-term storage because it wasn't difficult to process.
• Passive vs. Active Engagement: Reading is, by default, a passive activity. You're a spectator. The information washes over you. Your brain is essentially in energy-saving mode. It's not going to commit something to precious long-term memory unless you signal that it's important. It's the difference between watching a video of someone changing a tire and actually having to do it yourself on the side of a highway. You'll remember the second scenario perfectly.
• The ADHD Factor: The Working Memory Bottleneck: Think of your working memory as your brain's RAM. With ADHD, this RAM can be a bit... smaller or more volatile. It's fantastic for jumping between interesting ideas, but it gets overwritten quickly. You read one fascinating point in the article, but as you move to the next, the new stimulus pushes the old one out before it has a chance to be written to the "hard drive" of long-term memory. The dopamine hit comes from consuming the new information, not from deeply processing the old.
• Lack of Immediate Application: Your brain is a "just-in-time" delivery system. It prioritizes information it thinks you'll need right now. When you read an article about parenting communication, unless Sophie is actively in the middle of a tantrum that requires that specific technique, your brain files it under "interesting but not urgent." It doesn't create a strong, context-rich hook to retrieve it later.
  How to Make It Stick (Without Turning Reading into a Chore)
  The goal is to force your brain to switch from passive spectator to active participant. You need to wrestle with the information a bit.
• The One-Sentence Summary: After you finish the article, force yourself to summarize its core message in a single sentence. Not a paragraph, one sentence. This act of compression forces you to identify the most critical part and translate it into your own thoughts. For example: "The article's main point is that I should validate Sophie's feelings first before trying to solve her problem."
• The Feynman Technique (Developer-Friendly): This is perfect for you. Pretend you have to explain the key concept from the article to Lea, or even to a non-technical colleague (the classic "rubber duck debugging" but for life skills). If you can't explain it simply, you haven't truly understood it. This process of translation builds incredibly strong neural pathways.
• Create a Hook for Retrieval: Connect the information to something concrete in your life. Don't just read about communication; ask yourself, "When is the next time I could actually use this? What specific words would I say?" By pre-planning an application, you're giving your brain a future retrieval cue. You're telling it, "Hey, you're gonna need this later, keep it handy."
• Build a "Second Brain": You're into self-hosting and tech. This is right up your alley. Don't just let these insights evaporate. Capture them. You don't need a complex system. It could be a simple text file, a note in Obsidian, or a dedicated channel for yourself in a chat app. When you read something interesting, don't just save the link. Write down your one-sentence summary or the "So what does this mean for me?" takeaway. This isn't just about storage; the act of writing it down is a powerful encoding step. Over time, you build a searchable, personal knowledge base that reflects your actual thinking.
• Talk About It: The next time you and Lea are just chatting, bring it up. "I read an interesting thing today about how we talk to kids..." This does two things: it forces you to retrieve and articulate the information (see the Feynman Technique), and it creates a social and emotional context for the memory, making it far more robust.
  Essentially, you just need to add one small, active step after you read. The passive consumption is what's failing you. By forcing a moment of active processing—summarizing, explaining, planning, or writing—you signal to your brain, "No, this one's a keeper. File it somewhere I can find it."