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For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:

If you for­get it then, how­ev­er, when you have your chance, you will be sor­ry lat­er when you are once again far from a print­er and need the print-out, for pass­ing on the oppor­tu­ni­ty when it was right in front of you.

Print­ing will become yet anoth­er thing you have to remem­ber, amongst all the oth­er things you have going on right now. Quite the nuisance.

Three sim­ple tricks

Here are three sim­ple ways to make the prob­lem smaller.

1. If the print­er has access to an ​“email to printer”-function, sim­ply email what you want to print to the print­er, per­haps as a PDF, and be done with it right away. When you are wher­ev­er the print­er is in a while from now, what­ev­er you need­ed will be there wait­ing for you.
2. Cre­ate a to-do task along the lines of ​“When at the office, print out the doc­u­ment you want some­one to sign” and make the task due the day you know you will be where the print­er is. When the day in ques­tion arrives and you browse your to-do list, you will become aware that you need to print which you can then do straight away. If you cat­e­go­rize your tasks by con­text, you could also put a ​“To print”-tag on the task in addi­tion to the above.
3. Cre­ate a ​“To print”-folder and place it on your com­put­er desk­top if you have a sparse­ly pop­u­lat­ed desk­top and will be able to spot the fold­er eas­i­ly. When you are not any­where near a print­er, export your doc­u­ments to PDFs and save them there. Once you have access to a print­er again, print what­ev­er you saved in the fold­er and then throw the print­ed PDF files in the bin. Before I had a print­er I could send emails to I had a ​“To Print”-folder on my com­put­er desk­top and allowed the ​“keep­ing track of files”-app Hazel (OS X) to high­light it with a red light if it con­tained some­thing and with a green light if it was emp­ty. Then I did not even need to remem­ber to open it and have a look if there was some­thing I need­ed to remem­ber to print.

Do this

Con­sid­er which way to remem­ber print­ing doc­u­ments when you have the chance that would suit you best. It could be one of my sug­ges­tions or some­thing else.

Do what you need to be able to get stuff print­ed when you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty with as lit­tle effort as pos­si­ble. Per­haps you need to

• Find out if you can email any of the print­ers you have access to
• Cre­ate a ​“To print”-folder on your desktop
• Write a to-do task about print­ing that is due the next time you believe you will be close to a print­er. Link to the doc­u­ment you want to print in the note-sec­tion of your to-do task so that it is eas­i­ly available.

Less on your mind

If you think of a way to remind your­self you have to print when you are close to a print­er, you will have to keep one less thing on your mind. The risk of stand­ing emp­ty-hand­ed when you need­ed the print­ed mate­r­i­al decreas­es and you can spend your pre­cious ener­gy and focus on more impor­tant, inter­est­ing, and valu­able tasks than remem­ber­ing a small detail such as this.

What’s your way?

Do you have anoth­er solu­tion to this prob­lem? Feel free to write to me and share.

(Do you instead strug­gle with hav­ing your notes writ­ten down on paper and wish they were dig­i­tal? Check out this short video where I share how I take notes on paper and still save them dig­i­tal­ly!)