Ting Zhang is on the eve of getting her doctorate at Harvard Business School, where her focus is the psychology of rediscovery. Most recently, she was the lead author of a four-part study published in Psychological Science. In it, she took 135 university undergraduates from the northeastern United States and had them create time capsules. In these capsules, the students wrote about a range of current experiences: their most recent conversation, their most recent social outing, how they met their roommate, three songs they had just listened to, an inside joke, a photo they had recently taken, a recent Facebook status they had posted, a sentence they wrote for a school essay, and a question they responded to on a final exam.

They then rated how curious and interested they thought they would be about seeing this time capsule in the future. On a one-to-seven scale, the students gave an average rating of three. Three months later, immediately before looking at the capsule, the students were asked again to rate how curious and interested they were in their capsules’ contents. Their average answer now jumped to a 4.34. What this shows, Zhang writes, is “that even simple interventions (e.g., taking a few minutes to document the present) could generate unexpected value in the future.”

So I decided to collect memories of the banal. I had five days with my family over Christmas and each day I spent 10 minutes writing about what we had done—what I had seen, eaten, touched, and smelled—and then collected an object to mark the day. When we went to the movies I brought home my ticket stub. When we went to a seafood restaurant I brought home a dolphin figurine that came with our bill. After we opened gifts on Christmas morning, I saved a swatch of wrapping paper to remember not just the gifts but the pleasure of opening them.

Surely, I will throw these items away some time or another. I can’t hoard trinkets forever. But I want to wait to revisit them after I have forgotten the moments they represent. Within the year my grandparents will likely move to an assisted living home. My father, brother, and I will no longer make the cross-state car trip. I won’t see Tuesday morning movies featuring “Cary” and “Bogey” at the Galaxy Multiplex with my grandparents. The family won’t sit around in the living room eating cinnamon rolls and talking while my grandfather adjusts his hearing aid and tells everyone to quiet down when Meet the Press comes on.

Like me, the people in the study were most interested in rediscovering the mundane experiences. Asked to write down what they were doing on an ordinary day (a few days before Valentine’s Day) and then on an extraordinary day (on Valentine’s Day), participants had more pleasure reading their entry about the ordinary day three months later than their entry about the extraordinary day. The ordinary experience had also been more difficult to remember than the extraordinary one and so its rediscovery felt fresher.