The blog

How often do you think thoughts such as ​“When I’m there any­way, I might as well …”? 



It might be that some­one told you that ​“you just have to” go see an amaz­ing build­ing the next time you are in Toronto. 



Or it can be buy­ing passé-partout-paper in the art sup­plies store the next time you are eat­ing lunch at that nice restau­rant next door to the store.



Per­haps you are plan­ning to stop by and say hel­lo to a for­mer col­league when you are attend­ing a meet­ing in the same build­ing as he works in. 



Think­ing that you will is one thing, but remem­ber­ing it some­thing entire­ly different. 

Not when, but where

This con­cerns to-do-tasks that you catch a glimpse of every time you skim through your to-do-list, but it is not time-con­straints that deter­mine if you can do them or not; it depends on the loca­tion you are in.

Just because you have a few min­utes to spare that does not mean you can pop by your for­mer colleague’s office; you need to be in the same loca­tion to meet. 

Get as much as pos­si­ble out of where you are

You need to find a way to store your loca­tion-spe­cif­ic to-do-tasks so that you as auto­mat­i­cal­ly and eas­i­ly as pos­si­ble will be remind­ed what you can do where you are cur­rent­ly at. 

Nat­u­ral­ly, you want it to find what you can do while you hap­pen to be in a cer­tain loca­tion both eas­i­ly and quickly. 

Do this

Today I will give you three sug­ges­tions to what you can do. 

1. Give your to-do-tasks a location-prefix
   
   Decide that when you write them down, you will always start these types of tasks with for instance ​“In Oslo,…” or ​“In Doha,…” or with a more spe­cif­ic location. 
   
   This way it will be easy to orga­nize the tasks alpha­bet­i­cal­ly in your to-do-list (or search for tasks by loca­tion) and eas­i­ly find the things you could do in this par­tic­u­lar location.
   
   If you want to, you can cre­ate a spe­cif­ic con­text for these types of tasks, for exam­ple “@Location”. That way you will be able to fil­ter out all the tasks which are not loca­tion-spe­cif­ic and it will be even eas­i­er to find the tasks you can do here and now. 
   
   As you can see, the key to being suc­cess­ful at using loca­tion-pre­fix­es is that you are con­sis­tent in how you define your tasks. 
2. Cre­ate one, and only one, mindmap over the cities and loca­tions, and of the tips you have got­ten as to what you can do, what you could see, and who you should meet while you are there. 
   
   When you are head­ing to a cer­tain loca­tion, open the mindmap on your com­put­er and see if you should sched­ule to do any of the tasks or fol­low up on any of the tips you have gotten. 
3. Use an app that will alert you to what you have decid­ed to do in a cer­tain loca­tion as you are approach­ing the very same location. 
   
   If you have an iPhone, there is for instance the app IFTTT which will send you a text-mes­sage when you are in a loca­tion that you have pre­vi­ous­ly marked on the map. 

Nev­er miss out again!

If you use one of the above meth­ods, you will cre­ate a place where you store all the great tips and rec­om­men­da­tions you get from friends, acquain­tances and fan­cy mag­a­zines, with ease.

You sim­ply will not have to remem­ber them any­more. By hav­ing a clear process through which you chan­nel and save all the tips you receive, the prob­a­bil­i­ty that you will remem­ber to actu­al­ly do or see them all when in a cer­tain town or place, dras­ti­cal­ly increases. 

What is your way?

How do you make sure to get remind­ed of what to do where you are at present? Leave a com­ment to share your thoughts.