Gym, Tan, Dishes?

Very specifically for me, two parts of Getting Things Done:

• get things out of your head
• always set reminders

I have felt so much lighter for over 15 years because I can safely forget all these things I used to struggle to remember so that they wouldn't sneak up on me.

Getting things out of my head was easier to build as a habit at the dawn of having a computer in my pocket all day. Even back then, I simply chose to be an asshole for a few months, stopping everything to write things down or to do them on the spot if they truly took only 2 minutes. Especially taking photos of receipts and labeling them when traveling for business.

Setting reminders was similar, but rockier, since calendar apps sometimes have defects. I gradually learned which alarms to trust and learned to use those more often. Even so, Samsung Clock has at least once surprised me by setting my alarm volume to 0, causing me to miss one alarm in the last 10 years.

In both cases, I did nothing special except decide to build the habit and spend the effort to ingrain the habit through repetition over the span of a few months.