Many people are proud of how well they can rely on their memory.
Maybe you’re one of those people.
But have you ever had an experience at work you wish you could have avoided after your memory let you down?
See if any of these memory-challenging situations sound familiar to you…
- You’re working on a task and you get interrupted. Happens all the time, right? After dealing with the interruption, do you remember where were on the task or do you draw a blank? Do you struggle to remember what you were going to do next? Or do you forget what you were working on entirely?
- You’ve identified two or three important tasks to do today, but when you finish the first task, do you ever forget what the second task was? Then do you proceed with choosing a task to work on—feeling fairly confident that it was the next most important thing to do—but then realize later… it wasn’t?
- You’re called out of your office and away from a task you were working on. When you return to your office and see all that’s sitting on your desk, is it a little challenging to tell exactly what you were working on previously? If several tasks were in progress all at once and it looks a little overwhelming, you may decide to look at email instead. And you may get stuck there for the next hour.
- You regularly “jot” things to-do on a legal pad, but every so often, you have to spend some time trying to figure out what a particular note meant. It may have been scribbled too briefly or too vaguely—lacking important details about the actual step that needed to be taken. Were you feeling certain when you made the note that you’d recall it in a few days or a week, only to find that you have NO idea what it meant?
If you’ve experienced any of these scenarios, you know how frustrating these are and may want to consider a new way to manage tasks in your workday. As we age, our memory is the LAST thing we should rely on to keep track of things to do—as well as meetings, email and information.
Scientific studies have shown that short-term memory can hold only SEVEN items, plus or minus TWO.
And only for about 18 seconds.
Not long at all, is it?
On top of this, stress impairs the creation of short-term memories and when stress leads to burnout, this causes cognitive impairment, including issues with attention and focus, as well as working memory.
When ATTENTION is diverted from an original INTENTION—whether because of average daily distractions and interruptions or larger scale issues and emergencies—memory can easily be short-circuited. It can become muddled, fragmented, unclear and imprecise.
As a result, memory malfunctions can cause a person to forget important tasks and follow ups, miss important calls and meetings, and lose track of important email and information.
And all of these malfunctions can negatively impact the pursuit of opportunities, the meeting of deadlines, the accomplishment of tasks, the achievement of goals and the ability to make progress that is real and tangible.
All of this can easily happen when busy workdays pull you in a hundred different directions.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Instead of relying on your memory to keep track of things to do and taxing your memory with too much, take the burden OFF of your brain and take the risk OUT of your workday.
Give your brain the benefits of clarity, confidence, and control and free it up to support you in doing the work you REALLY need to do and want to do—sooner than later.
When memory fails…
When your memory isn’t 100% reliable—which happens to all of us—you’re not in the strongest possible position to keep your focus or to make the most progress you could make in a day.
When you rely on your memory and then forget something you wanted to do today, you’re setting yourself up for trouble down the road.
Later, when you suddenly remember one of the things you had forgotten to do, it causes a knee-jerk reaction. What you’ve just remembered will distract you and pull you away from what you were working on RIGHT now.
Unfortunately, reactivity is a state that DOESN’T support focus. It’s also very stressful, because once you’ve switched gears and stepped away from a task you wanted to work on in order to pick up the pieces somewhere else, it has a domino effect.
Anything that is put aside now is delayed until later and may be forgotten. At some point, those delayed tasks will be “late” and when you remember what they are, you’ll switch gears AGAIN and find yourself in a continuous scramble of reactivity to keep up.
Your brain craves certainty.
When you aren’t certain about which task to do next or which project is the MOST important one to work on, it means you don’t have a reliable way to keep track of what you need to do and when to do it.
In this situation, time and efficiencies will be lost and stress will build. Worries will creep in if it is possible you AREN’T working on the most important task or project right now.
This is equally true if you’re not sure how to spend the next hour of your day or where you’re supposed to be. This means your Calendar is not as reliable as it could be. It isn’t showing you all of the information you need to plan or navigate your day.
And once again, this is also true for flagged emails. When you’re not sure if the one you’re looking at right now is THE MOST important email you should be paying attention to, this means you don’t have a reliable way to manage new email or the information and attachments within.
This includes not knowing how to handle the tasks and follow-ups that arrive in email, too, but this actually leads back to not having a reliable way to track tasks and follow-ups in general, no matter where those tasks are coming from.
This is why it’s extremely important to protect your time and your focus with SYSTEMS that support clarity, confidence and control: clarity of tasks; confidence that nothing has been missed, lost or forgotten; and control of where your time is going.
Having this support means you’re far more certain that you’re working on the right tasks and daily priorities, and that you’re making steady progress on the projects and the initiatives that matter the most to you.
Specifically, for task management, it’s ESSENTIAL to have 100% awareness of what’s on your plate—including things to do, pending tasks, things you’re waiting for from others, delegated tasks, approaching deadlines, upcoming appointments, information and communication related to tasks, new opportunities and great ideas.
If you don’t have a handle on all of this, uncertainty, worry and stress will surely follow as will poor decisions, missed deadlines, forgotten follow-ups and lost opportunities.
As a result of the reactivity, you will lose time, energy and effort, and the inefficiencies will take over your day, causing you to work at a disadvantage.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What’s necessary to work most efficiently, effectively and productively is workday strategy that includes optimal task, time and email management. When these three are working in tandem, you can make incredible progress each and every day.
It all starts with task management, so let’s talk about that.
Stop doing what doesn’t work.
Do you create paper to-do lists to keep track of what you want to do today—perhaps on a legal pad, a notebook, a steno pad or a planner?
You may think that getting things OFF your mind and ONTO paper is a good idea, but it’s not. Yes, paper is better than using your memory, but paper will fail you, too, because paper is a TOOL, not a SYSTEM.
Paper is archaic, outdated and missing a host of functionalities that are necessary for planning, prioritizing and accomplishing tasks on the right days. You can’t efficiently or effectively plan or prioritize on paper.
Not only this, but there are more than TEN different sources of tasks in your workday and there is NO WAY to track them all on paper. It would be futile to try.
Task sources include things like email, phone calls, voice mail, meetings, hallway conversations, social media, texts and more. And when you create a to-do list on paper, that becomes yet another source.
What professionals don’t realize is that it’s actually IMPOSSIBLE to efficiently and effectively plan, prioritize and accomplish tasks while trying to manage them ONLY from their sources—including a paper to-do list—without missing, losing or forgetting something—or a LOT of things.
Unfortunately, professionals are leaving MOST tasks where they first appeared and continuously try to keep them “in mind.” They look for NEW tasks as they also try to remember the older ones, and all the while, they’re expecting to be able to plan, prioritize and accomplish tasks on time and on target. But this is impossible to do without missing, losing or forgetting something.
Now, CHECKING the sources of tasks in your day is something we ALL have to do throughout EVERY day, but it’s what you DO with the tasks after finding them that matters the most.
When tasks are left at their sources, professionals are undercutting their efficiency and productivity. Not only can they NOT DO certain tasks, but they also can’t pull those tasks OUT of their original locations and put them into a single, reliable system for proper planning and prioritizing.
Without this kind of system, professionals will waste time looking at more tasks AND task sources than necessary and will do it more OFTEN than necessary as well.
The bottom line? Professionals are constantly trying to remember tasks and keep track of tasks they’ve already seen, but couldn’t do anything with.
Get tasks off your mind and into a system.
The most efficient management of tasks requires their consolidation from all the many sources into ONE system—a single, digital inventory of tasks. This allows a person to efficiently and effectively compare and contrast those tasks and then make smart decisions about how to spend their time.
Since you can’t do all of your tasks in one day and time is limited, task comparisons leads to decisions about which tasks are best addressed on which days, and what should be accomplished first.
In the system, every task gets a target date of action and you want to avoid targeting too many tasks to accomplish in ONE day. (Hint: the number of tasks per day is lower than you think!)
From there, you can continue to reprioritize as necessary as new tasks appear and priorities shift, while other tasks can be deleted when they are finished with no further action steps.
When you stop relying on your memory and instead rely on a SINGLE system to guide you, you’ll never have to waste time or energy trying to remember tasks, rethinking what you were going to do next, or working reactively without a plan.
You’ll never question if you are aware of all your tasks or if something has been missed, lost or forgotten.
When this happens, stress can go down as efficiency and productivity go up.
And the time and energy you SAVE can be better spent taking action on tasks, getting things accomplished and moving projects forward instead of taxing your brain as it tries to remember all of the things you’re trying so hard NOT to forget.
