For example, nearly everyone who goes to work has a routine of waking up in the morning, showering, putting on clothes, eating, and leaving for work. Very few people get dressed, start breakfast, and then realize that they forgot to shower.
I find that very difficult, and quite impossible to do them in any reliable order other than what’s imposed by necessity. Each morning, I have to figure out again what I need to do. It’s easy to remember to brush my teeth and shower, because I feel dirty until I do. I’ll remember to eat if I’m hungry. It’s easy to notice if I’m barefoot as I leave the house, but sometimes I end up in the car with slippers instead of shoes. Shaving and taking my medicine are very hard to remember because there are no cues, so I keep a razor and extra medicine at work or in my car.
People always think this can be solved easily by putting sticky notes up in various places, but they fail to understand the quantity of notes that would be necessary if someone tried to live that way. They would be so numerous as to be useless. They also fail to understand the difficulty of seeing something written on a sticky note that tells me to do something in another room, in which case I have to get to the other room without forgetting what I’m doing, AND still remember the rest of the list. It’s so unreliable that the sticky note needs to be next to the item it talks about, in which case the item itself is a cue anyway. People also fail to understand that I have no way of being sure, when I’m leaving the house, whether I’ve read the sticky notes or not that day. I can’t just keep going back into the house to make sure I read them.
My memories are badly timestamped. If I read a checklist on my wall today, that will add one more memory of me reading that checklist. If I then step outside and try to remember reading that checklist, I may summon up dozens of memories of doing so, but have no idea whether any of them were from today.
It may be worth your time to enforce a very strict routine over a period (the morning is a good example, as long as sleepiness is not making things extra difficult) for a couple of weeks and see if it starts to stick; this is something that can make a big difference, and it is worth knowing if it can work for you.
However, I agree that this is not likely to be a magic bullet in your case.
Have you tried something like a smartphone with an extensive checklist/schedule? It has the benefits of coming with you almost everywhere, and having alarms for particularly important events.
This is a subject that interests me, and I’d like to know more about what you do and how it works. You have simplified matters by making your environment more flexible (e.g. razor in the car); is that something that has a halo effect—one less thing to go horribly awry, so you are less stressed and can function a little better overall—or is it just a solution to forgetting to shave, and that’s all? Are there other solutions that have worked for multiple problems? Are there any problems that you have found no solutions for?
I find that very difficult, and quite impossible to do them in any reliable order other than what’s imposed by necessity. Each morning, I have to figure out again what I need to do. It’s easy to remember to brush my teeth and shower, because I feel dirty until I do. I’ll remember to eat if I’m hungry. It’s easy to notice if I’m barefoot as I leave the house, but sometimes I end up in the car with slippers instead of shoes. Shaving and taking my medicine are very hard to remember because there are no cues, so I keep a razor and extra medicine at work or in my car.
People always think this can be solved easily by putting sticky notes up in various places, but they fail to understand the quantity of notes that would be necessary if someone tried to live that way. They would be so numerous as to be useless. They also fail to understand the difficulty of seeing something written on a sticky note that tells me to do something in another room, in which case I have to get to the other room without forgetting what I’m doing, AND still remember the rest of the list. It’s so unreliable that the sticky note needs to be next to the item it talks about, in which case the item itself is a cue anyway. People also fail to understand that I have no way of being sure, when I’m leaving the house, whether I’ve read the sticky notes or not that day. I can’t just keep going back into the house to make sure I read them.
My memories are badly timestamped. If I read a checklist on my wall today, that will add one more memory of me reading that checklist. If I then step outside and try to remember reading that checklist, I may summon up dozens of memories of doing so, but have no idea whether any of them were from today.
It may be worth your time to enforce a very strict routine over a period (the morning is a good example, as long as sleepiness is not making things extra difficult) for a couple of weeks and see if it starts to stick; this is something that can make a big difference, and it is worth knowing if it can work for you.
However, I agree that this is not likely to be a magic bullet in your case.
Have you tried something like a smartphone with an extensive checklist/schedule? It has the benefits of coming with you almost everywhere, and having alarms for particularly important events.
This is a subject that interests me, and I’d like to know more about what you do and how it works. You have simplified matters by making your environment more flexible (e.g. razor in the car); is that something that has a halo effect—one less thing to go horribly awry, so you are less stressed and can function a little better overall—or is it just a solution to forgetting to shave, and that’s all? Are there other solutions that have worked for multiple problems? Are there any problems that you have found no solutions for?