Have you tried the method of loci? I do a variation of it when I don't have writing means nearby to keep the idea in my head. In its essence, you visualize a familiar place (ie parent's home) and how you walk through it and drop what you want to remember somewhere. Works perfectly fine for me. I suspect that's because of grid cells and spatial cognition (more here: https://youtu.be/gmc4wEL2aPQ).
Interesting talk too. I like how she highlighted that the brain finds numbers to be important.
When doing grocery shopping I often memorize the list based on the item count. Like if I'm going for Italian bread, tomatoes, green peppers, sausages, milk, water, avocados, chicken and bagels I never try to memorize the items. I'll make a note of the count, which would be 9 in this case.
This has a really good success rate for me when it comes to remembering things because during the shopping session I'll think "ok, that's 7 things, what are the last 2 things". Then I'll scan my bag and recall the last 2 things eventually. It also makes it almost impossible to leave the store while forgetting something because 7 != 9.
