Easy ways to stop forgetting things

Remember what you need to, when you need to

When I was in high school, my chemistry teacher told the class that she was always willing to lend us things we’d forgotten: a pencil, a calculator, a textbook, etc. However, if you borrowed something from her, you needed to leave one of your shoes as collateral.

She’d tried other things in the past — like student IDs — but people would forget and walk out of the room with her calculators and without their IDs.

A shoe, on the other hand — and particularly one shoe — makes its absence immediately known. As soon as a kid would stand up and walk toward the door, they’d think “wait, why am I not wearing one of my shoes?” Nudged out of the mindless routine they’d remember that they still had a borrowed textbook and would go return it to get their shoe back.

Why we forget

I’ve always thought this was a great idea, because it gets at the heart of why people forget things. We spend a lot of time in a mindless state. Absent something that yanks us out of it, we’ll do what we always do. We’ll walk out the door without the lunch we packed and stuck in the fridge. We’ll drive straight home instead of stopping to pick up that prescription.

To stop forgetting, you need something to nudge awareness. Ideally, this nudge will explicitly remind you of the thing you forgot. But it doesn’t have to (there’s no real link between a shoe and a calculator!) Once you’re on alert, you’ll know you were supposed to remember something, and most of the time that nudge on its own will move the thing you need to remember back to your conscious mind.

Nudged to consciousness

So, for instance, setting an alarm on your phone might work (“Wait, why did the alarm go off?”). If you’re trying to remember to take something with you, and you usually drive, putting your keys with that object means that when you try to get in the car and start it you’ll realize something is amiss. Every Christmas, we are an Elf on the Shelf household, and it is my husband’s responsibility to make sure that the elf (ours is named Sassy) moved to a new location after her (or possibly his) trip from the North Pole. So my husband began putting a completely not-right object on his pillow when he got up in the morning (I believe one year it was a wrench). That way, when he went to bed at night and saw a wrench where he meant to lie down, he remembered he needed to go check on the Sassy situation.

Of course, this doesn’t always work. Even shoes sometimes don’t pull us out of our daydreams. One of my children walked out of a rock-climbing gym with his borrowed climbing shoes on, and got all the way home before realizing he’d left his sneakers there.

But usually it does. I think my teacher mostly got her stuff back!