September 16, 2025
The Weight of Remembering
You schedule meetings and events on your calendar. You put discernable tasks on your todo list.
But what about all the things you’d like to remember that don’t quite fit either category? Those articles you’d like to read when you have a free moment, that activity you’d like to turn into a habit, that person you need to touch base with again?
Remembering all of these incidental activities has become a weight we all carry. I want to respond to my email backlog, remember to track my habits on Lift, check-in on Foursquare, come back to my saved content in Instapaper/Pocket. Yet, all of these services do nothing to remind me and let me build a habit—they just add more weight.
We need tools that will allow us to schedule reminders for—or automate—these incidental activities. Most of us aren’t steel traps, remembering every little thing we’d like to do, nor so utterly excited to use every service that we’ll remember to use it. Not only that but, without building habits, it is very easy to forget and fall back to old habits and base behaviors—only to later (inconveniently) remember that we have these other things to do.
Buffer is a great example of a step in the right direction. While not great for actively engaging in conversations, it allows you to tweet at a regulated pace. Tweeting can be thought of as both a time and content based activity—you often don’t want to tweet several things in a row lest you annoy your followers. Buffer allows you to automate the time part of the equation, leaving you to only worry about content.
It’s no longer about just providing us with the tools to do something but also providing us with the tools to alleviate a burden. We want to remember to do these incidental activities and not feel a weight to do so.
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