Yesterday, I wrote about the two-minute rule from David Allen. Today, I reflect on another tool I’ve found immeasurably helpful in the past week.
I think of these as “action cues”—but first encountered them as “Gibsonian affordances” in the Daniel Levitin book The Organized Mind.
(I would link to the Wikipedia page, but it’s a real muddle of fairly complex psychology that I’ll spare you from looking at.)
The rough idea of this: our physical environment is full of objects that cue certain behaviors. An open kitchen drawer cues you to close it. Puzzle pieces on the floor cue you to pick them up.
There are also certain tasks that obtain a series of actions—embedded cues. To leave the house, you grab the keys, grab a coat, open and close the door, lock the door.
Levitin’s point is that you can leverage these cues as reminders.
This is a weird idea—why embed reminders in our physical environment when we have sophisticated task management apps on our phones?
Well, endless pinging reminders are annoying, for one—and I’m liable to turn them off or ignore them.
So, a real world physical reminder is better.
An example may help. Let’s consider a tuition check for daycare, which needs to be dropped off every month.
If I follow the two-minute rule, I write a check when I get the email reminder, but now I have to remember to bring the actual check to daycare.
If I leave the check at the kitchen counter, there’s no way it’s making it to daycare—grabbing an envelope off the counter isn’t part of my “leave the house” action.
Unless I see it during that action: an action cue.
If I leave the envelope on top of my house keys, I can’t leave the house without seeing that envelope and remembering I have to drop off the tuition.
There’s a direct connection between the envelope and the action it cues. The envelope is the object.
But you can create action cues even when the object is irrelevant to the object.
This is trickier, of course—the cue must be noticed (an open drawer may not pass muster), but, most importantly, the cue must surface the thought you intended.
Sometimes I think of something while falling asleep, for instance. I’m drifting off and don’t want to turn on the light, so I chuck a book on the floor. This may not get me far.
Better to do something more mysterious—like leave a frying pan on the floor. When I see that the next morning, I’ll remember that there’s a load of laundry in the dryer that I need to fold.
Taylor Coe 