[x] I consider it Very Bad Form for me to let someone else down in these circumstances, and will be very apologetic

My goodness you are very hard on yourself!

I'll fill in this poll when I've got a spare moment.

I'd make a big distinction between my ability to remember to do this sort of thing with and without reminders. If I don't have a sensible way of noting down RIGHT NOW that I'll need to do something in the future, then there's a big chance I'll forget to do it. If I've noted it down, and can sensibly put it into my usual reminder network, then my reliabilty shoots up.

A few points:

- If asked to do something like this, I quite often forget temporarily and then suddenly remember a little later, at which point I either do it straight away or construct a physical reminder (email, knot in hanky, mnemonic of some sort to tie it to an action I know I will be performing later) to make sure I don't forget again.

- I think we notice the times when someone says they'll do something and then doesn't actually do it, more than we notice the times it gets done as requested.

- It does slightly depend on whether the service in question is an asked-for favour, or an offered favour. If someone says "I know you have a copy of X, please could I borrow it?" I'd try less carefully to remember than if I happened to be talking to someone about X and offered to lend them my copy of it as part of the conversation. I would be annoyed if someone pestered me about something they'd asked for, rather than something I'd offered, IYSWIM.

- I can only think of one occasion when I semi-deliberately agreed to help out with something like this with no real intention of following through on it, because I felt slightly backed into a corner, and I still feel guilty about not having handled it well.

Mmm. I have occasionally suspected people of deliberately saying yes and not doing it, on the (presumed) basis that it provokes less argument than saying no and not doing it.

In the case where I said yes, the favour being asked of me was something I was rather uncomfortable doing for personal reasons, and I was being asked it in front of a lot of people to whom I really didn't want to have to explain why I didn't want to do it. So I said yes, thinking that I would just grit my teeth and do it anyway, but at the same time sort-of-knowing that I might not.

Afterwards, I realised I didn't care enough aboout what the asker thought of me to make me actually grit my teeth and do it.

If it was just something like lending a book, and I didn't want to lend it, I would just say no!

That's a bit naughty and would annoy me.

(One of the people I've tended to suspect of it is our once-mutual landlord, actually. Though the circumstances didn't exactly match the ones in this poll...)

I tend to move people up and down in my belief about their reliability rather than mind particularly, and then treat future requests with a seriousness based on that belief.

I have a terrible memory, so I write down even trivial requests (or if possible email them to myself) with the result that I'm probably pretty reliable.

(or if possible email them to myself)

This worked very well for me when I uses POP3 at home; if I thought of something at work that I needed to do, I'd email myself a reminder and then I'd see it in the evening, or next morning at the latest.

But now that I predominantly use webmail, I usually see it right away (still at work) and mark it read so as not to distract me from proper unread messages, and then when I'm home I may or may not see it on the list of messages still in my inbox "for referring to again later".

Possibly the single most useful feature in my personal MUA is the ability to add a "Queue: yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm" pseudo-header to an outgoing message, which is removed by the MUA and causes it to submit the message to an at job instead of directly to /usr/lib/sendmail. I get a huge number of these minor organisational things done by means of sending myself a time-delayed email so that I don't receive it until I am at home, or at work, or wherever. I don't think I'd now be able to migrate to any mail environment that didn't provide the same feature!

Ooh - clever!

(I also used to use it for sending messages to other people, delayed until after the next nightly build of my various free software. So I'd check in a fix for the bug they'd just reported, typically, and immediately send them a message saying "Try it now", which they wouldn't get until the version available for download from my web site had updated. Unfortunately, this occasionally made me look silly if the nightly build failed to happen. I always vaguely intended to enhance the queue feature so that the sending of the message could additionally be made conditional on some arbitrary Unix command returning a success status, but I never quite had the energy to think the details fully through and do it.)

I don't think I can fill in the first half of the poll because I don't have a real feel for the numbers. Generally people are reliable enough at this sort of thing that I forgive them if they forget. And if it's actually important I don't ask people to do things in this way.

I sometimes leave reminders and sometimes just remember: but if it's a "do it when you get back to your desk" thing you can't exactly leave a reminder other than by writing on the back of your hand, which you might not have a suitable implement for. And I do suggest people might email me when I think I'm likely to forget, but it's not their fault if they don't: specifically I can't see how they're *more* at fault for forgetting to remind me than I am for forgetting to do it.

I entirely forgot to not-eat-fish on Tuesday and Wednesday, when I'd thought I would remember. I'm not quite sure how I would have reminded myself of that one.

> Not-eat-fish

I write things like that on my hand. Though usually only the first letter, and then I sometimes forget what it stands for.

I couldn't really leave it on my hand for the whole two weeks between getting the letter and the time I had to start not-eating-fish though. I should have set my calendar to remind me on Tuesday morning or something.

You could've had a fish tattoo ;)

Written DON'T EAT FISH on your hand!

If someone asks me to do something that requires me to remember, I ask them to email me, or I write it in a notebook. At work I carry around a notebook all the time for this purpose, and I often have a notebook on me out of work. I am reasonably good at processing paper and email, though not 100% by any means.

If it's too complicated to put in a scribble in my notebook, or I am lacking a notebook, I try to make it clear that I need an email. My memory is catastrophic these days (I still haven't really adjusted, though it's been catastrophic since sometime during my pregnancy, so at least 3 years) so if I can't write it down/get it written down for me I quite probably won't remember.

Also, if someone doesn't want it enough to write a quick email, they don't want it enough for me to go to effort on their behalf.

Some of my family have taken to sending text messages to ask me to do things, and I haven't quite got into the habit of processing text messages into my to-do lists, so this often fails or results in me getting nagged.

Because I am so unreliable about casual requests myself, I don't assume anyone else will remember ones I make of them, and in fact I quite often forget that I have asked, unless it's really important (in which case I will write a reminder email).

IME people tend to do these things eventually. I know that I often forget to do them at the First Possible Opportunity but then remember to do them later.

It would appear that I have different standards for work requests and mate-requests. I have higher expectations in the professional situation and don't expect to have to remind people. If I've asked a mate to lend/return a book then I'm prepared for that fact that they may well forget and not get upset.

[x] I leave reminders to myself but they I don't always end up looking at the places where I left them.

(I clearly need a better, or at least more reliable, reminder system.)

I try to avoid doing that, because my life is already so full of little things I need to do, but I'm not very good at it as I get overenthusiastic. I don't tend to forget things, but I can also be terrible at actually doing them, just because I always have so much to do.

And I have a weird prioritisation system, in which 'how much will I enjoy doing this thing' plays a big part because (1) that makes my life happier and (2) I get much more done that way. And I don't take offense at being reminded about things, but if someone reminds me about something it makes me look forward to the task less, because doing something in response to "get on with this" is always less fun than doing a slightly unexpected nice thing for someone, and so it makes me less likely to do it. And as I say, it's unlikely to be that I've forgotten, but that I've taken on too many things. Quite understandably, most people interpret this as 'taking offence' at being reminded.

I'm not quite sure what to do about this, apart from redoubling my efforts to take on less stuff. I've tried prioritising things strictly in order of how important/urgent/overdue they are rather than how much I'll enjoy them (or the effect of having done them), but it does make me significantly less happy and significantly less productive.

I could try not minding about being reminded, but I'm not sure how I'd set about that.

It does annoy me if I've politely explained I can't do their five minute job because I have about 100 five minute jobs I need to get done, and some of them are more urgent, and they keep banging on with "it'll only take you five minutes though, and I saw you making frivolous lj comments the other day, so why couldn't you have done it instead of that?" because if I never did anything relaxing and fun until my to do list was complete, I'd expire from stress within a week or so. That wouldn't be the case if it was something they actually needed urgently though.

I get annoyed whenever people forget things, but I get annoyed when somebody spills their drink on me, and generally appreciate that it's not their fault and help them clean it up. If somebody forgets things over and over again I feel tempted to offer to organise their life for them which is sometimes slightly rude.

I get especially annoyed when I forget things because my entire life is made of mechanisms to stop me forgetting things, which because of fail-brain is my default thing to do with information.

It's a basic principle of management that if it ain't written down, it ain't gonna happen, and if it ain't reviewed, it ain't gonna happen neither.

So, about this dinner that we've been discussing for ages...

Ha, yes :-) You have mail.

I think it varies on quite a lot of things. Most people I know have very active email lives, so for most things I'd assume the default is "Yes, that's fine. But I'll probably forget unless you poke me by email". I'd start to count pestering from the second email, because I can, and have, spent years intending to give something to someone, getting in person reminders, and forgetting again, or vice versa.

And it depends how big a favour it is -- if it's small, you feel dafter about pestering, but more annoyed that they forgot, whereas if it's larger, or more time dependant, you don't want to pester, but don't want to let it go either.