"Out of sight, Out of mind"

Two tricks to help you when you are especially forgetful

As you might have read in one of my previous blogs, I have ADHD and have been learning to cope with its various effects. One of these effects being forgetfulness. 

You may relate to this:

How many times did I go to the basement, looking for something, only to immediately get distracted by something else and spend 30 minutes not doing the one thing I set myself out to go do? Often, this would result in me coming back upstairs empty handed, sometimes with a parent or my partner remarking that I am, in fact, empty handed. My mom used to say that I would get “lost in the twilight zone”, which had a much different meaning for me as I never saw the show. 

Or how many times can you “forget” to do a task so simple, yet, despite how common it is, you just don’t see it? I used to always forget to lock the front door as a child. Not only that, but I would frequently leave for school without my house key, my homework, or even my lunch! Because of that, my mother would worry about leaving me with too many responsibilities.

Now, this can happen to just about anyone from time to time, and is a common “human error”, as I like to call them. Sometimes the brain freezes and just needs to be rebooted. But what happens when you have an error in your code, making you prone to these mistakes on an almost constant basis? Unfortunately, apart from practicing mindfulness, (which I will be making a blog about!), You can’t ever fully rewrite that internal code. But you can apply a few tricks to get around it. 

Here are two time-proven methods I have employed to help me remember when I’m especially forgetful. 

When I met my partner, one thing I discovered is that he likes to eat two boiled eggs every morning. My partner is the exact contrast to my spontaneous and unstructured personality. He thrives in habits that are predictable and constant. So, at the end of every workday, as he stepped off the bus, he would stop by our Metro and grab himself supper and a pack of two pre-shelled and pre-boiled eggs for $0.99, ready for the next morning. Of course, a few things have happened since then… First, in order to reduce the amount of plastic waste, I opted to buy eggs and hard-boil them for him, which saves him lots of money every year. Second, the pandemic happened, and he has had to rethink a decades-long routine he had set up for himself. 

Since we now buy the eggs (along with all of our week’s worth of groceries) once a week, that means the eggs need to be made. Since we divided tasks in the home (see my “Skills not pills, but sometimes pills” blog for more on that) based on our respective skills, I make him the eggs. (Who knew not all adults know how to make hard-boiled eggs!) While executing the task might not be a problem for me, remembering to do it is… 

Enter the “In Sight” method. Whenever my partner asks me if I can do the eggs for him that night, I always ask that he leaves the eggs on the counter as a reminder for me. Having them in front of me when I finish supper and do the dishes, prompts me to start boiling them. 

Whenever possible, it is always better to leave the task right in front of you, in a place you frequently visit, so you are less prone to forget it. 

Take folding the laundry. If you are like me, leaving the clean laundry basket in a room that you don’t ever go in to is a surefire way to ensure you never put away that laundry. While putting the laundry basket on your bed seems like a good way to go, most people that are going to their bedroom tend to use it for one thing only… sleeping. That’s not conducive to motivating you to put in a whole lot of effort, leading you to simply take the basket off the bed, place it on the floor, and crash for the night. Instead, placing the laundry in front of the TV can inspire you to pair a “painful” task with a “pleasant” one. 

Of course, the “in sight” method is really most effective for those times you have an uncommon task. If the pile of dishes that never seem to go down can be a testament to an “in sight” task that never gets done, then you know the feeling of despair you get when you still don't finish an important task. You see those dishes everyday, and yet, just like magic, your brain decides to be blind to it, instead of constantly feeling that despair. That’s why you need to employ the second trick.

My childhood friend decided one day that a life in construction was just not for him, and so he decided to become a helicopter pilot in the Canadian Air Force. Flash forward to today, where rigorous training has taught him all about how to read the inside of a plane, and all the bells and whistles that exist in the cockpit. (He has tried to explain to me how to operate the inside of a jet plane several times, but the best I could piece together is that there’s a lot of math involved!) He has to fly on a regular basis just to be properly trained on how to operate the plane, which is a step he has to get through, before leaning how to fly helicopters. 

But before he can even start the engine, he has several checklists he has to go through, in the correct order, before being able to operate that complicated piece of machinery. Then he has to go through yet another checklist before being able to get off the runway. Once he’s in the air, guess what… Another checklist! Needless to say, without habit built around these checklists, several key important things would be forgotten, leading to a disaster for the pilot. 

So, in order to avoid disaster, my mother made a checklist for me and placed it at eye level right before I left the house. In order for me to have everything I needed before leaving the house, that step by step checklist guided me every morning until the instructions became second nature. The list was so popular, apparently my older sister as well as my parents benefited from that visual reminder. 

Of course, I would eventually overcorrect my bad habits, and learned to lock every door I ever saw, even ones that aren’t my own, sometimes in the most inopportune times. But my mom never needed to worry about a missing lunch disaster ever again, or leaving the door open to strangers.

The “Habit Checklist” method can be used to establish any new habits you need. Write a checklist of things you need to remember in a logical order, with the most important tasks at the top and bottom of that list. (We tend to remember the first and last of most things, such as the first and last person to go through a class/work presentation.) Place the lists in strategic places at eye level. Write: wash dishes, load up dishwasher, start up dishwasher (if full) on a list next to the door in the kitchen or on a cupboard over the sink. Write: bring laundry down, make bed, water plants on Saturday, on a list either on or next to your bedroom door. And of course, write: “did you forget to bring up the laundry?” next time you find yourself walking back up the basement stairs after spending time in the “Twilight Zone”. 

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