How to Build a Trusted System and Stop Apologizing for Dropped Commitments.

Are you tired of hearing yourself say it? “Sorry, I forgot.” Or “yeah, I was getting to that, I just haven’t had a chance yet.” Or one of my old favorites, “it slipped my mind.” I said all of those for years, and at some point I just got sick of listening to myself.

Before I had a system, I was a wreck on the inside. I doubt I looked like one. People around me probably figured I had it all together because that’s the version of me they saw. But I knew the truth. I was carrying too much in my head, and it was only a matter of time before something important fell out.

The mess wasn’t just mental, by the way. It was physical too. To-do pads on the desk. Post-its stuck to the monitor. Crumpled pieces of paper in my pockets. Post-its on the dashboard of my car. This was when I was running three businesses at once, an auto glass company, a restoration company, and my coaching business, all while raising four kids in school and relying on a stay-at-home wife to hold the rest of our lives together (Which, by the way, she did and still does an amazing job!). I had a lot to remember, and I was trying to keep most of it in my head, which is just about the dumbest possible way to run a life.

Of course it didn’t work. How could it? We all have too much to remember. Nobody’s brain was built to hold all of it. If you’re trying to run your work and your life out of your head, you’re going to drop things.

What that whole approach really did, looking back on it now, was follow me around. There was this constant mental baggage of trying to remember what I was supposed to remember. A nagging feeling I was forgetting something even when I wasn’t. And then the hit to my self-respect every single time I had to apologize to a client, or a vendor, to one of my kids, or my wife for dropping the ball.

The truth about people who forget things

If you’re a chronic forgetter, the problem isn’t that you have too much on your plate. The problem is that you haven’t built a trusted system to handle what’s on your plate. Those are two very different things, and people confuse them all the time.

I have plenty of empathy for people who feel overloaded. I’ve been there myself, and I remember exactly what it feels like. What I don’t have much patience for is the story that gets told about being overloaded. “There’s just so much to remember.” “I’ve got a million things going on.” “My plate is full.”

Stop making excuses.

Chronic forgetting is a cop-out, and I’m going to call it what I think it really is. It’s a form of laziness and a lack of discipline, and that’s coming from someone who used to be guilty of it himself. The people I know who forget the least aren’t smarter than the rest of us, and they don’t have better memories either. They just decided at some point that they weren’t going to be the kind of person who drops the ball, and then they built something to back that decision up.

The decision comes first

You can’t just skip to the system. The system without the decision is just another app on your phone that you’ll abandon by the end of week one.

The decision sounds something like this . . . “I am no longer going to be the kind of person who forgets what I said I’d do.” To reinforce the message to yourself, consider saying it out loud a couple of times. 

That’s it. That’s the line in the sand, and everything that comes after it is really just mechanics. If you can’t make that decision, the rest of this article isn’t going to do much for you. If you can, keep reading.

Your brain isn’t a filing cabinet. Stop using it like one.

David Allen, the guy who wrote Getting Things Done, has a line I’ve never been able to shake. He says: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

Read that twice.

Every commitment you’re carrying around in your head is taking up bandwidth that you could be using to actually think. The pressure you feel at the end of a long day? It’s not really the workload that’s doing it. It’s the open loops. It’s the eighteen things you’re trying not to forget while you’re trying to do the nineteenth thing, and that loop is never going to close until you put them down somewhere outside your head.

So get them out of your head. Put them somewhere reliable. That’s really all a trusted system is, when you boil it down. A place outside your head where commitments are stored until you can act on them.

Here’s what I use. Might not be the best system. It works for me.

I’m not trying to sell you on my exact system. I’m sure there are better ones out there. What I am selling you on is the idea of having one, any one really, the one you’ll actually use day after day after day.

Mine has two parts.

The first part is a task manager called Toodledo, with Siri integration on my iPhone. When something comes up while I’m driving, I just tell Siri and it lands in my task list before I even get out of the car. When something comes up on a call and I need to track it as a specific to-do with a due date, that goes in Toodledo too.

The second part is a paper journal that sits on my desk. The one I use is the Emergent Task Planner by David Seah. When I’m on a client call and I commit to doing something, it gets written down in the journal before the call ends. Same goes for when I’m thinking through a problem and an idea hits that I don’t want to lose. The mechanical pencil moves before the idea leaves my brain.

Two tools, one digital and one analog, and that’s the whole rig.

I’m not perfect. The system isn’t either. But here’s the difference.

I want to be clear about one thing before you assume I’m preaching from some kind of mountaintop. I am not the guy who never misses anything. I miss things from time to time, and when I do, it’s almost always because I didn’t actually use my system at that moment. I trusted my memory instead of writing it down or telling Siri. It’s not the system, it’s me.

Even when I do use my system, I’ll sometimes still be late on something. Life happens. The day runs away from you. But there’s a huge difference between a late task and a forgotten task, and that difference is what the system is really doing for me. Because the thing is in Toodledo, I haven’t lost sight of it. It’s sitting right there in front of me with a past due flag on it, and I see it, and I deal with it, and nothing falls through the cracks. 

A real example from today. I’ve got three things written in my paper journal that I want to get done by the end of the day. Say I only get two of the three done. Before I leave my desk that evening, that third item is going into Toodledo with a due date attached to it. It is not getting buried on a journal page I might flip past tomorrow morning. It’s in the system now, and the system isn’t going to let me forget about it.

That’s really the whole point. A trusted system isn’t there to make you perfect. It’s there to make sure that when you’re not perfect, nothing important disappears on you.

The non-negotiable rule

Whatever system you choose, there is one rule that makes it actually work, and the rule is this . . . capture it the moment it shows up.

Not later, not after the call, not when you get back to your desk. In the moment.

If you commit to something on a call, write it down before the call ends. If something comes up while you’re driving somewhere, capture it before you get out of the car. If your wife asks you to grab something on the way home, put it in your phone right then, before the conversation moves on to something else.

This is where most people fail. They tell themselves they’ll write it down later, and later just doesn’t come. The next thing happens, and the thing they were going to remember slips out the back door.

Your memory is not going to hold it for you. Not even for thirty seconds. The next thing is going to hit, and whatever it was you wanted to remember will be gone.

What it costs you when you don’t

Let’s be honest about what this actually costs you. Forgetting things isn’t a quirky personality trait or a charming little flaw. There’s a real cost, and it adds up over time.

• It costs you trust with your team. They stop relying on what you say. They start covering for you in ways you probably don’t even see.
• It costs you trust with your clients. They start CC’ing other people on emails to you, just in case.
• It costs you trust with your family. Your spouse. Your kids. The people closest to you who were counting on you to follow through. They’re the ones who feel it most, and the ones you owe the most to.
• It costs you trust with yourself, and that’s the worst one of all. You start to believe you’re just the kind of person who forgets things. And once that becomes part of your identity, it gets very hard to escape from.

There are basically two kinds of people reading this right now, and I want to speak to both.

The first is the person who has someone on their team, or in their family, who forgets things constantly. You’ve been catching what falls. You’ve been wondering, maybe more than you want to admit out loud, whether this person is ever going to be able to carry what you hired them to carry, or what you’ve been counting on them to carry. You’re not crazy. You’re seeing what’s actually there.

The second is the person who knows, deep down, that this article is about them. You’re the one who’s been apologizing. You’re the one saying you’ll get to it. You’ve been telling yourself it’s because you’ve got so much going on right now.

Here’s the good news, and it applies to both of you. This is fixable. If you're really serious about this, you can get a handle on it in about thirty days. You just have to be willing to do the work.

How to build your own trusted system this week

• Pick one capture tool for tasks. Toodledo, TickTick, Todoist, Things, Apple Reminders, Microsoft To Do. It honestly doesn’t matter which one you pick. Pick one and stop shopping around.
• Pick one capture tool for thinking. A paper journal works really well. So does a notes app if you prefer digital. The point is just having a place that isn’t the task list for all the stuff that isn’t quite a task yet.
• Turn on voice capture. Siri, Google Assistant, whatever you use. If you can’t capture hands-free while you’re in the car, you’re going to lose half of what you need to remember.
• Build the habit of capturing in the moment. On every call, in every meeting, walking out to your vehicle. The first couple of weeks will feel awkward and forced. By week two or three, it will feel automatic.
• Review your system at least twice a day. These reviews take me just a few minutes. The first review is before I start my workday, and the very first thing I look at is what’s past due. Anything sitting there from yesterday or earlier gets dealt with before anything new gets started. Then I look at what’s on deck for today. The second review is at the end of my workday. I clean up what didn’t get done, move anything I need to move, and look at what’s waiting for me tomorrow. In between, I check it throughout the day. When I stop for a bite. When I’m making a cup of coffee. After a call. Sometimes I’ll scan it again in the evening, since I keep personal items in there too, just to see if there’s something on the home side I can knock out before bed. The reviews aren’t optional. If you skip them, the system stops working.

That’s the whole playbook. Five steps. None of this is hard, but it does take discipline. There's no way around that. 

If you want to go deeper

I’m not the expert here. I’m a guy who figured out a system that works for him. The people listed below have spent their entire careers on this stuff. If this article hit you in the gut and you want to actually do the work, start with one of these.

Books

• Getting Things Done by David Allen. The original. If you only read one book on this topic, read this one. It’s the book that shaped how I think about capturing commitments. You don’t have to adopt his whole methodology to get a ton out of it.
• Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. A more modern take on the same kind of thinking. More focused on knowledge and ideas than tasks. Pairs well with GTD.
• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Not a productivity book at all. It’s an accountability book, and if your forgetting problem is really a discipline problem dressed up in a costume, this is the kick in the pants you need.
• QBQ! The Question Behind the Question by John G. Miller. Short, direct, and all about the language of personal accountability. You can read it in an afternoon.
• Deep Work by Cal Newport. Adjacent topic, but very relevant. If you want to stop dropping things, you also need to stop being interrupted every nine minutes.

Videos

• David Allen at TEDx Amsterdam. “Getting in control and creating space.” About 18 minutes. A clean overview of the GTD principles and a good way to test-drive the ideas before buying the book.
• Jocko Willink at TEDx University of Nevada. “Extreme Ownership.” About 14 minutes. Watch it before your next morning meeting.
• Tiago Forte’s YouTube channel. Practical, tactical videos on capturing and organizing your thinking.

Podcasts

• The Jocko Podcast. Long form. Discipline, ownership, leadership. Not for everybody, but if it is for you, you’ll know within one episode.
• The Tim Ferriss Show. Search his back catalog for episodes on productivity and systems. He’s interviewed just about everyone worth listening to on this subject.

The bottom line

You don’t have a memory problem. What you have is a system problem, and underneath the system problem, there’s a decision problem.

So decide. Decide you’re done being the person who forgets. Then build something simple to back that decision up. Use it all the time, not just when you feel like it. And review it at least twice a day.

Thirty days from now, you’ll be operating at a different level, personally and professionally. You’ll be someone who can be counted on. You’ll count on yourself. Other people will count on you. Your team will feel it. Your clients will feel it. Your family will feel it.

About the author

Scott Miller is the founder of The Growth League, where he coaches business owners and their second-in-commands on building companies that don’t depend on them. He previously built and sold two businesses, one in property restoration and one in auto glass, before turning full-time to coaching. He has over sixteen years of coaching experience and works with owners across multiple industries on financial clarity, accountability, and building businesses that scale without burning out the people who run them.