Managing Forgetfulness at Work: Strategies to Stay on Top of Tasks

Do you find yourself misplacing your car keys more often than you'd like? Or struggling to remember every item on your grocery list? We’ve all been there; everyone forgets things once in a while. But when those memory lapses turn into being forgetful at work, that’s when the real challenges start to surface.

Picture this.

You arrive at the office at 9:18 a.m., being late as usual, running late again because you couldn't find your car keys.

Agitated by your hectic morning, you log in to your computer to start working.

You are greeted with the painful reality of numerous missed deadlines, dozens of unreplied emails from last week, and several misplaced documents.

To top it off, new tasks seem to pop up every 3 minutes or so.

You roll your eyes, pondering how you are going to explain all these missed deadlines to your team lead, secretly hoping that you’ll get away with it.

We can all be forgetful sometimes, right? Your team lead should show some compassion for your lack of concentration.

Maybe. But maybe not.

Your repeated forgetfulness at work is a serious issue: it hinders your performance, affects your reputation and relationships with colleagues, and even slows down career growth. If memory slip-ups turn into “I keep forgetting things at work all the time, I don’t know why”, it’s time to check yourself and work on your focus and concentration.

Knowing how important this topic is, this article covers forgetfulness at work, what causes it, and how you can sharpen your memory with concrete steps. We explore this topic from two perspectives: as an employee dealing with forgetfulness and as a manager or team lead looking to support team members facing these challenges.

Let’s dive in.

Part I: Being a forgetful employee

If you keep forgetting things at work, you have probably missed several important meetings, haven’t responded to urgent emails, and had to juggle a million tasks at once.

I bet you know what it feels like to lose sight of what needs to be done. And that feeling is so dangerous.

Being forgetful at work disrupts your productivity and your sense of well-being. Such mental cloudiness affects your self-esteem and can even lead to burnout.

And this chronic habit of having brain fog doesn’t serve anyone: not you, your team lead, or your colleagues.

When you constantly forget tasks or struggle to stay focused, it not only affects your performance but also puts extra pressure on your team. Your manager might need to step in more often, while coworkers may have to pick up the slack, all the while getting frustrated and anxious.

Over time, your forgetfulness strains relationships in your team and slows overall project progress. 

That's why addressing forgetfulness at work is crucial—not just for your own well-being but also for the success of the entire team.

What is triggering your forgetfulness?

The number one cause of being forgetful at work?

You probably guessed it: multitasking.

We at Memtime view multitasking as the contagious delusion of the corporate world. We believe that it’s a productivity plague that subtly suggests that people get more done by managing several tasks at a time when, in reality, they don’t.

Multitasking drains your energy, breaks concentration, and lowers the quality of your work. When you spin between tasks, you lose efficiency.

Not convinced?

Let’s take a look at the science behind it—specifically, working memory.

You see, your brain can handle a particular amount of tasks during the day or week.

Working memory refers to the memory used when you think about a problem and it’s very limited. In fact, your brain is able to hold only about 3 to 5 items at once.

So, when you try to multitask, it exceeds your brain’s memory capacity, which is why you can’t successfully and efficiently process information. Not to mention, when you have to switch between tasks rapidly, your brain consumes more cognitive resources than necessary, meaning you are more likely to make mistakes.

Ultimately, multitasking is proven to lead to mental fatigue, lowering your productivity and increasing stress.

What’s even more intriguing is that if you experience stress before trying to remember something, it becomes much harder to recall and store that information in your working memory.

A study on working memory and stress suggests that stress negatively affects cognition and working memory, affecting the structure and function of brain regions that are key for working memory, like the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.

So, when you connect multitasking and stress, you get a catch-22 situation. Or which came first, the chicken or the egg? Multitasking or stress?

What can you do to combat forgetfulness at work?

The obvious tips from all the previously mentioned are to stop multitasking and manage stress better.

But it’s easier said than done.

Multitasking can be a persistent habit that requires a step-by-step approach.

So, we at Memtime suggest you do this to reduce forgetfulness at work:

• Reduce the number of items on your to-do list. Eliminating multitasking isn’t just about not jumping from one task to another but about improving your planning and organizational skills. Learn to establish goals,  prioritize tasks, and even set reminders for key events (like meetings) during your workdays.
• Lower your stress levels. The one thing that will lower your stress is learning how to manage your time better. In most situations, stress appears as a symptom of high expectations of yourself, especially when combined with improper time management. The pressure to meet those expectations builds when you set overly ambitious goals without allocating enough time or planning properly. It also helps to prioritize self-care, such as getting more sleep, improving your diet, or engaging in mindful practices.

Rely on Memtime, your quiet working memory assistant

We at Memtime call our app a “memory assistant”.

It’s just that; a comprehensive tool that captures all your work一quietly!一in the background.

It automatically tracks time spent on all your computer activities and provides detailed logs so you can reconstruct your workday.

With Memtime, you can pinpoint how much time was spent drafting emails, attending meetings, working on specific project tasks, etc., across all tabs and programs. All that while focusing on your work and forgetting your time is being tracked.

With Memtime, you can:

And if you wonder about the privacy of your time tracking data, Memtime stores data locally on your device only, giving you full control over your information.

If you decide to transform your memory and keep track of every task, just click the button below to start your 2-week free trial. No credit card needed; just sign up with your email.

Part II: Leading a team of forgetful employees

When you schedule a meeting with your team, your employees should show up on time.

When you set deadlines for tasks, your employees should meet those deadlines.

It’s common corporate decency, right?!

Yet, somehow, not all employees attend meetings and meet deadlines. Some of them just forget.

You get frustrated because other team members feel disrespected or bitter. As an experienced manager, you understand that when employees frequently forget important tasks, it can erode trust within the team. And once trust is compromised, rebuilding it becomes a challenge.

In the long run, dealing with forgetful employees directly impacts your company’s profitability. Missed deadlines delay subsequent projects, which in turn leads to even more missed deadlines.

Chronic forgetfulness at work can be a great menace to your team’s productivity, which is why you need to find ways to help and support forgetful employees.

3 steps to eliminating forgetfulness in your team

As mentioned before, forgetfulness is a symptom, not a disease.

The disease is either multitasking or stress一or both.

Such a disease affects teams worldwide. Check out this discussion on Reddit, r/managers, where a user noticed that the “laziness of forgetful employees” was caused by their inability to focus on a few specific tasks.

So, to eliminate forgetfulness in your team, you must get to the root cause of their slip-ups and provide tools to overcome them. Here are 3 effective ways to do so.

#1 Have a one-on-one talk with forgetful employees.

The key to discussing forgetfulness with employees is having the right dosage of empathy and the ability to assertively communicate the issue. Chronic forgetfulness is unacceptable because of how it affects employees, your team, and your company.

Of course, the goal is not to make people feel bad about themselves but to understand how serious the issue of forgetfulness is and what they can do to stop and prevent it.

Here are some questions you can ask to help you identify the reasons behind your employees’ forgetfulness at work.

#2 Suggest they use a time tracking tool alongside a project management app.

A time tracking tool should be used as a means to identify patterns in forgetful employees’ work habits, allowing them to pinpoint distractions and clarify where they need to improve focus.

But the key action here is to pair a time tracking app with project management software so you can assign times to projects, monitor deadlines, and keep everything systematically organized with the help of just two platforms.

We say use a project management software of your choice and Memtime.

Pairing a project management tool with Memtime works so well because it eliminates excuses: your employees' days will be automatically organized. Once Memtime captures all their activities, they can turn them into time entries and connect those time entries with tasks in project management software.

For you, the team lead, it means you’ll have an exact overview of what has been done, who’s done it, and how much time it took them.

#3 Introduce a time tracking pilot program to employees.

Encouraging employees to view time tracking for what it is一a personalized tool, not a monitoring system一can be troublesome.

That’s why it’s your job to explain to them that you want them to take ownership of their productivity. Suggest that workflow will be streamlined, and they’ll see a reduction in forgetfulness when they start using a time tracking app.

Since they will probably be a bit hesitant to give Memtime a shot, suggest a team trial period so employees can see first-hand how it impacts their memory and task management. This can be seen as a low-pressure way for them to explore Memtime's benefits and still feel supported.

If you want to give Memtime a shot, schedule a call with us, and we’ll happily run a custom live onboarding for your staff.

At the end of the trial, we’ll arrange another call with you to answer any questions your team may have. From then on, you can choose a Memtime package that best suits your team's needs.

Wrapping it up

Forgetfulness can feel like a fog in which tasks disappear as fast as they appear.

But there’s a way you can improve such productivity parades, no matter if you experience forgetfulness yourself or lead a team of forgetful employees.

With tools like Memtime, tasks will take the spotlight, enabling your employees to ditch the multitasking myth and regain control over their time.

Sit back, focus, and let Memtime be your memory’s secret weapon.