Because geek is cool and clever

Remembering to, erm, not forget stuff August 11, 2008

I have a memory that is something akin to a hideous genetic crossbreed of a goldfish and a sieve.

I don’t know if I was born without the ability to remember important things or whether I simply became reliant on keeping notes and ‘to do’ lists from an early age.

Even at school I would always carry a small, spiral bound notepad in my back pocket where I would jot anything I needed to remember and then check it routinely throughout the day.

As the years have passed I have found my love of paper difficult to shake off and still keep copious scribbles and personal memos in my treasured Moleskine  (www.moleskine.co.uk) notebooks but being a digital devotee has meant shifting my reminders to online offerings.

For some time I’ve been using Google Calendar to log meetings and tasks that need completing on a certain date. The function to have Google email and/or SMS text message me at fixed times before an event’s due date is particularly useful but if not used carefully it can result in what I refer to as ‘alert hell’.

Many is the occasion I am working at my desk when almost simultaneously I get a new email message tone, a text message, an alert from my iCal on my Macintosh which has been set to synchronise with Google Calendar and finally a pop-up from my work computer’s system tray – all telling me the same thing.

Having applications that communicate with each other and several computers and an iPhone all setting their clocks with split second accuracy can be overkill. I feel like the owner of a cuckoo clock shop at midday!

I’ve recently gone back to using an old favourite that I have mentioned before in this column.

Remember The Milk (rememberthemilk.com) has added even more useful features in the year since I last used it. It’s now even easier to add tasks, set reminders and check what you should be doing each day.

I chose to pay the entirely reasonable $25 (about a pound a month) a year for a pro account and now I can synchronise and manage all my tasks via a wonderful little application on my iPhone.

I’m no longer in ‘alert hell’. I get meaningful and relevant reminders that help to keep my day perfectly organised.

Who needs an old fashioned biological memory?