Basic trick to never lose things. Count the number of things you have when you enter and leave. If they're different it's time to rack your brain for what's missing.
The classic example is the phone wallet keys trio, but you can extend this to anything. As long as it's easy to remember the count, because if you could remember every single item you wouldn't lose things to begin with.
I split the difference by counting off my electronics and bags, but not specific items beyond that. My everyday mental patter is something like "I entered this room with my backpack and gained a bag of things, both bags are there, I took out my laptop headphones and phone while here, there's my laptop in the bag, my headphones are on my head, I'm picking up my phone, picking up both bags, I've got everything". Of course, it's shorter mentally than written out. You can say it aloud if it helps, but a mental tally works fine.
For bonus points, build a habit of scanning the floor before you leave. Takes half a second and drastically reduces the likelyhood of dropping something.
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Nightly Notes
It's been a bad few days for writing. I'm here to throw out the idea and get back to sleep.
My internal threshold for long posts is going down. I think at the start I was trying to hype myself up so I overinvested time, but now that it's becoming routine I'm still working out where I want to settle. I have two modes for editing, concept editing to flesh out the ideas and smooth out flow, and line editing to cleanup specific wording. Wordcount is my proxy for how much concept editing I've done because I know it tends to increase length even though most line editing cuts wordcount.
All metrics are flawed, etc, but it works well enough as a signal.
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