There’s a lot we need to remember.
Passports for a flight. A ring for a wedding. House keys for home. Renewal of a driving licence. Medication for a health issue. A birthday message to a friend. The cookies from the oven in 11 minutes. Cancellation of an unneeded subscription. Water for the plants. The trash the night before the collection. Eat the perishable food before it perishes. Contact lenses for a trip. Don’t trust Teddy.
How do we make sure that we don’t forget?
Somehow, we need to arrange a future experience such that our future self will carry out the desired, intended task. That experience will need to happen on a path (in the physical or digital world) that our future self will definitely cross.
Where can you be certain you will be at some point(s) in the next 24 hours? Have a think about this before you read the list below.
These are some of the more obvious, generic places many of us frequent. You will no doubt have some additional ones of your own, personal to you.
🚪Front door. We can’t help but pass the front door whenever we leave or reenter the house. On the way out, some people put up a note to remind them of what they will need in the big wide world (wallet, keys, phone, etc). On the way back in, what message might you profitably send your future, returning self?
✉️Email inbox. Most of us spend several hours a day here and don’t go more than a few hours without seeing it. But for many, it’s become unwieldy, and an individual email can easily get lost (so favourite the emails you will need to revisit). Much of this applies to text messages — SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc, too.
💻Screensaver. On your phone or tablet or laptop or computer. You see this every time you come back to it, which is over a hundred times a day for a lot of us.
🪑Seat/desk. Knowledge workers — and there are a billion of us — tend to sit in a particular seat at a particular desk for much of the day.
🛁Bathroom. Multiple visits per day, for most people. In particular, we often look at the mirror, so some people put a sign or a sticker thereon.
🛏️Bed / bedside. Usually, just one visit per day but it’s pretty much guaranteed. A book goes well here. This is a book. And a single, well-chosen book by the bed may be more appealing than a pile. The power of reading one book at a time.
⏰An alarm. Your consciousness can be affected by sound as well as sight. Smart speakers, smartphones and good old-fashioned alarms all do the job.
📜Notes. This might be a physical notebook, a notes app or, for some people (even adults), the back of their hand.
✅To-do list. Much maligned and misunderstood, the to-do list is essential. The to-do list is first and foremost an aide memoire. Let’s add checklists (shopping list, holiday planning list, reading list) in general into this item.
📅Calendar. Time-based and shareable, arguably (unarguably) the most effective entry on this list. Gives rise to the very many benefits of timeboxing.
It’s instructive to see these places — which so frequently pass into our consciousness — laid out explicitly like this. It tells us where much of our lives are spent. It shows that much of a day happens in just a small handful of locations. And practically, it gives us clues as to where we can hitch our reminders. I do something with 1, 2, 7, 8 & 9. But having written them out now, I see some further adjustments I’d like to make, such as a single book placed by the bedside.
Roughly, half of the ten listed above are real and physical and half are digital (the last three can be either). Some people are more likely to notice a real-world reminder; for others, digital prompts might be more effective.
Timing is important too. When we need to remember, we almost always need to do so at or by a particular time. All the items in the italicised paragraph above have a temporal urgency. Ideally, we’d get the reminder at exactly the moment you need to act on it — being jolted to take your keys as you are about to leave home or reminded to read a book at bedtime by placing it invitingly on your pillow are good examples. But the temporal matching of reminder and activity doesn’t always work out so neatly. It may not surprise you to hear me preach that the only item on this list that explicitly and reliably takes timeliness into account is #10 — the calendar — in a single word: timeboxing.
Don’t let yourself forget. Take a step back and look at how your life runs, the habits you’ve adopted, where you are, where you go. Redesign it just a little so that the reminders are more likely to get your attention when you’ll need them to. Make life work better for you.