Write notes to next time

Take advantage of your hard-won wisdom

One of the upsides of having lots of kids is that I get to use some of my hard-won knowledge multiple times. My second child took biology over the summer because we learned from kid #1 that if you don’t do that, you won’t get to take advantage of all the upper level science classes that our high school offers. We knew to hire a pre-calculus tutor for all subsequent children going into the pre-calculus class because, for whatever reason, it’s the hardest class at the school. I knew to sign my fifth kid up for a popular local day camp on the day the sign-ups opened.

Even without multiple kids, though, we sometimes wind up doing things again. The problem is that with a long enough gap between times, it’s hard to remember the details of what worked and what didn’t. We used to go to a particular museum that’s about an hour away. There’s a restaurant nearby that we’d see, and vaguely remember. It took a while to realize that the reason we remembered the restaurant is that it wasn’t very good.

To be sure, the stakes here are not terribly high, but if you’d like to make life more efficient, one idea is to create a universal “Notes to Next Time” file about anything you might do repeatedly but rarely.

How not to forget

This can be a simple document you keep going on your computer or on the Notes app in your phone. You can think broadly about what can go on there. Do all your kids wind up doing the same project of building a bridge out of popsicle sticks or building a Pinewood Derby car? Note what worked and what you learned from the bridges or vehicles that won.

Sometimes apps can help with this to some degree. My GrubHub app tells me my recent restaurants, and shows me what I ordered last time. Of course, the problem is that the app doesn’t tell me whether I liked it. Just because I keep ordering the dragon roll doesn’t mean I like the dragon roll. That needs to go on the Notes to Next Time list.

“Notes to Next Time” are great at work too, particularly for projects or tasks that you do just once or twice a year — big events, mailings, and the like. Indicate the steps you followed, the colleagues who were involved, the timeline, and any thoughts about doing things differently. It’s also a great idea to have your direct reports create “Notes to Next Time” for any projects where they have a key role. That way, they get the institutional knowledge out of their heads and onto paper, so you’re not counting on them to remember how to perform the task successfully the next time it comes up. And if a direct report leaves, their replacement can benefit from some of this wisdom.

Remember to remember

The only trick is getting in the habit of remembering to look at your Notes to Next Time file. But the good news here is that we can usually remember if we’ve done something before. We just don’t remember the details about it. So if you know you’re doing something for the second time you can just train yourself to do a quick search.

One other caveat: this universal “Notes to Next Time” idea works best with things that aren’t time specific. If you have a note to next time that will be relevant at a particular time of year, you might be best off putting that directly on your calendar. I wrote on my calendar for November to order more than 175 holiday cards. That’s how many I ordered last year and we ran out — whoops. Next time, I’ll remember, and won’t be caught short.