Similar to you, I’ve found that writing the notes helps me to remember stuff, but I found that my on-the-fly remembering really improved when I started to make my notes more findable by the use of tags. It doesn’t even need to be a formal tagging system — even just including “#tag” in the note body helps me to find things better.

The key to this approach is asking yourself in what context you might want to refer back to a past note, and to not just add a scattershot of possibly relevant tags. For example, if I’m writing down my thoughts about a movie that I want to talk about to a friend, I might write “I should ask #Becky what she thinks about this”, or “this reminds me of what #Sarah was saying about #thing” (if #thing is a topic I’ve written other notes on). I found that doing this became easier over time, and this was reinforced by the fact that I found myself referring back to my notes more often (which also helped me to make more connections between thoughts I’d been having)

Edit: To give an example relevant to the original post, I might tag a note about a good movie with #movie (I don’t need to qualify that with “favourite”, because that is too specific, and realistically, if I’m writing about a movie, it’s probably one that I like), or a brief note about a great restaurant might be tagged with #goodfood and #city