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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Remembering to do it
The usual advice is to work through it, which is precisely what nobody does with a list that long. It is kinder and quicker to start a fresh page with the next three days on it and park the old one somewhere you can raid later. You will lose a couple of things that way. You were losing all of them while it sat closed.
Whenever you forget, remember your Lord and say, May my Lord guide me closer to what is right (Quran 18:24). A way back is written into the instruction itself, which is roughly what a clean page is.
الكهف
إِلَّآ أَن يَشَآءَ ٱللَّهُۚ وَٱذۡكُر رَّبَّكَ إِذَا نَسِيتَ وَقُلۡ عَسَىٰٓ أَن يَهۡدِيَنِ رَبِّي لِأَقۡرَبَ مِنۡ هَٰذَا رَشَدࣰ ا
without adding, ‘God willing,’ and, whenever you forget, remember your Lord and say, ‘May my Lord guide me closer to what is right.’
Qur’an 18:24read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A conceptual review of cognitive offloading argues that moving mental work onto an external system can either reduce the load or add to it, depending on how the system is set up. An overgrown list is offloading that has stopped reducing anything. The review is an argument rather than a trial, so use it as a way of thinking about your own setup and not as a measured result.
Ginto Chirayath; K. Premamalini; Jeena Joseph (2025). Cognitive offloading or cognitive overload? How AI alters the mental architecture of coping. Frontiers in Psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A list you cannot bear to open is no longer reminding you of anything.
Remembering to do something later is really two jobs stacked on each other. You have to keep hold of the thing itself, and you have to keep some feel for how the hours are passing, and both have to be working at the same moment.
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.
When someone hands you a date, the useful move is not writing the date down. Open your calendar there and then and decide the hour the work will actually happen.