‘How could I forget to do that?”

I asked myself this question last week over and over, wondering how an important task was able to fly right over my head until I was reminded about it the next day, after it was too late. I mean, I use Post-it Notes! I had an Outlook calendar reminder! I thought I made it impossible to forget... and yet, there I was. It was time to get to the bottom of this and rethink my implementation of reminders.

The first thing I did was confirm that I had the event on my calendar at all; maybe I simply forgot to add it and never saw a notification. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Not only was it on my calendar, but the event also had a specific time, meaning there was definitely a pop-up for it, and I simply discarded it.

The thought that a notification window popped up, complete with sound effect, for this event that I forgot to do baffled me. These don’t just go away; I would have had to acknowledge it. Before long, I settled on the thought that I might have just been distracted at the time and clicked it away without really thinking about it and moved on. Until yesterday, when I received our daily office reminder to shut the windows.

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