# Working Memory in Practice

Working memory is particularly useful for:

1. **Personal assistants** that need to remember user preferences
2. **Customer support agents** that need to track issue details
3. **Educational agents** that need to remember a student's progress
4. **Task-oriented agents** that need to track the state of a complex task

By using working memory effectively, you can create agents that feel more personalized and attentive to user needs.

Here are some best practices for using working memory effectively:

1. **Be selective about what goes into working memory**
   - Focus on information that will be relevant across multiple conversations
   - Don't overload working memory with transient details

2. **Use clear instructions**
   - Give your agent explicit guidance on when and how to update working memory
   - Instruct it to check memory before asking for information the user has already provided

3. **Design a thoughtful template**
   - Structure your template based on the specific needs of your agent
   - Include sections for different types of information
   - Use clear labels and organization to make information easy to find

4. **Test thoroughly**
   - Verify that your agent correctly updates and retrieves information from working memory
   - Test edge cases like conflicting information or corrections

In the next step, we'll bring everything together to create a complete memory-enhanced agent with all the features we've explored.