Your brain is not an alarm clock

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that your brain is not an alarm clock. If there is something you need to remember, get it out of your head and onto your calendar, task list, or some other system that you can trust. Today's tip, like another recent one, comes from Kelly Nolan. Kelly, a former litigator who invented the Bright Method of time management, was a guest on my other podcast, Best of Both Worlds.

0:46Speaker 1:In her interview with my co-host, Sarah Hart Unger, Kelly talked about how remembering to follow up consumes mental bandwidth. You either keep thinking about the thing you need to remember, or you worry that you will forget. Kelly's solution is to get the reminder onto your calendar. She described the relief that comes from calendaring follow-up. You don't have to remember the thing anymore. You can say to yourself, as she does, my brain isn't the alarm clock in this.

1:22Speaker 1:Your calendar can be the alarm clock. And your calendar is much better at this than you are. Want proof? Just think about the stress you feel when you are trying to keep track of too many things. Like, I need to be on the lookout for the uniforms I ordered for my kids in case we need to exchange them for a different size. Or Caroline said she'll send me feedback on the presentation draft on Monday. So I need to be expecting that. And then incorporate her feedback.

1:50Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and Max asked when we could have dinner with their family. And I suggested next Friday or the Saturday after that. And hopefully he'll confirm one of those soon because I'm looking at some other things for those windows as well. I need to be sure not to schedule anything else at those times if it's going to happen. Well, sound familiar? All of this consumes mental time and energy, but it doesn't need to consume nearly as much if you get all of that out of your brain. As Kelly suggests, one option is to put any follow-up you need to do or next steps you need to take or expect right onto your calendar. So if you are planning to hear from somebody on Monday afternoon, schedule a few minutes on Monday afternoon for looking for that response or reaching out if you don't get it. If you are hoping to hear from Max about dinner soon, put a note on Wednesday's calendar to follow up with Max in a time to do it. If he hasn't responded by then, you call him up and get an answer.

2:54Speaker 1:You can also record the follow-up as a task in whatever form you keep your to-do list. Maybe that is a task management app or maybe it's a spreadsheet where you have tasks, dates and statuses like to do or anticipate this. Or like me, you might just use a paper to do list. Maybe you use a note on your phone. If you use a dated paper planner, you could put the follow up you need to do or expect on the day for that page in your planner. In my case, if I know I just need to follow up in the next week or so, I put it as an entry on my weekly priority list. Regardless, the point is to get whatever you need to do or expect out of your head and into a system that you know you will check. Now, if you don't know you're going to check your system, that is an entirely different matter. But hopefully, if you are listening to this show, you have at least one regular source of truth you look at frequently. Externalizing reminders frees up your brain for other things. It makes you more reliable and it makes you less anxious. And both of those are real wins. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening.

4:17Speaker 1:And here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thank you.