Cue in Context

Put one exact prompt at the place and time of the intended action, and delete cues that don't change behavior.

Every trip, the same discovery at the worst moment: the camera battery is dead, or the memory card is in the laptop at home. You know the check perfectly well. You have performed it, angrily, in a trailhead parking lot 90 minutes from the charger. Knowing is not your problem. Remembering at the moment that matters is.

Cue in Context is the heuristic for people who know what to do but fail to remember at the moment of action. The procedure: put one exact prompt at the place and time of the intended action. Here, that means taping the battery-and-memory-card check inside the camera bag itself, so packing the bag and encountering the reminder are the same event. The spec adds two disciplines that separate this from ordinary reminder-setting. The safeguard: remove weak alerts, because too many cues erase the signal; a phone that pings for everything is a phone you have learned to ignore. And the stop rule: keep only cues that measurably change behavior. If the taped note stops working, or never worked, delete it rather than adding a second note beside it. When the heuristic lands, the dead-battery discovery moves from the trailhead to your kitchen, where it costs 40 seconds.