Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
Anything that comes round every month should be leaving your account without you. Direct debits and standing orders take the remembering out of the job altogether, which beats any reminder you could set.
It is worth an afternoon. List what recurs, automate what can be automated, and put one calendar note to check the statement each month instead of chasing each bill in turn. A lot of poor credit scores come from payments that were forgotten rather than payments that could not be afforded, and that part is fixable in a way that a shortage of money is not.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Who are faithful to their trusts and pledges (Quran 23:8). Faithfulness gets measured by what actually happens on the due date, and a standing order is a perfectly respectable way of getting there.
وَٱلَّذِينَ هُمۡ لِأَمَٰنَٰتِهِمۡ وَعَهۡدِهِمۡ رَٰعُونَ
who are faithful to their trusts and pledges
Qur’an 23:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A Cochrane review examined mobile phone text messaging for preventive health care, asking whether prompts sent to a phone change what people do. Prompting is the most studied answer to forgetting, and even at its best it still leaves the doing to the person. Where a task can be handed to a system instead, that step disappears, which is not something a reminder trial can improve on.
Vodopivec-Jamsek V, de Jongh T, Gurol-Urganci I, Atun R, Car J. (2012). Mobile phone messaging for preventive health care.. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The strategy that never fails is the one where the remembering was never needed.
When not to
If money is tight, set up low balance alerts before you set up automatic payments, since a missed payment and an unexpected overdraft are not the same problem.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The standard was never that you drop nothing. It is that the effort is steady and visible, and the misses that remain get some grace.
The bag that has to travel with you tomorrow goes on top of your shoes, not neatly beside the desk. Let the object stand in the way of a route you walk without thinking.
When a task is missed it is usually not sitting somewhere being refused. It has gone off the radar altogether, the way a name goes when somebody asks you for it.