Everyone forgets things, unless you have eidetic memory. In order to counter this, many people do all sorts of things to not forget something. We get rubber bands, write on sticky notes, setup calendars, get day planners, create agendas, etc… The problem is that even with all of these things, there are still things that fall between the cracks.
As forgetfulness is a natural part of our lives, we tolerate this to an extent. The extent being limited to the severity of what was forgotten. For example, listening to a friend tell a joke for the 4th or 5th time, because they can’t remember who they haven’t told it to, is often times acceptable while forgetting your presentation to land a major client, would land you in deep trouble.
And yet, it still happens. Student’s forget major projects/tests, husband’s forget their spouses’s birthday/anniversary, customers forget to update their information with all of their vendors, the list goes on. As a result, grades are adversely affected, loved ones are hurt, services we rely on are shut down.
Now the problem here is not memory, while a perfect memory would fix a lot of these issues, you cannot blame a natural part of life. The problem is that we have this natural tendency to blame anyone else besides ourselves for our memory problems. The professor didn’t remind the students, the spouse didn’t remind their husband, the vendor didn’t remind the client.
I seriously got a customer a while back who blamed our company for not keeping their information up to date. All of their information was out of date (phone number, email, address, credit card, etc…). We tried contacting them, that they were past due 3 times. Then we shut them down for not paying their bill. Then suddenly it is our fault because everything is out of date and they can’t remember anything needed to get into their account. We can have up to 6 different means a customer can verify, and if those don’t work, we have backup options. All because people forget.
Stop blaming other people for forgetting something. Learn from them, find out what you didn’t do, and change. Sometimes the consequences are not going to be nice, but that is life. Take better notes, track things better, put stuff in multiple locations. It may take a little extra time to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks, but usually that is much better than the alternative.