How To Remember Phone Numbers

You were in the park. While jogging, you bumped into an old friend of yours. You were soon chatting happily. In the chat, your friend tried to give you his phone number so you could call him… But the problem was you left your cell phone in the car and you didn’t have a pen and paper.

This post will teach you how to temporarily remember phone numbers in situations like above.

Here’s the method I always use when I want to remember phone numbers.

Number Stories

In this method, you have to create stories out of the numbers. All you have to do is to choose a thing that looks like the shape of the numbers (e.g. 2 = swan). Then, create a story using the sequence of the phone numbers.

These are the ones I often use.

0 – egg
1 – pencil
2 – swan
3 – ear/heart
4 – sailboat
5 – hook
6 – pipe (for smoking)
7 – walking stick/gun/candy cane
8 – snowman/sunglasses
9 – tadpole/balloon
10 – baseball
13 – Bee (the number looks like a ‘B’)
100 – Spear piercing two eggs

If you think you would prefer another thing to represent a number, you can use yours.

Here is an example of the story used to remember 80023987:

One day, a snowwoman (8) lays two eggs (00), which looks like the ones of a swan (2), which has a good heart (3). The heart looks like a balloon (9) made out of candy which was made by a silly clown snowman (8) which loves to eat candy cane (7).

Here is another example (62937581):

There is a pipe (6) which is used by a dirty swan (2), who can’t fly, so he rides on a fat balloon (9), which is shaped like a yellow heart (3). Suddenly, it is burst by an angry walking stick (7), which is unfortunately hooked by a hook (5), which is used for fishing by a joyful snowman (8), who loves to write stories using a magic pencil (1).

Ask your friend to recite the phone number slowly, so that you have enough time to create a story. But you have to create it fast though, you don’t want your friend to repeat the numbers again and again.

Remember – the story can be anything, as long as you can remember it. For some reason, funny or absurd things are easier to remember than normal ones. So, use adjectives to describe them.

If you want to remember it for a long time, you would have to recite the story. But if you do not want to remember it for a long time, you can write it down and do not need to remember it anymore, when you have a pen and paper or a phone.

Besides having to remember the phone number, using this method would also enhance your creativity.

Sometimes, you would find it hard to remember, but hey, at least you can still remember it!

If this method is not working for you, you could create your own method.

So, is this method working for you?