Growing up, I was absolutely awful at remembering things. My parents would ask me to do something and then get really mad when I didn’t get to it, but I never did it on purpose.
Okay, usually didn’t do it on purpose; I was still a dumb kid sometimes. Still, nine times out of ten, it would simply be that when dad asked, “Can you feed the cats when you finish your homework?” I forgot almost as soon as I replied with a “yes”.
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Except maybe at night, when my growing anxiety issues would most commonly manifest back then.
That’s when I’d remember all the things I did or didn’t do, whether they were actually relevant or not.
Since this meant I was exhausted all the time, I had to do something.
Even in elementary school, I was a kid that liked to “hack” things.
Of course, being a kid in the days when the internet was still a pain in the butt to dial into, my hacks were mostly bad advice from other kids and weird ideas I came up with myself.
I was imaginative and creative, but I wasn’t necessarily very logical.
It’s a cliche, but in the end, I just learned to write everything down.
These days, I’m one of those people with a paper planner and a phone with half a dozen daily reminders programmed into it.
Was it annoying to force myself to stop what I was doing to write it down every time? Sure, at first.
Eventually, it became second nature to jot things down. I don’t even think about it anymore.
And even better, I learned that the act of writing the item down actually lodged the thing into my mind and I now rarely have to look back at my notes to remind myself of things.
Of course, that doesn’t solve the whole “forgetting why I walked to the kitchen” problem, but it’s a start!
