Mine has been patchy for a long time, but I've come up with various rationalisations:

- Work item priorities changing on a semi-regular basis means that "working memory" can need to be purged at the drop of a hat. Happens enough times and you just start, not even necessarily consciously, not committing some things to memory.

- Having kids has meant there's always something on "soon", so we try to keep all the things in a shared calendar. It's not possible for me to remember all the things, so there's no point remembering some of them, so I don't. The calendar is the singular source of truth.

- My wife tends to recount the entirety of her day to me, randomly interspersed with a couple of pieces of information that are critically important to our lives between now and three months from now, as soon as either she or I walk in the door after work. I don't try to remember any of it any more because I just don't, and never did, have the throughput capability.

- I've heard that making memories (and this might be specific to long term behavioural type memories, so maybe moot) has a relationship with adrenaline production - you'll remember something scary or exciting or dangerous or unusual. I'm a fairly chill mf, so my assumption is that I don't pump adrenaline quite a easily as most people, and therefore memories are less likely to be "sticky" (tenuous reasoning).

- Life and work are increasingly busy and complex. Short term memory may be getting saturated by things we don't realise are using short term memory, and so it feels as if short term memory is worse, when actually it's just at capacity all the time.

- There is always something else on our minds. If you're thinking about X (which is important to you) and someone else starts explaining Y, then there's a fair period of mental wind down of X in order to start processing Y, during which time they've already kinda got to the middle.

An analogy I've used when discussing "remembering details" with work colleagues:

We're having 50 tennis balls thrown at us all at once. We shouldn't be expected to be catching more than one - and it may not even be the one you were trying to catch.

In the case of my wife's rapid fire information delivery, I'm being thrown 50 tennis balls, two of which are invisibly marked as critical, and I'm expected to catch both.

(This is only slightly hyperbolic)