How do you remember everything you have to do?
I'm not going to write a long blog post about Getting Things Done. (But I am a student of that system.) I just had a micro-crisis and wanted to write about it. I have an alarm on my Palm Prē called "see todo." I normally set it to remind me to check my todo list for time-critical actions. But today I set it without writing down what I was supposed to do. That was my micro-crisis. Turns out I was supposed to heat up a pot roast for dinner. I did it early, and the alarm freaked me out. I don't think I would have remembered, so it's a good thing I did it early. Thus the micro-crisis.
I wear a ring on my right hand that has an asymmetrical design. I can turn it 180 degrees, and it becomes a physical reminder. I've trained myself to ask, "Why did I turn my ring around?" I use it as one might have tied a string around one's finger a hundred (or even as little as forty) years ago. I'm a computer scientist, so I think of it as "a bit" that I can "flip" like a register in a CPU. (Yeah, I'm a geek. Deal. :) After I complete the task I'm trying to remember, I "reset the bit" by turning my ring around.
So there you have it. I use a phone alarm to remind me to read my todo list at specified times. Or I "set a bit" to remind me to do something.
How do you remember everything you have to do?