You know the feeling. You're in the middle of something completely unrelated - folding washing, driving to school pickup, half-listening to a podcast - and out of nowhere your brain pipes up: Oh yeah, I still need to book that dentist appointment.
For about four seconds, you fully intend to do it. Then the moment passes. The washing needs folding, the podcast gets interesting again, and the thought slides right back out of view.
Weeks later, you're doing something completely unrelated again, and the same thought resurfaces - this time with a slightly guilty edge. I still haven't done that, have I?
This was happening to me on a loop with the small, non-urgent stuff of running a life: appointments to book, forms to fill in, subscriptions to cancel, gifts to buy, emails to reply to that don't matter today but will definitely matter eventually. None of it was ever an emergency. All of it was important. And that combination - important but not urgent - turned out to be exactly why it kept slipping through the cracks.
The problem isn't your memory, it's the timing.
The moment a task pops into your head is almost never the moment you're actually able to do it. You think of the appointment while you're driving. You think of the form while you're cooking dinner. Your brain is doing its job perfectly but your circumstances are almost never set up to let you act on it right then.
So you're left with two options: Stop what you're doing and scramble to sort it on the spot, or trust that you'll remember later. Most of us default to the second option. And most of us are, understandably, not that reliable at it.
I didn't need a better memory, I actually needed a system that didn't depend on my memory at all.
So now I put a recurring event in my Google calendar, once a month, called "Life Catch-Up." It's already on the calendar, already scheduled, no decision-making required about when this stuff gets handled.
Whenever one of those "oh yeah, I need to do that" thoughts pops up during the month, I don't try to act on it and I don't try to remember it. I just open that calendar event and add a line to the description. Book dentist. Cancel free trial. Reply to Sarah about the school thing. Get business insurance quotes. It takes about ten seconds, and I can do it from wherever I am - standing in the kitchen, sitting in the car, on my way into the movies.
By the time the catch-up day actually arrives, I'm not starting from a blank page trying to rack my brain for what I've been meaning to do. I've got a running list, built in real time, of everything that crossed my mind over the past month. I sit down, work through it, and everything gets its moment instead of just disappearing from my brain.
For me, this works so much better than a normal to-do list, which doesn't have a deadline attached, so low-urgency tasks just sink to the bottom and stay there indefinitely. A calendar event has a date. It's the difference between "add it to the pile" and "add it to a pile that gets opened on the 15th."
Capturing it in the moment works so well. If I wait until I "have time to write it down properly," it's already gone. Dropping a quick line into the description takes no more effort than the thought itself, so it actually happens.
Want to try it?
Pick a day each month that tends to be a bit calmer for you - I usually do it mid month, mid week. Put a recurring calendar event on it. Give it a name that means something to you: Life Admin Day, Loose Ends, The Sort-It List, etc.
Then just let it collect. Every time you catch yourself thinking "I should really sort that," open the event and add it to the description before the thought disappears. Don't overthink the wording, don't wait for a better moment - just get it in there.
On catch-up day, you'll have a handy list waiting for you and tick them off as you do them, without getting distracted.
Easy! Let me know how you go with it.
x Marissa
Marissa Roberts
Organising tips to make life easier for busy mothers
