The forgetting curve: what Ebbinghaus discovered in 1885 about your follow-ups
Hermann Ebbinghaus measured how fast we forget: most of it happens in the first days. The same curve runs for you and for your customer — and it can be outsmarted.
In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus turned his own head into a laboratory. For months he memorised nonsense syllables and measured how quickly he forgot them. The result is the forgetting curve — one of the oldest and most reliably replicated curves in psychology. And, incidentally, a precise description of what happens to your meeting from last Tuesday.
Most forgetting happens immediately
Ebbinghaus's curve falls steepest at the start: a large share of anything new vanishes within the first hours and days, then the loss slows down. We don't forget evenly — we forget like an avalanche, and the avalanche starts right after the event. The meeting details you hold in your head “forever” today will be a fragment in a week and an anecdote in a month.
The curve runs on both sides
The same thing happens to your customer. The day after the meeting, you're the most interesting company in their world. Two weeks later they vaguely recall “talking to someone.” Two months later you're one of many. Silence between contacts isn't neutral — the curve works against you at both ends of the relationship: yours and theirs.
How to outsmart the curve
Psychology has known the answer for over a century: repetition at growing intervals — the spacing effect. Every reminder lifts the curve and slows its fall. It's exactly how vocabulary apps work today — and exactly how a relationship works too: a short touch at the right moment keeps it “learned” better than one long meeting followed by six months of silence.
What this means for sales
Two practical things. Write it down today: capture the promises, numbers and context from a meeting while you're still at the top of your own curve — by evening you're transcribing a memory of a memory. And schedule the intervals: a touch in a week, a month, a quarter — each with a reason, not just “checking in.” You don't have to remember the curve. Your system just has to know it.
The intervals Ebbinghaus prescribed for memory, you can prescribe for a relationship in Lemnio — a reminder with a date and a reason lifts the curve for you. Try it free, or write to [email protected].