"I'll forget anyway"

There's a resigned version of the heap. You'd do things when they arrived but you don't remember them, and by the time you do it's the fourth reminder, and you've come to think of this as how your memory works.

Memory isn't the system, and it was never going to be. Nobody remembers eleven small items with different deadlines by holding them in their head, and the ones who seem to have a list somewhere. The carry from chapter 3 is what memory does when it's asked to be a list. It keeps everything half-active, raising each item at random, usually at eleven at night when nothing can be done about it, and never once at the moment you're actually at a computer with four minutes free. That's not a bad memory. That's a memory doing a job it isn't built for, and doing it the only way it can, which is by nagging.

Masicampo and Baumeister's intrusive thoughts are, from this angle, memory's reminders. The stray thought about the form during the reading task is the mind saying "the form" in the only voice it has. It's not failing to remind you. It's reminding you constantly, at the wrong times, at a cost to whatever you're doing. What it can't do is remind you at the right time, and what it stops doing, in their experiments, is reminding you at all once a plan exists somewhere outside your head.

So the answer to "I'll forget" isn't to remember harder. It's to give the item somewhere to be that isn't your memory. The list in chapter 21 is that place. Once the item is on it, with a day, the memory can put it down, and in the experiments it does, and the eleven-at-night version of the form stops arriving because there's a Thursday version of it written down.

And the ten-minute test in chapter 20 removes most of the forgetting altogether, because an item done when it arrives is never remembered or forgotten. It's just done. The forgetting only happens to items that were allowed to leave the moment of arrival without either being done or written down, and that's the one moment the method doesn't allow.

You will still forget things. Everyone does. What you'll stop doing is using forgetting as the reason for a heap that was built by putting things down without writing them down, which is not a memory problem. It's a habit, and habits can be changed, and chapter 21's list is the change.