Why forget?

One activity that would immensely benefit each one of us and yet does not need any additional investment, is to decide we will never have to use the statement "I forgot". With the plethora of reminder mechanisms available -- mobile alerts, email notification, web sites dedicated to generate reminders -- it's indeed amazing we still manage to forget anything.

All relationships, be it personal or professional, rely upon commitments. And nothing is more detrimental to a commitment than to forget it to begin with.

Use Reminders extensively

Many of us have some fantastic ideas about our own memory capacities. We feel our memory is infallible and forgetting is something that just doesn’t come naturally to us.

Well, having a great memory is one thing; and ability to remember the right things at the right time is just the other. I realized it last year.

My cousin sister’s birthday is in June; and of course I did remember it… exactly 72 hours later. What made things more awkward was the fact that I had spoken to her just the day before.

Lesson Learnt: Set reminder for everything that you need to do.

• In office, I use the Calendar feature of Microsoft Outlook. It has some powerful features that you can use to set recurring reminders, or reminders to be sent to others.
• For personal matters, I use Reminder feature of my cell phone.
• For birthdays of special ones, I have two reminders: one for the day itself, and another a week earlier, to buy greeting card or a gift.