How do you remember appointments?

Serious question here. I'm a 51-year-old adult who is mostly pretty responsible about taking care of obligations. But I have never, ever been good about writing down appointments and remembering them. This is by far my worst professional habit. It's not so bad that it's debilitating, like I don't forget things every day or even every month. But it happens enough that it is aggravating both to me and the people whom I inevitably inconvenience by my failure to show up or call when I am supposed to.

It's a difficulty that has persisted from the days of paper calendar books into the days of Google calendar. The obstacle is that I often make or receive confirmation of appointments while I'm in the middle of doing other things, because I'm always in the middle of doing other things, and so I don't take the couple of minutes necessary at that moment to document the thing. And then it just goes out of my head, never gets written down, and gets forgotten until I get a message asking where I am.

Most interested in hearing from people with similar challenges who have figured out how to counteract them. Those of you who, like my wife, keep perfect diligent calendars at all times are probably not going to be able to help me (any more than my wife is). I mean, I know the answer is "JUST WRITE IT DOWN," I'm just trying to get from here to there in a reliable way.

Write a brief note INSTANTLY when you hear about the appointment - just a word or two on a scrap of paper. Pick one spot on your desk where all those scraps of paper go.
At the end of the day, pick up all the scraps of paper from that spot and take 10-15 minutes, say after dinner, to enter them all into your phone's calendar.

I set specific alarms on my phone, just giving them 1-2 word titles that make it obvious enough what it's for.

I had to do this for work as it is so easy to miss conference calls due to working on 2-3 devices at once a lot of the time plus my employer's restrictions on things like desktop and browser notifications.

Ah, both good ideas. I agree that writing it down SOMEWHERE would help. I do use alarms sometimes, but that's typically for things I have managed to write down and just want to remind myself of.

Surround yourself with post-it notes. If you manage to write an appointment down on a post-it, stick it on your refrigerator so that you'll be constantly reminded about it.

my somewhat serious answer is find a way to have fewer appointments. that's what i would do if i was forgetting a lot of things.

I wish. Sadly my chosen career necessitates me constantly having to make arrangements to talk to people.

This is the only reason I ever wish I had a secretary. Someone to keep track of my schedule would be a wonderful thing.

i had this issue with a lot of things--like i would make an appointment to my next haircut at the barber shop and not write it down telling myself i would remember that it was 5 weeks away or something. i had to start immediately making a google calendar entry before i did anything else or i would just never do it. so whatever vehicle works, stickies, app, etc. is probably less important than just interrupting everything i was doing to write it down.

My email inbox is my reminder tool. Most of my appointments involve an email, for those that don't I will send myself an email about them. In the course of checking email daily I will constantly be reminded of upcoming appointments. Of course this method depends on keeping a tidy inbox.

My problem is that while I have both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar, I routinely forget to check both of them, because my appointments are rare enough that I don't get in the habit of checking every day.

A5 desk diary, go through my Outlook and copy them into it and at end of week see what’s the priority for the following week and then highlight those in the diary abd then check again on Monday morning. Outlook reminders are usually too short for me to action. No easy way around it you’ve got to be disciplined otherwise you’ll just be wasting your time.

Of course this method depends on keeping a tidy inbox.

lol yes, well ...

I think my core problem is that going all the way back to middle or high school, I've always mostly kept track of things in my head. And I'm pretty good at it! Good enough that I don't miss a whole lot. But as my life and job have both become more complicated over the ensuing decades (and possibly as my cognitive capacity has maxed out or slipped a notch, but let's not think about that), it's too much to juggle mentally.

I feel like the title of this thread is mocking me

A big 1.5-year calendar on the fridge, calendar apps synced on desktop+phone, sticky notes on the desk as extra redundancy. But the big fridge calendar is the most useful, especially in crosschecking for conflicts with other family members' appts. We use this one: https://www.amazon.com/Orange-Circle-Magnetic-Calendar-August/dp/1682589609/

kept reading this thread title as "Hey do you remember appointments?'

sad lol I've been pretty good about this for the last six months since I started this thread, but today totally forgot a thing I'd agreed to do (talk to a university class) — and, unbelievably, this is the second year in a row I've stood up this same class! (Different students, but same instructor.) We're gonna reschedule for later in the semester, but I feel like an idiot, I called the instructor and gave groveling apologies. I had it on my digital calendar and just ... didn't happen to look at it in the last few days.

So now I've ordered myself an old-fashioned weekly planner, on paper. My theory is that possibly physically writing things down will embed them more in my brain. (As suggested by some in this thread before.)

I really hate it because I'm pretty good at most parts of being a responsible professional, but this is just a perennial problem.

Actually only FOUR months since I started the thread, so I can't even claim six months.

I add everything as an event in my iphone calendar, and add an alert to the important ones. Then I also wear a fitbit that syncs to the phone, so even if I’m occupied with something else, it will physically buzz me at the specified reminder time.

Also like that because it’s more subtle than the phone beeping all the time.

So ppl keep digital calendars but dont set reminders?

That seems ..... I mean...

No digital calendar over here. It was at my wife's insistence since she's an analog girl, but somehow keeping the physical calendar works for us. It's nice to be able to say "Not sure if I'm free that night, but I'll check the calendar and let you know."

I keep my work schedule and appointments on Google Calendar.

I pretty much just have to remember shit. Trying to maintain any kind of a planner (i.e. remembering to update it, remembering to check it) has proven to be an abject failure throughout the course of my life. And like smartphone notifications and reminders have proven to be horrendously unreliable in my experience, so eff that noise until people who make technology decide to start making technology that functions consistently.

guys ARE YOU ALL JOINING THE ILX MS TEAMS MEETING, it's now six minutes in and I"m the only one here. you all gots to get organized!

we use outlook at work and my calendar is filled with meetings i don't necessarily need to attend but that i'm invited to anyway. and they all have reminders. but there's sometimes no way for me to know if i needed to attend the meeting unless i bug someone. this is more the fault of the organizer and i guess how teams/corporations are run, i guess.

Last time I had an office job, not working for myself, everyone was on Outlook and that did make things easier because most of my appointments would just pop up and populate the calendar. (Plus most meetings were in the same building where my office was, so if I forgot one someone could just text me and I could get there in 2 minutes.)

I do set reminders on all my digital appointments, but the problem is that my phone is always buzzing with one thing or another, and I sometimes tune it out. It's been years since I've used a physical planner, and I don't really remember if I was much better about things then, but what the hell. I'm in my 50s, I feel like this is a life skill I should have figured out by now.

Both of my kids are terrible about remembering when school assignments are due, when to turn them in, where they left their musical instruments etc. We're on them all the time and I give lectures about how these are things they need to learn to handle, and then I do stuff like this and I realize I've passed on my genes to them ...

Paper calendar when I sat at a desk, G-cal once I started a job that was more mobile. Over the pandemic shutdown months, because the passage of time ceased to have meaning, I missed a truly embarrassing number of zoom appointments with people because I just couldn't remember from one 15 minute period to another, that I was supposed to be online. I guess because I didn't have to GO anywhere, it kinda all ran together.

xp This is the one thing ADHD'S never caused me any problem with. I may live in an infested dump because I can't get my mind into cleaning, I may forget where I set my keys a second ago, but I always remember to make note of appointments.

work appointments, I just use the work Outlook account

Social appointments, I'm pretty sure I can remember in my head that one night a week I get invited for a pint on a thursdsay lol

You lol, but ADHD literally means I can’t remember the one time a week I get invited for a pint on a Thursday.

Reminders app on my phone. For everything. For remembering to take my meds, do push-ups, keep appointments, feed and water the cats, buy necessaries, pretty much everything that needs doing in a day. Location-based reminders for oddball stuff I don’t need for survival, like don’t forget to stop at the record store when you’re in the neighbourhood of the record store even.

I do set reminders on all my digital appointments, but the problem is that my phone is always buzzing with one thing or another

On my phone I diligently turn off all the notifications that I'm not interested in. I think you could also set a different sound for calendar reminders that would be distinguishable from say, an email coming in, if you are interested in those notifications (I'm not, because most emails I receive are not important).

If typing in a reminder is tedious (and it's not coming from an email or text where the phone automatically detects it and makes it easy to add to the Calendar), another option is to use the voice assistant feature (or something like Alexa if you have that). It works pretty reliably to say "Remind me on such and such date and time to do X".

I do set reminders on all my digital appointments, but the problem is that my phone is always buzzing with one thing or another, and I sometimes tune it out.

Create a custom ringtone, something that can't be ignored or misunderstood -- "WAKE UP AND DO THIS THING." I recommend the first few seconds of "Viet Nam" by the Minutemen or "Skunk" by JSBX -- they've been great for me.

by the seat of my pants, into the teeth of the storm

I have no issues remembering appointments, I just put everything in calendar, which I look at multiple times a day and have reminders.

What I hate though is when I make an appointment, I get all these extra emails/texts/calls asking to confirm my appointment. I don’t need that, I made the appointment, I’ll be there, fucking trust me. I block and ignore them all.

Putting alerts on my appts in my Google Calendar has pretty much solved my woes. Also my office uses Google Calendar so I'm now forced to check my calendar a few times a week, and my phone shows me my personal calendar as well. It's hard to believe I functioned before having a smartphone!

And if it's an appt I have to prepare for, I usually put an alert on it to go off a few days in advance

I'm contracting on 2 projects - 1 east coast (less demanding), 1 central time (more demanding). I'm west coast. Separate computers, separate emails for each. I've screwed up meeting times way too often when I tried to coordinate it all on one calendar. I finally had to start putting blocks of "unavailable" time on the MD project calendar so I don't miss critical things on the LD project. It's basically a clusterfuck and I screwed up and scheduled a haircut on a Thursday when I also had a meeting on MD, a Zoom jury selection interview (that thankfully got cancelled), and a therapy appointment. So I am reading all suggestions with full attention.