BrownStudies

The Rise and Fall of Mr. Zip

brownstudy — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 22:20:21 +0000

Informative and fun little article on the US Postal Service’s push to get Americans to add a 5-digit ZIP code to their envelopes and post cards. The effort started in 1963 and it took almost 20 years before Americans changed their habits — or knuckled under, depending on your point of view.

Interesting slice of Americana, with a special role played by an, at one time, iconic — though now largely forgotten — cartoony character.

The campaign began with the name itself — ZIP. It was a good name. ‘ZIP’ sounded a lot friendlier than Zone Improvement Plan, the Orwellian phrase for which ZIP was an acronym. At the same time, ZIP said speed. Mr. Zip — a hand-drawn, wide-eyed little postal guy — became the face of ZIP code promotional efforts, the embodiment of the harmless yet zippy quality of ZIP codes. (‘Mr. Zip’ was also a significant improvement on Mr. Zip’s original name “Mr. P.O. Zone”.) Mr. Zip was speedy and clever, like other American cartoon heroes: Bugs Bunny or Speedy Gonzalez or the Road Runner. After July 1, 1963 Mr. Zip was everywhere. Americans would turn on their radios or televisions or open a newspaper and there was Mr. Zip, banging the drum for ZIP codes.

via The Smart Set: Happy 50th Mr. Zip – June 12, 2013.

Pretty much a perfick day

brownstudy — Fri, 17 May 2013 03:41:10 +0000

Up early and walked down to Patti’s house, where we carpooled to the Creative Entrepreneur Expo 2013, sponsored by the Durham Arts Council. When I first saw the email advertising this half-day workshop, I thought, “No. I’m not a ‘creative,’ and I am not selling any services to creatives. So there.” But then Patti forwarded it to the neighborhood listserv. And then Liz reforwarded it to me. At this point, the knocking on my door is getting so loud I can’t ignore it any more. So I arranged with Patti that we would buddy-up and attend together. My intention was to have no goals or objectives about the day; I just wanted to expose myself to what was going on and see if anything resonated with me.

I have a coffee while we examine our materials and a young woman, Heather, walks up, introduces herself, and asks what our businesses are. Patti explains her business and I say, rather smugly, “I’m just exploring today. Just want to see what’s out there and what’s going on.” She nods. Heather tells us about her business, which helps artists grow and manage their businesses.

Several memories and ideas bubble to the top of my brain and collide: this is an opportunity to try out ideas in a non-judgmental space, what can it hurt to put myself out there a little, follow the energy, one of Mike Uhl’s early urgings to me to become a time management coach, since he’d benefited from our frequent conversations about his workflows and habits at the office, if the next thing I say isn’t interesting then I can tweak it for the next person, oh come on what could it hurt.

So I tell Heather that, well, if I were to sell a service, it would probably be something like this (dredging up the old marketing template of “I help X do Y so that they can Z): “I help artists and creative entrepreneurs solve their time management problems so they can get more of their creative work done.” Her eyes widened, she smiled, she leaned forward — I’m on to something! I mention it again later to an artist who we talk to; she’s immediately enthusiastic and suggests a few venues where I could hold small roundtable discussions on the topic with artists.

Met a few of the vendors and talked to one fellow who’s part of a non-profit that helps veterans get their own businesses started. I rattle off my spiel to him. He nods his head, leans forward, says I could register as a government contractor to teach stuff like that.

We go in to the keynote and receive some fabulous information on Durham’s “Creative Vitality Index“: in short, compared to the rest of the state, similar cities of our size in the Southeast, and the US, Durham is incredibly energetic and vibrant as more artists settle here and more revenue is generated from arts and culture activities. I don’t know how they gather their data. I note that technical writers count as a creative jobs category and the numbers of technical writers in this area have decreased markedly since 2006, which confirms my observations.

I heard one of the vendors say that way more people showed up than they expected, and the second-floor theater was indeed packed. The keynote speakers were entrepreneurial gurus who have started their own organizations and teach at Duke. Their aim appeared to be to introduce common business concepts and jargon to the artists, with their core message being that with the decline of traditional industries and revenue in this geographic area, the arts and culture are taking up the slack by bringing in increasing levels of revenue; therefore, more opportunities may arise for profit/non-profit collaborations.

It wasn’t the first time that day that we would hear about how artists need to manage their work as a business. Fred Hathaway of Entredot gave a presentation on the basics of business, with the (to me) comforting idea that there is a method here and no one needs to create a business plan from the start. He echoed the keynote speakers’ advice to stage lots of small experiments, fail quickly, and iterate often. Plan while doing and do while planning.

For me, the star presenter was Tivi Jones of Tivi Jones Media, who gave a great talk on creating a marketing plan. She called on people at random and asked me, “Sir, what is your business?” I cheerily waved my hands and said, “I don’t have a business. I’m just observing.” She moved on to someone else and I was instantly besieged by thoughts: Why did you do that? This is the perfect place to try out the pitch. The energy in the room is great. You’re never going to get a better opportunity than now. Just do it.

So after she posed the next question on her worksheet — What problem does your product or service solve? — I raised my hand and said I’d changed my mind. I said something like, “I help artists and creative entrepreneurs figure out custom time management solutions so they can end their days feeling more productive rather than tired.” (In talking with Mike about elevator speeches, we’d noticed that the most memorable ones included a built-in duality or contrast.)

Even before I finished my pitch, Tivi sort of yelped and said, “I need this!” The woman sitting beside me asked for my contact information. A man asked me later for a card (I didn’t have one! I was only going to explore!).

And oh, my brain is buzzing.

I’d already decided to take the rest of the day off from work. I check out a book from the library. I go by Parks & Rec to pick up free tabloids and giveaways for our Sunday neighborhood association meeting.

It’s now 2pm and I’ve not had lunch. I grab a hotdog and eat it in the parking lot with my windows down. A woman in scrubs asks me to help her get a traffic safety cone unwedged from under her car. Why the hell did she run over the cone in the first place? Nonetheless, I crawl around on the pavement and somehow wrestle it out.

I go home, prune some tree limbs, and cut the grass, since light rain is being forecast every day for the next week and I hate cutting wet grass. I shower and nap.

Liz comes home and we go to a new restaurant for us, Dain’s Place, which has awesome hamburgers. I debrief Liz about my day and show her the stack of papers, business cards, leaflets, etc. that I collected.

As we walk out, we see Peggy Payne walking down Ninth Street in a cobalt blue sequin party dress and cape, handing out cards advertising her new novel, Cobalt Blue, and inviting us to a reading she’s giving with her friend Carrie Jane Knowles, whose novel Lillian’s Garden has also been released. (Peggy and I were both in a creative writing class taught by Lee Smith in the mid-80′s.) Liz and I agree: when you’re invited to the party, say “Yes.”

To pass the time before the reading, we go to a near-empty Francesca’s and get ice cream. Thence to the Regulator Bookshop for the reading, which is very well attended and entertaining. I also see David Halperin there; I’d last seen Peggy at the book launch for David’s novel.

What a rich, bizarre day for me. I met more people today than I normally meet in a week. I made a list of at least three new people I want to take out for coffee and a door has opened for me to … do what? I don’t know. But someone was knocking, and I opened it. I did some hard physical work that also made the house look good. We went to a new restaurant on a Thursday night (!) — very out of character for us — and diverted ourselves to an impromptu book reading.

Thence home, where I checked my email for the second time that day and saw that there really was not a lot worth spending my time on at all.

Thence here, where I wanted to write up the events of this day before their freshness faded.

And so to bed.

“My whole life is a coping strategy.”

brownstudy — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 02:53:04 +0000

While seeing my physical therapist the other night, he asked if I liked my eating habits (an odd way to ask the question, but it got me thinking) and I babbled for a few minutes about the little things I’ve picked up on eating, hunger, diets, and the like.

I told him about how I was at 250 lbs. in my mid-20s, my work with a nutritionist where I learned that starches shot my weight up like nobody’s business, the various diets I’ve been on in my life, how food and money are both lifelong meditations since I tell myself so many stories about what they say about me, how fasting one day a week has taught me the difference between hunger and cravings, and the little tactics I weave into my life: make a plan for how to navigate the dessert table at the family reunion, put a hand on my belly and ask myself “Am I hungry?” when I stand in front of the candy machine (for some reason, I can’t lie to myself when I do that), using the No S diet eating plan when eating normally through the week. And on and on.

He smiled and said, “Sounds like you have some great coping strategies, there.”

To which I replied, without thinking, “My whole life is a coping strategy.”

(There’s probably a blogging rule somewhere about not making the punchline the title of your post, but I’ll deal with the blog police later.)

I repeated this line to my mastermind group later and they laughed and said, “You’re right.”

Not quite sure what to do with this self-appraisal that bubbled up out of nowhere, but it’s something more to meditate on.

On realizing when my vacation started

brownstudy — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 01:45:54 +0000

December has been an unusually stressful month this year, what with jury duty, a rather punishing work schedule, and the usual Christmas shenanigans.

One of our Christmastime rituals is driving down to Florida to visit Liz’s brother and sister-in-law. It’s about 750 miles, door-to-door, and we do it all in one day. In the past few years, we’ve driven on Christmas Day (less traffic, generally, and no road work), but this year we drove down on the Sunday before Christmas. The traffic was denser and pushier, with about three slowdowns through the I-95 deadlands of South Carolina, a few necessary rest stops, and so on.

The next morning, the 24th, I ran out of hot water about halfway through my shower. We then went to the Publix grocery store to buy some necessities for the week and ingredients for a dish Liz would make on Christmas Day. Shopping and navigating my cart through the aisles reminded me of driving through Orlando the night before (i.e., dense, crowded, lots of defensive driving, and being stoical in the face of madness).

After the shopping, we went next door to the Mexican restaurant for lunch. We ordered, I drank my iced tea, and I started to slow down. At some point, while sitting at that table, eating chips and salsa, I relaxed because I realized — for the first time in a couple of months — I was not in problem-solving mode anymore. I didn’t have to plan my work for that afternoon, craft a last-minute PowerPoint presentation, juggle time to buy Christmas presents, deal with my insurance company, calculate car lengths and speeds on the fly, or endure a surprise cold-water shower.

For Liz, her vacation started the minute our wheels turned for Florida. For me, it started when I had the leisure and space to just sit and relax and enjoy what was in front of me.

“Merry Christmas from the Kensingtons”

brownstudy — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:13:43 +0000

My friend, the novelist Lewis Shiner, has a new Christmas short story up on the Subterranean Press site. It’s titled “Merry Christmas from the Kensingtons” and is Lew’s own Christmas ghost story — particularly the ghosts of Christmases past as lived out in a series of annual family photo postcards.

It’s a haunting story, and in reading just the simple descriptions of the family members as they age and grow, I found myself writing each person’s lifestory in my head.

Lew said he had bought such a stack of family photo postcards at a flea market and the images, showing each family member growing older and with their personalities inevitably peeking through, year after year, haunted him.

I share his fascination and deep imaginative involvement with found objects. I’ve always found art installations made from found objects more interesting than other types of sculptures, for example. I also enjoy such items as densely collaged artwork and Cornell boxes; contemplating the original objects and sorting out my reactions to them, and then to their new associations and relationships within the artwork, can keep me staring for hours.

The power of Lew’s story — and of those found images — shook loose a memory from my own mental lumber room of when I cleaned out the attic of our rental house before moving to our current home.

In a far corner of this huge attic I found posters and birthday cards from the 40th birthday of a previous resident, a woman named Timothy. “Lordy, lordy, Timmer’s forty!” was one of my first clues, doncha know.

It was amazing the story I was able to piece together from these remnants — she worked as a nurse at Duke, was taking a job in Virginia, and there was a touching birthday card from a young woman (I assume young) who had turned down Timmer’s profession of love but still wanted to show her affection and respect.

It was surprising and a little sad to find these relics in a far corner of the attic — they meant enough to her to save them, at one time. But maybe she’d forgotten about them or she had to leave town in a hurry.

I also remembered a box of personal memorabilia I had found years ago in my parents’ basement. It contained letters I’d received from a Doctor Who pen pal named Bobbie, who had placed a pen-pal-personal ad in some DW fanzine or other in the early 1980s. As she wrote me later, she had broken up with someone, was feeling sorry for herself, placed her ad, and then found herself writing to lots of feeling-sorry-for-themselves guys. She and I wrote for several years until she got married and then our correspondence ran its course and dried up.

I met her one time only, at a DW convention in Columbus, OH, where she lived. This would have been a few years after we’d started writing to each other. It was a little awkward at first — pen-pal correspondences are not conversations, after all, but exchanged soliloquies.

We eventually were able to spend some time together and chat. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember that, at some point later on during that first evening at the convention, that she was in my car and we circled the hotel parking lot just talking, and then she went back into the hotel.

When I found her trove of letters in this box 20-odd years later, I re-read them and decided to send them to her. Not knowing her married name, I found that her mother still lived at the old address. So I mailed her a package with Bobbie’s letters and a cover letter telling her how much Bobbie’s letters had meant to me at that time. Since I had enjoyed them the first time I’d received them, and enjoyed them again 20 years later, I thought it was only fair to share them back to Bobbie so she could enjoy them too.

It was a weird little project, I guess. But it felt like the right thing to do.

I wound up getting an email from Bobbie! She was kind of flabbergasted that I’d saved the letters — OK, no argument there. But I was the kind of person who liked Doctor Who, had pen pals, and saved paper ephemera, so I already dwelled beyond the boundaries of “normal” society.

In her email, she said she found that re-reading her old letters reminded her of events and feelings she’d forgotten, so she was grateful to have them.

She also tantalized me by saying that there was something I didn’t know about that night in Columbus, something she was a little embarrassed about sharing but that she’d tell me in her next email. I wrote her back with my thanks and said I’d love to hear whatever she wanted to tell me, if she was comfortable doing so.

Alas, she never wrote me back and never replied to any of my subsequent emails. So I’ll never know what happened or didn’t happen or might have happened that night in Columbus.

And therein, I suppose, lies the power for me of found objects (which I just now mistyped as “fond objects”) and untold stories — they tantalize by showing just enough clues to suggest a story but never enough to solve their mystery. And it’s the mystery, for me, that endures.

Restored Radios exhibit

brownstudy — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 04:38:25 +0000

Durham is growing its own crop of local businesses — not just local artists and boutique eateries, but also a love of handmade crafts and the pleasure of both making and admiring objects that, as William Morris might say, are both useful and beautiful.

The Horse & Buggy Press, a local letterpress, has some wonderful pictures for its Restored Radios exhibit, displaying American radios from the 1930s-50s restored by Asheboro resident Bob Gordon, age 81.

I know these radios were probably mass-manufactured, but damn — just look at them and marvel at their decoration, their style, their solidity.

On hitting 50 (blog posts, that is)

brownstudy — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 03:10:17 +0000

Inspired by Shannon’s example, I decided to forge ahead and write M-F blog posts for 10 weeks. And rather remarkably, to me, I hit that goal without missing a day or calling for a do-over. Last Friday I posted my 50th entry.

What surprised me about the experience:

I thought I would exhaust my list of 20 or so ideas. I now have about twice that many on my list, plus about 15 draft posts in various stages of completion. Which proves what I said in my first post: the more I write, the more I can write.
The time between me getting an idea and then creating a decently readable post shrank. I experimented with ways to plan out long posts so they weren’t so exhausting to write, though with mixed success.
I can pretty much tell within about 20 minutes of writing whether I can finish a post in a sitting or whether it needs more time.
I thought I would need fancy software but the WordPress setup has served me quite well and it gets better all the time. I still like starting some drafts in nvAlt, but I tend now to keep my drafts in the WP Dashboard.
I tend to prefer the longform essays.
Continuing to discover little idiosyncrasies in my style (such as my love of parenthetical asides or constantly adding “and” clauses to sentences) and occasionally surprising myself with a felicitously turned phrase or metaphor.

What pleased me:

I restarted the blog in response to creative constipation; I had stuff backed up I wanted to write about but didn’t know how. The regular writing unblocked whatever was jammed and the words and ideas simply gushed out for the last two months. (Here endeth the metaphor unsavourie.)
Whenever I’ve felt blue, it’s usually because I’ve not been exercising my creativity muscles. Shortly after restarting the blog, the dark cloud lifted and I began enjoying the process of planning, experimenting, and publishing. Writing is mood-altering!
I like going back and reviewing the stuff I’ve written. I often forget what I’ve written about, and it’s like finding lost treasure.
I suppose because it was the last week of mandatory posting, I pushed out several posts that I had started in Spring 2011 but had never had enough reason to actually finish. The Davies and prospective memory posts had waited a long time to be given their due and each flew near the 2000-word mark. The satisfaction I felt in finally publishing those ideas and opinions — really committing to them and then marking them as done — felt so good.
I really like being able to go back and fix a typo or rephrase some clumsy sentence. A blog post is never finished, only abandoned.
Instead of my evenings being spent watching cat videos on YouTube or moving all the icons on my desktop 2cm to the left, I’ve spent them creating and producing things. What I always thought of as my distractible nature never bothered me while I wrote. And I felt much better about how I spent my time.

What I wish I could have done:

I would have liked establishing a routine for writing every day at the same time. But since I typically wrote in the evenings, then perhaps that was my routine time.
I wish I could have written shorter posts. The longer posts took a lot out of me and I sometimes felt kind of stunned the next day. I just like to blather on. I guess.
I wish I could have found better graphics and maybe more multimedia. I like illustrations or pictures with blog posts and while Zemanta can find some interesting stuff, I sometimes just settled for what I could find in a hurry.

What I won’t miss:

Spending almost every Monday through Friday evening staring at a computer screen! There was one period where I successfully stayed one day ahead of schedule, and I remember one glorious patch where I had three short posts all lined up and scheduled for publishing through the end of the week. I was never able to repeat that.

What I still want to play with and figure out:

I want to invest in the Thesis theme or something similar and more plugins. I would like to play around more with the site’s look and feel. It’s a rather bland looking site.
My friend Mike Uhl, who writes two very focused blogs, continues to urge me to commit to a theme. Not for this site, which will remain a repository of jottings and fancies, but perhaps my next one.
A Creative Commons notice and how to attach it to the end of every post.

A few remaining points:

I will continue to write posts, but not to a schedule. I look forward to a break. One of the great things about this project is that I now have a new hobby. If I’m ever at loose ends and wonder whatsoever shall I do — writing a blog post is the activity that will leap to mind.
I have purposely not promoted the blog. I haven’t advertised my posts on either my Twitter or Facebook accounts. This blog has been my private lab where I could try things out, play around, and generally make lots of pots while letting the process work its magic on me. When I start a more focused blog, it will be to support my side-business and then I will be more interested in the social media side.
It’s not the goal that’s important, after all, it’s who you have to become to achieve the goal. In the past 10 weeks, I’ve become someone who spends his free time writing, getting better at writing, and sharing what he knows (or thinks he knows). And it’s been great.

Remembering Harvey Pekar on his birthday

brownstudy — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:34:36 +0000

Hat tip to Southern Folklife Collection’s Facebook feed

For owners of older Mac products

brownstudy — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 21:33:14 +0000

Apple’s criteria for upgrading to Mountain Lion is whether you own a mid-2007 or newer iMac or late 2008 aluminum MacBook and so on. I mean, what? I don’t see dates like that when I open my MacBook’s About This Mac info window. Newer MacBooks are showing this type of year-of-production info, but not the old models.

Hence the value of this German web site dedicated to Apple tech support. Enter your serial number for various Mac products (computers, laptops, printers, batteries, and monitors) and it will extrapolate various bits of basic information, such as the item’s manufacture date, model number, and so on.

This can be useful info for people like myself who want to know whether our products are eligible for the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Alas, my poor little plastic MacBook is mid-2007, so I’ll be staying with Snow Leopard for quite a while yet.

Remembering to remember (practice)

brownstudy — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 03:19:33 +0000

The previous post talked about prospective memory (PM) research. Today’s post is about learning to work with your prospective memory so you don’t forget to remember what you want to do. (God, do we writers love playing with phrases like “don’t forget to remember.” Annoying.)

PM requires you to plan ahead so that the retrieval cue will be spontaneously triggered. If you don’t plan ahead, then your brain must spend precious cycles monitoring the environment for the retrieval cue. The human cognitive system can’t keep up a prolonged task like that, so you have to keep a few things in mind (heh — this stuff just writes itself) when establishing the PM task.

The following tips are explained in more detail below, but be prepared: you’re going to hear stuff you’ve heard a zillion times before. Also annoying, I’m sure. If there’s a theme tying these separate tips together, it’s also the oldest theme in the book: mindfulness.

Remove the delay in delayed intentions: do it or lose it
Use good external cues
Anticipate the triggering cues: use implementation intentions
Beware of busy and demanding conditions
Address the special problems of habitual PM tasks

Remove the delay in delayed intentions: do it or lose it

A PM task is a delayed intention; the longer the delay, the likelihood increases that you will forget the cue. The delay can be more hazardous if you successfully retrieve the cue yet cannot execute the task for some reason — just as you begin to do the PM task someone walks in and interrupts you, for example.

Thoughts fade from consciousness after only about 2 seconds without refreshment or rehearsal. If you’re in a hectic or pressured situation, then it’s even more likely you’re going to forget what you intended to do. Therefore, if you can do the task now, then do it now. Don’t delay.

But if you have to delay, then…

Use good external cues

The best way to ensure the PM cue will be triggered is to externalize your intention, put it in the environment where you’ll be sure to either literally or figuratively trip over it. Assume, in other words, that you will forget and plan how you will work around that forgetting.

Hence the age-old advice: if you need to take your moss-covered three-handled family gredunza to work the next day, then put it by the front door where you’ll see it before you leave.

You can extend that advice by associating a task or intention with any convenient object. If I wake up in the night and think of a task I want to do in the morning, then I’ll take the box of tissues by my bed and stand it upright on the floor. If I’m working in my office and want to remember to check that the back door is locked before I go to bed, then I’ll pull the trashcan out from under the desk and put it in front of the door. Once I’ve set the object in place, I can safely send the PM task to the background and continue with my foreground task. When I see the tissue box or trashcan, my first thought is usually, “What’s that doing there?” quickly followed by, “Oh yeah! I wanted to …” and the miracle of life goes on.

Other advice along these lines is to use a tickler file or leave yourself a voicemail or a Post-It note on the bathroom mirror. The goal is to get your attention by having the cue stand out from the quotidian.

Anticipate the triggering cues: use implementation intentions

I wrote a bit about implementation intentions here:

An implementation intention basically says. “I will do behavior x when y happens so that I can achieve z.” The objective is to have your environment deliver the cue for the behavior you want to encourage.

So avoid saying, “I need to remember to send Scott that email.” Instead, say “I will send Scott an email immediately after I sit down at my desk so that he can order the tickets.” These simple when-then directives can also support goals and encourage better habits. This method has proven effective across numerous populations: drug addicts going through withdrawal, schizophrenics, frontal lobe patients, and older adults.

To make the intention even more memorable, say it out loud and pat yourself on the head (laugh, but the subjects had to do that in a study where there were no other retrieval cues available).

A disadvantage of this method is that it requires time and mental energy to think of and then phrase an appropriate intention. If you are in a demanding environment, this may not be useful. So, if at all possible …

Beware of busy and demanding conditions

We are poor multitaskers and in the middle of a swirling, hectic day you are not likely to remember any promises quickly made as you’re walking to the printer or just before the phone rings. Even if you try setting implementation intentions, you need to clear some mental space by shutting out the noise and distraction surrounding you; that effort can simply overtax your cognitive processes too much.

Interruptions also take their toll; if you’re interrupted just as you’re about to execute a PM task, then it’s important for you to set a new, strong cue as quickly as possible. Writing things down or setting reliable external cues, like alarms or reminders built into your email or calendar systems, can help you to remember to execute future tasks.

One of my practices, if someone asks me to do something while I’m in transit or can’t write anything down, is to ask the person to send me an email. I am good about turning email into tasks, and that way I can simply track that task in my productivity systems. And if the other person forgets to send the email? Not my problem! I win!

Another underrated tool: the humble checklist, a standby of airline crews and, if they listen to Atul Gawande, medical teams and physicians. You can’t think and do at the same time; you can do one or the other, but not both. In a stressed environment — even life or death environments — doing is easier if the steps are already laid out for you.

Side note: I have found that creating a checklist for certain procedures or workflows is a great way to capture long-term knowledge or experience, either my own or someone else’s.

Address the special problems of habitual PM tasks

Habitual PM tasks are things like taking medication, closing the chimney flue, turning off the oven, making sure the door is locked. With such actions, you may repeat the task because you can’t remember you performed it or you may think you performed it when you actually didn’t. Again, using external aids — like pill organizers or alarms or homemade checklists — can help keep you on track.

Again, the challenge is to make yourself pay attention to what you’re doing. You can manipulate some part of the environment to flag that you have or have not done the task. For example, I have sets of exercises to do when I practice my banjo. I use a sticky note to flag the set of exercises I do in the current practice session. The next time I sit down to practice, I can quickly see the exercises I practiced last time and the set I need to practice this time. Again, it’s so simple as to sound almost trivial, yet it’s those little tricks that often enable older adults to perform better in some prospective memory studies than young college students.

Other things you can try:

If possible, block out all other distractions and focus exclusively on the task. Don’t think about anything else. In fact, describe aloud what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Engaging the vocal and aural areas of the brain will make the task more lively and memorable.
Try to increase the complexity of the task or execute it in an unusual or different way. Cross your arms as you take your pill, turn around three times and say “three-handled moss-covered family gredunza” as you close the flue — anything you can do to make the task more memorable.