In my case, I think it’s just because it’s so routine I can do it without thinking or remembering. I got a free 7-compartment container, and at least I knew if I had not taken my nightly pills. It took me a long time to realize that I was much more likely to remember my nightly pills if I left the container on the sink and not in the medicine chest out of sight.
I do that too, and I pat my pockets before I close my door to make sure I have my keys, wallet, and glasses.
Do your pills come in smaller containers? Don’t throw them away, and when you have enough, load up one container with a week’s worth of one pill. Or load one container with Monday AM pills, another with Monday evening pills, and the same for each day of the week. Yeah, it’s a lot of containers, but it’d work.
I’m ok with once-daily ones. I get my coffee, take my meds.
Not so much with painkillers when I have a migraine. I’m so out of it that sometimes I get the container, get a drink, but don’t actually take the dose. Wait an hour…yep, no change in pain…guess I didn’t take it.
I just use one of those 7-day pill boxes. I fill up several of those boxes and I’m set for weeks. Most HMOs will give them out free to its patients. Regardless they’re cheap. Just glancing at the box tells me if I forgot to take a pill or not. I include in the daily regiment my vitamins and other supplements. Fool-proofed.
The only thing I don’t like about my 7-day pill box is that once I put all of my medication and other supplements into it, there isn’t enough room for my chewable multivitamin, so I still have to remember to take that on my own.
I’m awful with all this stuff. Pills are bad. Like everyone one else, I try to find a trick, but then the trick becomes so mundane, I don’t remember if I did that or not.
One trick I heard on the radio (and the DJ wouldn’t stop talking about how amazing it was) for people who lose things was to picture a little tiny explosion in the spot where you set the commonly lost item (keys, glasses, phone etc) down. But the way I see it, after a few days, the little explosion will be just as common as every other trick you’ve tried.
My current problem is remembering whether or not I’ve closed the garage door. I do my best to make sure it’s closed, I check it in my mirror as I drive away, then check it one more time as I turn the corner, but like I said, that’s become such a habit, I always forget if I did it. Then I ask my 5 year old if I closed it and she always says yes. I’m 90% sure she’s convinced that the drive to school involves doubling back past the house. I’m willing to bet that I probably go back and check it better then 50% of the time. Part of the problem is that I work close enough to home that if it’s really bugging me I can leave work, check it and be back in 10 minutes. After 7 years of doing this I finally got mounted a webcam in the garage that I can check on my phone.
Now, I check it three times as I’m driving away and if I’m a half mile from the house and it’s bugging me, I can pull my phone out, hit the webcam icon and see the closed garage door.
For $70, that was more then worth it to me. Now we’ll just have to see if it survives the winter. Also, FTR, in the 7 years of living here and the who knows how many times I’ve checked, I think I’ve only left my door open once or twice in all that time.
At my work, you need your badge to get through some of the main staff doors, so if you’ve forgotten it, you have to go all the way down to the security office in the bowels of the building and get a Temp Badge of Shame. To prevent this, I keep my badge and my bus pass on the same lanyard. That way I can’t forget my badge, because I wouldn’t be able to get downtown without it!
Of course, this has the potential to backfire because if I lost the lanyard, I’d lose both badge AND bus pass. But that’s one of those things that Just Won’t Happen, dammit.
Same here, but I’d get in the habit of forgetting my lanyard at home, so I’d gotten into the practice of hanging it on my rear-view mirror when I’d get off work. That way if I did happen to forget to put it on when I got into the building, the farthest I’d have to go would be the parking lot to retrieve it.