Ever forgotten to reply to an important client?

Forgotten to cancel an expensive subscription before it renewed?

Forgotten to buy a birthday present?

I don’t blame you. Our world is so complicated and our minds get yanked in a dozen directions every day.

You can’t expect to remember everything that’s important.

Not on your own, anyway.

But for 2025, let’s set up a system to help you out.

If you have a good capture system for important tasks, deadlines, and just thoughts, you won’t have to remember them yourself.

You can write them down and act on them when you have more bandwidth.

I set up a simple “plus” button on my phone’s lock screen that lets me capture anything I want to remember or act on later:

The plus button opens my to-do app.

So when I think of something to remember, I just pull out my phone, tap the plus button, write the thing down, tap save, and get back to focusing on what’s in front of me.

It’s like how in olden times you might have always carried a small paper notebook and a pen in your jacket pocket. Except today, you already have your phone with you all the time anyway.

(The eagle-eyed, by the way, will see that my phone’s lock screen includes two plus buttons. One for adding calendar events and another for everything else. But I suggest you start with just one catch-all system.)

So, find a good to-do app. Get its plus button on your phone’s lock screen. And then, whenever you think of something to act on later, just grab your phone and write it down.

It takes, like, 20 seconds.

This capture system does need follow-up, of course.

If you only ever write down what you need to do, but you never look at what you’ve written down—well, you’re back to square one.

You need to periodically process your capture “inbox”.

And that’s not all. You also need to learn what’s worth capturing in the first place.

If you write down every single thought you ever have, you’ll quickly overwhelm your ability to process your entries.

So capturing is part one of your complete productivity system.

You also need a way to track deadlines, a routine for planning your days, a system for processing your email… but I digress.

It all starts with making capturing very easy. Near-frictionless.

So go set that up, if you haven’t already.

Oh, and remember to reply to that client, buy that birthday present, and cancel that subscription—before it’s too late.