Past about five, this stops being memory and becomes logistics.
There is a threshold somewhere around five medicines where the problem changes character. Below it, people remember. Above it, the day has too many moving parts to hold in your head - especially when some go before food, one has to be spaced from another, and two arrived from different doctors who have never spoken.
Taking several medicines at once is common and often entirely appropriate. What it needs is a written system, because no one should be running this from memory.
The first job is a single document with everything on it. Most people's medicines live across several prescriptions and nobody has ever seen them side by side - which is also how duplicate prescribing survives for years.
This is the question most families never ask. Medicines accumulate - something started for a short course is never formally stopped, a specialist adds one without seeing the full list. Reviews of older patients repeatedly find medicines that are no longer needed.
Ask your doctor for a medication review, using the word. Bring the one-page list. It is a normal request and the list is what makes it productive.
Every additional time-of-day is another chance to miss something. Where the instructions allow it, fewer clusters is better - but that is a question for the pharmacist, not a decision to make at the kitchen table.
What you can do without asking anyone is arrange the medicines physically by cluster, so the morning group lives in one container and the night group in another.
Worth saying plainly, because the wrong tool applied to the wrong problem wastes weeks:
Not automatically - many people need several. The risks come from interactions, duplication and medicines that are no longer needed, which is why a periodic review with the full list matters.
Usually yes, and a pharmacist can fill it for you, which also catches mistakes. Ask first about anything that must stay in its original packaging.
You often can't from the brand names - two products can contain the same ingredient. Show the full list to a pharmacist; that is exactly the check they're trained for.
DailyDawa groups the medicines due at each time into one message, so a four-slot day is four messages rather than nine. And if one goes unanswered, someone is told.