You Can Forget What Matters to You

We tend to think that if something is important enough, we won't forget it.

Maybe we forget an appointment. A name. Something we meant to pick up from the store. But the important things? The things we deeply value? Surely those stay with us.

Except they don't.

Forgetting Doesn't Always Mean It's Gone

You can forget something without losing the knowledge of it.

Sometimes forgetting simply means that something has moved out of the foreground of your consciousness. It is still somewhere in there. If someone mentions it, you immediately recognize it.

“Oh yeah.”

You remember.

But you hadn't thought about it today.

Maybe you didn't think about it yesterday, either.

And while you weren't thinking about it, other things were making demands on your attention.

Emails. Work. Bills. Children. Relationships. Projects. Appointments. Ideas. Problems. Notifications. Things that actually need to be handled and things that merely feel like they need to be handled because they are sitting directly in front of you.

The immediate has an incredible ability to make itself important.

Meanwhile, something you deliberately decided mattered to you can quietly move further and further into the background.

You didn't decide it no longer mattered.

You didn't abandon it.

You just stopped consulting it.

Knowing Your Values Isn't the Same as Living Them

I think this happens with our values more than we realize.

We spend a lot of time talking about identifying values. There are exercises for it. Books about it. Organizations put them on walls. We ask ourselves what kind of person we want to be and what we want our lives to represent.

But identifying a value and living according to one are two different things.

Once you have decided what matters to you, there is still the question of whether that decision will be present when it needs to influence your behavior.

That is the part I have been thinking about.

A value can be completely sincere and still have very little influence over an ordinary Tuesday.

You can value your health and repeatedly allow other things to consume the time you intended to use to care for it.

You can value your relationships and realize you haven't meaningfully connected with someone you love in weeks.

You can value financial stability and make a series of small decisions that work against it.

You can value rest while continually treating rest as whatever happens after everything else is finished.

You can value being present with your children and still find yourself distracted by things that could have waited.

None of that necessarily means you were lying when you said those things mattered.

Sometimes you forgot.

Not in the traditional sense.

You forgot in practice.

The value stopped occupying enough space in your consciousness to affect what you were doing.

That distinction matters to me because the solution to forgetting isn't necessarily to care more.

You may already care deeply.

The question becomes: How do you make it easier to return to what you already know?

The Code Exists for a Reason

I have been thinking about this in my own life.

One of the values I have deliberately set for myself concerns how I use my son's waking hours. I have plenty of things I want to write, research, build and explore. I also know myself well enough to know that “let me check one thing” can turn into genuine mental investment very quickly.

Then my two-year-old does what a two-year-old is supposed to do: he wants my attention.

The conflict isn't really between my son and my work.

The conflict started earlier, when I allowed work to enter time that I had already decided wasn't meant for it.

That realization led me to a specific rule for myself: when he is awake and alert, unnecessary computer work, research, writing and rabbit holes can wait. I have protected time before he wakes, during his nap and after he goes to bed.

That isn't a rule I think every parent needs to adopt.

It is a decision I made based on what I value, what I have experienced and what I know about myself.

And that distinction is important.

Our personal values should produce personal decisions.

Maybe your rule is about not answering work emails after a certain hour.

Maybe you decided you aren't going into debt for things you don't need.

Maybe you decided you call your parents regularly.

Maybe you protect Sunday mornings.

Maybe you don't allow certain kinds of conversations in your home.

Maybe you exercise before work because experience has taught you that “I'll do it later” usually means you won't.

Maybe you decided that when you're angry, you don't send the message immediately.

Whatever it is, at some point you probably had an experience, reflected on it, considered what mattered to you and reached a conclusion:

This is how I want to handle this going forward.

Then life happens.

And strangely, we often allow ourselves to reopen decisions in the exact moments when we have the least perspective.

The thing in front of us wants something different, so we start negotiating with ourselves.

Just this once.

I'll get back on track tomorrow.

It will only take a minute.

This is different.

I know what I said, but...

Sometimes those exceptions are completely reasonable. Values aren't supposed to eliminate judgment.

But sometimes we aren't exercising judgment.

We're allowing the urgency, convenience or desire of the current moment to overrule a decision we made when we were considering the larger life we wanted.

That is why I have started thinking about personal values almost like a code.

The code exists because you already thought about it.

You experienced something.

You learned something.

You considered what mattered.

You made a decision.

There is a form of self-leadership in honoring that decision instead of requiring yourself to rediscover its wisdom every time the situation comes around again.

Sometimes discipline isn't making the right decision in the moment.

Sometimes discipline is respecting a decision you already made when you had more perspective.

What Happens When You Forget the Code?

But that still leaves us with the problem of forgetting.

You can have an excellent code for your life and still fail to consult it.

That is where structure becomes important.

We often treat reminders, calendars, routines, written plans, dashboards and other systems as productivity tools.

They are.

But I think they can serve another purpose.

They can help us remember ourselves.

Think about how many things people keep visible simply because they are afraid that if they put them away, they will forget them.

An open browser tab.

A piece of mail sitting on the counter.

An email marked unread even though you've already read it.

A note on your phone.

A document left open.

Something sitting beside the front door.

These are all little attempts to keep something in our consciousness.

Don't forget this.

Come back to this.

This still matters.

The problem is that when everything has to remain visible in order to be remembered, eventually everything becomes clutter.

And clutter isn't particularly good at telling us what matters.

A System Should Make It Safe to Let Go

A reliable system changes that.

If you know where something lives and trust that you will encounter it again, you can let it leave your immediate consciousness.

You can close the tab.

You can capture the idea without following it.

You can stop mentally rehearsing the thing you need to remember.

You can say, “Not now,” without fearing that you've accidentally said, “Never.”

That is one of the reasons I am building a dashboard for myself. I want a place where the different things I am responsible for, working toward and deliberately trying to protect can connect.

But I am realizing that I don't only need to see what I need to do.

I also need to see what I have already decided.

There is a difference.

A task tells you what requires action.

A value reminds you how you have decided to live.

Some values are broad enough to carry with us for years. Others need to become extremely specific because specificity makes them usable.

“Family is important to me” may be true.

But what does that mean at 10:42 on Wednesday morning?

“Financial stability matters to me” may be true.

What does that mean when something you want is sitting in your shopping cart?

“I value my health” sounds good.

What happens when your calendar fills up?

Values become much more powerful when they are translated into behaviors that can actually govern ordinary moments.

And once we have translated them, we need ways to return to them.

Commitment Is Also the Practice of Returning

That may be the part we underestimate.

Commitment isn't just deciding once.

It is returning.

You will drift.

You will forget.

You will occasionally realize that your behavior hasn't reflected something you genuinely believe in.

That doesn't necessarily require a new value, a new plan or another round of soul-searching.

Sometimes you already have the answer.

Return.

There is something freeing about that word because it doesn't demand perfection.

You don't have to prove your commitment by never drifting from what you value.

You demonstrate commitment by noticing the distance and coming back.

Maybe that is why some things are worth writing down.

Not because we don't know them.

Because we do.

And because we know ourselves well enough to understand that even the things that matter can be forgotten.

Our attention will move.

Life will get loud.

The immediate will continue presenting itself as important.

So perhaps part of living intentionally is creating ways for the things we value to find us again.

Not everything important needs to stay in the foreground of our minds every minute.

But the things that are supposed to govern how we live need a reliable way back.

Know what you value.

Translate it into decisions.

Build structures that help you remember those decisions.

And when you realize you've drifted, return.

You may not need to figure out what matters all over again.

You may simply need to remember what you already decided.