Reminder Techniques: Which are the Best?

Life is busy and you’ve got lots of things to remember to do every day. Some of them are critical. There are many ways to prompt yourself to remember the most important tasks (besides the old-fashioned method of tying a string around your finger); see the list below with my personal favorites marked.

1) Trust  your memory (NOT a good choice)

2) Write a note on your hand in ink (cool if you’re in high school, but not so cool if you’re a responsible adult)

3) Write a sticky note and post it somewhere you’ll see it (fine, until you get too many sticky notes and are nearly buried in them — or you’ve looked at the note so many time you no longer “see” it)

4) Hang a  doorknob reminder board over the door knob (good for remembering to take something with you when you leave the house) 

5) ***Write a note and staple it around your purse strap (I find this effective, but it looks a little slovenly; didn’t realize quite how bad it looked til I rode up the elevator at work once with the executive director and found him staring at the handwritten note stapled haphazardly around my purse strap)

6) Write yourself an email if you’re at work and want to remember to do something at home (when I do this, I usually ignore my own email)

7) Call yourself and leave a reminder message (OK, but it feels a little like you’re stalking yourself, doesn’t it? “Hi Diane, this is Diane…”)

8) ***Write a to-do list (in order of priority) on a piece of paper and place it somewhere prominent. Enjoy the satisfaction of crossing tasks off as you accomplish them. In fact, if you do something useful that’s not on the list, go ahead and add it to the list, then cross it off. And for extra discipline, don’t let yourself do anything fun in the evening until you’ve crossed off one or two items on the list!

9) Paint a wall, inside of a kitchen cabinet or pantry door with chalkboard paint and write your to-do list on it with chalk.

10) Put a magnetic board on the front of the refrigerator with a to-do list on it.

11) Keep a to-do list on a phone app (and be sure to look at it) or send yourself a text message.

12) Keep a to-do list on the Tasks section of Outlook on your computer or use a stickies program on your PC or tablet.

13) Set the alarm on your phone, or use Outlook pop-up reminders to do tasks at specific times. (I actually have a daily reminder at work that pops up a few minutes before 5 p.m. and says “Go home” because I often “get in the flow” writing something at the end of the day and work past quitting time. I know… who forgets to go home?!)

Two new products I’ve tried recently were:

1) Repositionable dry-erase circles that stick to various surfaces;

you use special markers to write notes on them, erase, rewrite, erase … (However, now the door from my kitchen into the garage looks like a liquor store. In South Carolina, the statewide symbol

S.C. Liquor Store Symbol

for liquor stores is a row of three red circles prominently displayed on the front of the store. Don’t ask me why.)

2)Long, thin Post-it reminder tags designed to wrap around carryall items such as the strap of your purse. (My thrifty side thought these were pretty pricey, when the back of an already-written-on piece of paper stapled around the strap is just as effective and contributes to recycling, as well. However, my (non-dominant) neat side realized the Post-it notes looked a

Post it Reminder Tags

little classier.)

So what’s the perfect solution? Do you use other methods to remind yourself to do things that are more effective than those on the list above?

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