At a glance

Based on the reader question: Why do I keep intending to do things and forgetting to actually do them?

• Most of what we forget is not in the past, but in the future. We make promises to ourselves, then carry on as though the promises will somehow remember themselves.
• These promises are known as prospective memory, and it's failure is mostly a cue problem, not a character flaw.
• Overcoming this problem is a matter of designing a better environment: if-then plans, physical cues, and intentions tied to things you already do rather than things you hope to notice later or actively monitor.

Introduction

Most of the things you forget are in the future, not the past.¹ We plan to do something, like call the restaurant or buy some flowers, but it slips out mind, three weeks go by, and our partner starts talking about divorce.

In the world of psychology, this is known as prospective memory. Despite it being the bulk of the things we forget, most of the attention is given to retrospective memory: recalling information from the past, like facts, figures, or events.

For this piece, I will refer to the different types of forgetting as:

• Future forgetting: forgetting to do something in the future; a prospective memory failure.
• Past forgetting: forgetting to recall something from the past; a retrospective memory failure.

With past forgetting well-covered in previous pieces, let's focus on the greatest cause of memory frustration and unpack the anatomy of future forgetting, why it's vulnerable, and how to use the If-Then Technique to more effectively keep our promises.

The two types of prospective intentions

Our prospective intentions can be divided into:

• Event-based: a prospective memory cued by something you encounter, like remembering your key when you see it by the front door, or the need to buy more oats when you walk past the supermarket.
• Time-based: remembering to do something at a specific time, like calling the doctors at 8am.

Time-based intentions fail more often, because there's no external nudge². You must rely on your own attention to resurface the thought at the right second, usually while you're busy doing something else.

Two ways your brain tries to remember intentions

Time-based intentions are managed differently in the brain compared to event-based intentions. For these sort of intentions, the brain adopts a strategic retrieval approach, while event-based intentions rely on spontaneous retrieval.³

• Strategic retrieval: for these, your brain is constantly scanning for the right moment to complete your intention. It's like sweeping a torch back and forth over a dark room waiting for something to change. It works, but it's exhausting and can't be sustained for long. That's why holding onto the intention to 'Leave for the airport at 11.25' can feel draining and sap your attention from other tasks. That only compounds when juggling multiple time-based intentions.
• Spontaneous retrieval: your brain is not actively remembering these intentions. Instead, your environment remembers it for you and, when you encounter the cue, the intention comes back. In this case, you're not sweeping a torch back and forth, but simply walking into a room with an automatic light that you've rigged to activate in advance.

Knowing the two ways the brain manages your future intentions reveals the practical implication: start rigging more light switches to automatically illuminate what you need to do.

The If-Then Technique for Future Remembering

The If-Then Technique, developed by Peter Gollwitzer, helps with welding a vague intention to a concrete situational cue.

Take your intention and adapt it into the following structure:

If I do [Situation X], then I will do [Action Y].

For example, swap saying 'I will message her later' with 'If I have sat down with a cup of tea, I will complete my messaging'.

What's frustrating about this technique is that it has a surprising success rate at improving people's follow through on their intentions.⁴

The power of the technique comes from changing time-based intentions into event-based ones. This means more of your remembering will happen automatically, because you've tied them to a relevant and reliable trigger.⁵

For example, instead of saying 'Take medicine at night' you could put the medicine by your bedside, so when the evening rolls you'll inevitably pop your pills.

Switching to this approach rather than "Just try to remember" also means you bypass the expensive and unreliable habit of indefinite monitoring.

Three Tips For Using The If-Then Technique

If you want to make your future intentions more reflexive, my recommendations are:

Attach the intention to something you already do, not a time

'After I pour my tea, I'll write my three priorities for the day' is stronger than 'I'll plan my day in the morning'.

The existing habit is the cue, which means you don't need to expend willpower on remembering it, because the cue is unavoidable.

Make the cue physical and visible, not mental

Whenever possible, make the cue physical rather than mental. If you need to take out the recycling or return a parcel, don't put these on a mental to-do list. In fact, even a physical to-do can be burdensome.

Instead, experiment with putting the recycling and parcel by the front door and see if you recall the task on your way out.

Precision matters

You don't want to confuse or mislead your future-self and have them wondering, 'What was I supposed to do?'. Something like 'Sort the dishwasher' isn't great. 'Refill the salt in the dishwasher' is much better.

Writing down your intentions can help with overcoming vagueness, as it will reveal which parts are foggy and need fixing.

Broken Promises Are A Design Problem

Characterising ourselves as flaky, unreliable, and scatter-brained is usually unfair, especially in the eyes of memory psychologists. To them, your future forgetting is mostly a design problem, not a discipline problem.

Your intention to do something failed because you likely relied on the expensive and unreliable part of your retrieval system to do a job that a physical reminder – like a doorway, a note, or a precisely expressed if-then sentence could have done for basically free.

All you need to do is build the right cues, and fulfilling your promises will take care of themselves.

1. Matthias Kliegel from the University of Geneva, found that 50-80% of memory complaints were about future forgetting. ↩︎
2. Einstein, G.O., McDaniel, M.A., Richardson, S.L., Guynn, M.J. & Cunfer, A.R. – 'Aging and prospective memory: Examining the influences of self-initiated retrieval processes', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 1995. ↩︎
3. McDaniel, M.A. & Einstein, G.O. – 'Strategic and Automatic Processes in Prospective Memory Retrieval: A Multiprocess Framework', Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2000. ↩︎
4. A meta-analysis pooling 94 independent tests of the technique found a medium-to-large effect on whether people actually followed through – an effect size of d = 0.65, which is a large number by the standards of behavioural psychology, and one that has held up reasonably well under later scrutiny. ↩︎
5. Gollwitzer, P.M. – 'Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans', American Psychologist, 1999. ↩︎