Recognize and Prevent Failures by Design

A notification pops up, I tap “complete”, set out to do it after the current task is done, and forget about it. Sounds familiar?

If I’m lucky, I remember to do my task later. But usually by then it’s too late. I didn’t put the task on my todo-list and set up the reminder instead, because it was time-sensitive.

This is a failure by design, and I’ve since changed my behavior to avoid that problem – by implementing a rule that should be a no-brainer, but wasn’t for me:

Checking a task off marks it as done, so I can only check off a task after it’s done. Duh!

Now that my failure-by-design is solved, what do I do? Snoozing the reminder helps — it’ll bug me again a couple minutes later and I can check it off once the task is finally done.