Show Notes
How many calendar reminders do you have right now? How many Post-it notes? How many to-do lists? Every single one of those is a failure point waiting to happen.
Scott shares his own memory trap failure: sales tax due on the third Thursday of every month. Calendar reminder—skipped because low priority. To-do list—bumped to the next day. Post-it note on the monitor—blended into the background. Missed deadlines. Fines. "Hope is a terrible strategy."
The reframe: Calendar reminders are just digital Post-it notes. They still require someone to see them, acknowledge them, and take action. And when that person is sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed? The reminder fires, they dismiss it, and it never gets done.
The diagnostic question: How much work in your business depends on someone remembering to do it?
Where the Memory Trap hides:
- Recurring tasks (time-based triggers)
- Follow-ups (how much revenue lost because someone forgot?)
- Handoffs (how does Person B know it's their turn?)
Why it's dangerous: The Memory Trap is invisible until it fails. When someone remembers, nothing happens—the work gets done. When someone forgets, everything breaks. And then you blame the person. But you built a system that required them to remember. That's a system problem.
The three-part escape:
- Identify every memory-dependent task (calendar reminders, to-do lists, Post-it notes)
- Convert time triggers to action triggers (when X happens, do Y—not "remember on Monday")
- Build alerts for failures, not just reminders for tasks
Scott's payroll example: To-do at 8am every other Thursday. But also: at 3pm, if that to-do isn't marked complete, send a text. "Urgent. Payroll not approved." The alert catches what the reminder missed.
The Post-it note distinction: Capturing a problem is a one-time act of awareness—that's a tool for seeing. Relying on Post-it notes to execute recurring work—that's a crutch for remembering. One is improvement. The other is a trap.
Connection to SCALE: A = Automate the trigger. L = Leverage the data (visibility into what's NOT happening).
Your action: Find one recurring task that depends on someone remembering. Convert it from a time trigger to an action trigger. Automate it. Set up an alert.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
How many calendar reminders do you have right now? Not meetings on your calendar, but reminders. The little alerts that say, don't forget to do this. How many Post-it notes are stuck to your monitor? And how many to-do lists are open on your phone? What about your team? Maybe you're like, no, I'm good. What about your team? You see, here's the thing.
Every single one of those is a failure point waiting to happen because every time work depends on someone remembering to do something, you've created a crack in your business and cracks only grow over time. Today, I'm going deep on the memory trap and I'm going to show you why your calendar reminders aren't a solution. They are a problem. But first, let me tell you about the memory trap.
in my business. Welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving corporate America. And this show is dedicated to helping you build a business that you love. A few years ago, I introduced, I should say a few episodes ago, it feels like years ago, a few episodes ago, I introduced the four traps, the control trap, the variability trap, the memory trap, and the visibility trap.
And in the last two episodes, we've gone deep on the control trap and the variability trap. Today, we're tackling the third trap, the memory trap. And I'll tell you right now, this is the trap that creates the most frustration within businesses because things fall through the cracks. And when they do, everyone wants to point a finger. I'm not going to say you're the problem, but you're the problem. Just kidding. But you see, it's not a people problem.
This is a system problem. And here's what's happening. I'll give you an example from my business. In one of my businesses, we have to report sales tax on a monthly basis. And I decided I would be the person that did it. It was a small little thing. I should not have done it, but I took it onto my shoulders and I said, I'm going to do it. And it was due on the third Thursday of the month. So I put a calendar reminder out there. Hey.
I want to make sure I do this. And guess what? It was always the lowest priority thing. It really was. It was like kicking the can down the road. So it got skipped to the next day. And then I decided, you know what? There's got to be a better way. And this is after a couple of like missed deadlines where I had to like pay some fines. I'm like, okay, there's got to be a better way here. So I put it on my to-do list. But again, the low priority problem kicked in. So I would bump it to the next day. I would forget.
Sometimes I would forget to look at my to-do list because I was busy, man. And as a result, I would miss the filing deadline again. So then I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take a Post-It note. I'm going to it right in front of my keyboard, right on my monitor too. I'm going to go do that because I look at my monitor all day long. Guess what? The Post-It note blended into my visual surroundings and it got skipped again.
And that's when I realized that the Post-it Note system was not a system. It was me hoping to remember to do something, which by the way, hope is a terrible strategy. Now you might be thinking, okay, well, look, just use a calendar reminder. Okay, the calendar reminder is better than the Post-it Note, right? Well, no, and here's why.
Calendar reminders are just basically digital post-it notes. They still require someone to see them. They require someone to acknowledge them and then to take action on them. And what happens when that person is sick? What about when they're on vacation? In a meeting, overwhelmed with other priorities that they deem is higher or think that you deem as higher.
What happens is the reminder fires off, they dismiss it, they tell themselves they'll get to it later, and they never come back to it. I have seen businesses with literally hundreds of calendar reminders scattered across multiple people. Remind me to follow up with this client. Remind me to send an invoice. Remind me to check on this project. That is not a scalable solution. It's not sustainable.
And here's the question that you should be asking. How much work in your business depends on someone remembering to do it? Think about that for a second. How much work in your business requires memory, requires someone to remember? These could be weekly tasks that someone has to do every single Monday. ⁓ Maybe it's
Follow-ups, follow-ups for clients, remembering to send something. What about remembering to renew a contract or send some sort of renewal? Every single one of those is a memory trap issue because the work doesn't trigger itself. It depends on a human being remembering and humans forget.
Our brains aren't designed to hold a bunch of reoccurring tasks. That's not what memory is for. So when you build a business that depends on memory, you're fighting against human nature. And guess what? Human nature always wins. So now let's talk about where the memory trap hides because it really hides in three areas of your business. The first place is in reoccurring tasks.
Any time something has to happen on a schedule, weekly, monthly, quarterly, there is a vulnerability there because the trigger is time. It's not an action. And time-based triggers require someone to remember that it's time. Every Monday, we need to send the client an update. The first of the month, we have to reconcile the accounts. Every quarter, courtlies are the worst.
We have to review the contracts, whatever it's for. Okay? That is the trap. Time-based triggers, manual-based triggers are a trap.
The second area that they hide is in follow-ups, and this one is huge. This is one that you really can't even quantify, but how much revenue have you lost because someone forgot to follow up? Think about that one for a minute. I've had leads that have said, call me on this day, and then I have forgotten to call them on the day. And then I remember three days later, and guess what?
They're not taking my call anymore. They're mad because they told me to follow up on this day or I let them down. So they went off into business somewhere else. I let them off the hook. That's a problem. The third area that, well, memory trap lie in is in handoffs. Anytime work has to move from one person to another, there is a memory trap. Person A finishes their part, then person B needs to do their part.
But how does person B know? How does one person know that it's now time for them to kick into something else? So oftentimes it's just that they have to remember to go check up, this ready for me to go do my work? And when you have people having to remember, that's the crack. And work falls through cracks all the time. Now, here's what makes the memory trap just absolutely so dangerous.
It's dangerous because it's invisible. It's invisible until it fails. So when somebody has to remember to do something and they don't, and the work doesn't happen, well, in most cases, nobody notices. But when someone forgets and then they remember and they do the work, even if it's late, well then guess what? The work.
gets done and it's often like, oh, nobody noticed. Now, there could be some times where it does get noticed. For example, I don't know, sales tax. You file the sales tax late, guess what? You're going to get a penalty. You're going to get charged $50 for being late, plus interest, penalties, whatever it is. going to have to know that it was late. So then what happens? What happens from the business owner's perspective, from your perspective, when you're like, the work wasn't done?
It's easy to want to go and blame the person. Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you remember? How could you forget? But it's not their fault. You built a system that required them to remember. Think about that for a second. A lot of times people want to blame people within their organization for things not getting done.
but if the system allowed them not to do it, that's a system problem. I firmly believe in system first. So we have to build systems that create the opportunity for the business to work and to win. And I talked about this in episode 52. This is episode 57. So five episodes ago, I introduced the scale framework. And in the scale, the letter A stands for automate the trigger. And that's...
exactly why we do this. See, manual triggers fail. Automated triggers don't forget. So how do you escape the memory trap? How do you get out of this? Well, there's three steps. Part one, step one, whatever you want to call it, is to identify the memory dependent task. This means that you go through your business and you find every task that depends on someone remembering. Look for counter invites, look for reoccurring to do's,
Look for follow-up lists, look for post-it notes on monitors, make a list of them all, capture them all. And I promise you that list is larger than you think. And the more people that you have in your company, the more memory that there is. Part two is that you need to figure out how to convert these time triggers into action triggers. And that's the key shift. Instead of remembering to do this on Monday,
We want something to trigger this so that it just gets done. So let me give you an example. Instead of remembering to send a client update every Monday, we want to figure out some way that we can automate that process so that on Monday at 9 AM, the updates are sent automatically. Or better is we provide an update when the project status changes in some part.
The client gets notified automatically. Law firms, for example, are some law firms are better than others, but law firms are notorious for like having all of this client work going on. And you never know what's going on with your case. Like what's happening here? Good law firms have automated trigger set up to where when the case moves status or when somebody has looked at something to get an update on the case, it automatically triggers an updated email saying, hey,
This is what's happening or better yet, nothing has happened. Okay, I've had some law firms that actually call me and say, just want to tell you that nothing's happening with the case so far. Okay, cool. It's one less thing that I have to worry about and remember. See, what you want to do is you want to figure out how to make the trigger so that it's not time. It's not time-based for somebody to remember to do it. The trigger is an action. That's the best one. And actions don't require memory.
Another example might be instead of remembering to follow up with your leads, you set up a system that if the lead doesn't respond within 48 hours, then an automatic follow up is also sent. Or what about when a lead goes cold, that a task is opened automatically for the sales rep. See, that's event triggers and that's going to get you out of the memory trap. The human doesn't have to remember. The system handles it.
Step three, part three of this memory trap escape is to build alerts for failures. And this is so important, so important. If there's one thing you remember, you don't just want reminders to do the work. You also need alerts to notify you when work doesn't happen. So here's an example from my business is one of the things that I still do in my business is I approve payroll.
every other week I do the payroll approval. I haven't found somebody that I want to do it yet. I still do it. So, payroll is due by 5 p.m. every other Thursday. I have to remember. So I have on my to-do list every Thursday at 8 a.m. to pop up and say, this. I also have an automated trigger that looks at this and says,
at 3pm every other Thursday if that to-do list item is not marked as complete to send me a text message. Urgent. Payroll not approved. Now maybe I've forgotten to check it off. Maybe I have forgotten to do the payroll payoff or approval. That's my trigger. That's my, hey, go do this now. Urgent. It's urgent.
And see, in episode 52, when I talked about scale, I talked about the letter L, and L is leverage the data. And this is where it applies. You want visibility into what's not happening within your business. So you don't want to know what is like, okay, we're successful in doing this. You also want to know where the failure parts are. If you can make the invisible work visible, man, you have changed the dynamic of your business.
So here's how the memory trap connects to the scale framework. The A that I already mentioned is automate the trigger. That's part two of the escape because we're converting from memory-based triggers to action-based triggers. And also the L in scale is for leverage the data. That's part three. We want to build alerts when things fail. So we want to build this into our systems. And when you do both of those, the memory trap disappears.
because work happens whether or not someone remembers. Now I wanna come back to something that I also said in a previous episode where I told you that Post-it notes, using Post-it notes to capture friction points, okay, I told you to go do that and now in this episode I'm telling you that Post-it notes are a trap. So what's the difference? You see, when you're capturing a problem on a Post-it note, that's a one-time active awareness. Something...
You see something that's broken, you write it down, you put it on the wall. That's my recommendation. That's your observation. Okay. That's your process improvement, but relying on Post-it notes to execute reoccurring tasks. That's the trap. One is a tool for seeing and the other is to help you remember. Don't use Post-it notes to help you remember. So here's your action for this episode. Find one reoccurring task in your business.
that currently depends on someone remembering. Just one and convert it to a time trigger. I'm sorry, convert it from a time trigger to an action trigger. I want you to automate it. Set up an alert. Remember that human memory, the more that you can remove it from the equation, the better. And that's the first step out of the memory trap.
In our next episode, we're going to go deep on the final trap, which is the visibility trap. And this is the one that makes you feel like you are in charge when in fact you're flying blind. And I'll show you the question that reveals whether you have data that you need to, I'm sorry, whether you have the data that you need to make the decisions in your business or not. And if you have a business question, head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask.
I read every single submission and I will see you in our next episode.
How many calendar reminders do you have right now? Not meetings on your calendar, but reminders. The little alerts that say, don't forget to do this. How many Post-it notes are stuck to your monitor? And how many to-do lists are open on your phone? What about your team? Maybe you're like, no, I'm good. What about your team? You see, here's the thing.
Every single one of those is a failure point waiting to happen because every time work depends on someone remembering to do something, you've created a crack in your business and cracks only grow over time. Today, I'm going deep on the memory trap and I'm going to show you why your calendar reminders aren't a solution. They are a problem. But first, let me tell you about the memory trap.
in my business. Welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving corporate America. And this show is dedicated to helping you build a business that you love. A few years ago, I introduced, I should say a few episodes ago, it feels like years ago, a few episodes ago, I introduced the four traps, the control trap, the variability trap, the memory trap, and the visibility trap.
And in the last two episodes, we've gone deep on the control trap and the variability trap. Today, we're tackling the third trap, the memory trap. And I'll tell you right now, this is the trap that creates the most frustration within businesses because things fall through the cracks. And when they do, everyone wants to point a finger. I'm not going to say you're the problem, but you're the problem. Just kidding. But you see, it's not a people problem.
This is a system problem. And here's what's happening. I'll give you an example from my business. In one of my businesses, we have to report sales tax on a monthly basis. And I decided I would be the person that did it. It was a small little thing. I should not have done it, but I took it onto my shoulders and I said, I'm going to do it. And it was due on the third Thursday of the month. So I put a calendar reminder out there. Hey.
I want to make sure I do this. And guess what? It was always the lowest priority thing. It really was. It was like kicking the can down the road. So it got skipped to the next day. And then I decided, you know what? There's got to be a better way. And this is after a couple of like missed deadlines where I had to like pay some fines. I'm like, okay, there's got to be a better way here. So I put it on my to-do list. But again, the low priority problem kicked in. So I would bump it to the next day. I would forget.
Sometimes I would forget to look at my to-do list because I was busy, man. And as a result, I would miss the filing deadline again. So then I'm like, you know what? I'm going to take a Post-It note. I'm going to it right in front of my keyboard, right on my monitor too. I'm going to go do that because I look at my monitor all day long. Guess what? The Post-It note blended into my visual surroundings and it got skipped again.
And that's when I realized that the Post-it Note system was not a system. It was me hoping to remember to do something, which by the way, hope is a terrible strategy. Now you might be thinking, okay, well, look, just use a calendar reminder. Okay, the calendar reminder is better than the Post-it Note, right? Well, no, and here's why.
Calendar reminders are just basically digital post-it notes. They still require someone to see them. They require someone to acknowledge them and then to take action on them. And what happens when that person is sick? What about when they're on vacation? In a meeting, overwhelmed with other priorities that they deem is higher or think that you deem as higher.
What happens is the reminder fires off, they dismiss it, they tell themselves they'll get to it later, and they never come back to it. I have seen businesses with literally hundreds of calendar reminders scattered across multiple people. Remind me to follow up with this client. Remind me to send an invoice. Remind me to check on this project. That is not a scalable solution. It's not sustainable.
And here's the question that you should be asking. How much work in your business depends on someone remembering to do it? Think about that for a second. How much work in your business requires memory, requires someone to remember? These could be weekly tasks that someone has to do every single Monday. ⁓ Maybe it's
Follow-ups, follow-ups for clients, remembering to send something. What about remembering to renew a contract or send some sort of renewal? Every single one of those is a memory trap issue because the work doesn't trigger itself. It depends on a human being remembering and humans forget.
Our brains aren't designed to hold a bunch of reoccurring tasks. That's not what memory is for. So when you build a business that depends on memory, you're fighting against human nature. And guess what? Human nature always wins. So now let's talk about where the memory trap hides because it really hides in three areas of your business. The first place is in reoccurring tasks.
Any time something has to happen on a schedule, weekly, monthly, quarterly, there is a vulnerability there because the trigger is time. It's not an action. And time-based triggers require someone to remember that it's time. Every Monday, we need to send the client an update. The first of the month, we have to reconcile the accounts. Every quarter, courtlies are the worst.
We have to review the contracts, whatever it's for. Okay? That is the trap. Time-based triggers, manual-based triggers are a trap.
The second area that they hide is in follow-ups, and this one is huge. This is one that you really can't even quantify, but how much revenue have you lost because someone forgot to follow up? Think about that one for a minute. I've had leads that have said, call me on this day, and then I have forgotten to call them on the day. And then I remember three days later, and guess what?
They're not taking my call anymore. They're mad because they told me to follow up on this day or I let them down. So they went off into business somewhere else. I let them off the hook. That's a problem. The third area that, well, memory trap lie in is in handoffs. Anytime work has to move from one person to another, there is a memory trap. Person A finishes their part, then person B needs to do their part.
But how does person B know? How does one person know that it's now time for them to kick into something else? So oftentimes it's just that they have to remember to go check up, this ready for me to go do my work? And when you have people having to remember, that's the crack. And work falls through cracks all the time. Now, here's what makes the memory trap just absolutely so dangerous.
It's dangerous because it's invisible. It's invisible until it fails. So when somebody has to remember to do something and they don't, and the work doesn't happen, well, in most cases, nobody notices. But when someone forgets and then they remember and they do the work, even if it's late, well then guess what? The work.
gets done and it's often like, oh, nobody noticed. Now, there could be some times where it does get noticed. For example, I don't know, sales tax. You file the sales tax late, guess what? You're going to get a penalty. You're going to get charged $50 for being late, plus interest, penalties, whatever it is. going to have to know that it was late. So then what happens? What happens from the business owner's perspective, from your perspective, when you're like, the work wasn't done?
It's easy to want to go and blame the person. Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you remember? How could you forget? But it's not their fault. You built a system that required them to remember. Think about that for a second. A lot of times people want to blame people within their organization for things not getting done.
but if the system allowed them not to do it, that's a system problem. I firmly believe in system first. So we have to build systems that create the opportunity for the business to work and to win. And I talked about this in episode 52. This is episode 57. So five episodes ago, I introduced the scale framework. And in the scale, the letter A stands for automate the trigger. And that's...
exactly why we do this. See, manual triggers fail. Automated triggers don't forget. So how do you escape the memory trap? How do you get out of this? Well, there's three steps. Part one, step one, whatever you want to call it, is to identify the memory dependent task. This means that you go through your business and you find every task that depends on someone remembering. Look for counter invites, look for reoccurring to do's,
Look for follow-up lists, look for post-it notes on monitors, make a list of them all, capture them all. And I promise you that list is larger than you think. And the more people that you have in your company, the more memory that there is. Part two is that you need to figure out how to convert these time triggers into action triggers. And that's the key shift. Instead of remembering to do this on Monday,
We want something to trigger this so that it just gets done. So let me give you an example. Instead of remembering to send a client update every Monday, we want to figure out some way that we can automate that process so that on Monday at 9 AM, the updates are sent automatically. Or better is we provide an update when the project status changes in some part.
The client gets notified automatically. Law firms, for example, are some law firms are better than others, but law firms are notorious for like having all of this client work going on. And you never know what's going on with your case. Like what's happening here? Good law firms have automated trigger set up to where when the case moves status or when somebody has looked at something to get an update on the case, it automatically triggers an updated email saying, hey,
This is what's happening or better yet, nothing has happened. Okay, I've had some law firms that actually call me and say, just want to tell you that nothing's happening with the case so far. Okay, cool. It's one less thing that I have to worry about and remember. See, what you want to do is you want to figure out how to make the trigger so that it's not time. It's not time-based for somebody to remember to do it. The trigger is an action. That's the best one. And actions don't require memory.
Another example might be instead of remembering to follow up with your leads, you set up a system that if the lead doesn't respond within 48 hours, then an automatic follow up is also sent. Or what about when a lead goes cold, that a task is opened automatically for the sales rep. See, that's event triggers and that's going to get you out of the memory trap. The human doesn't have to remember. The system handles it.
Step three, part three of this memory trap escape is to build alerts for failures. And this is so important, so important. If there's one thing you remember, you don't just want reminders to do the work. You also need alerts to notify you when work doesn't happen. So here's an example from my business is one of the things that I still do in my business is I approve payroll.
every other week I do the payroll approval. I haven't found somebody that I want to do it yet. I still do it. So, payroll is due by 5 p.m. every other Thursday. I have to remember. So I have on my to-do list every Thursday at 8 a.m. to pop up and say, this. I also have an automated trigger that looks at this and says,
at 3pm every other Thursday if that to-do list item is not marked as complete to send me a text message. Urgent. Payroll not approved. Now maybe I've forgotten to check it off. Maybe I have forgotten to do the payroll payoff or approval. That's my trigger. That's my, hey, go do this now. Urgent. It's urgent.
And see, in episode 52, when I talked about scale, I talked about the letter L, and L is leverage the data. And this is where it applies. You want visibility into what's not happening within your business. So you don't want to know what is like, okay, we're successful in doing this. You also want to know where the failure parts are. If you can make the invisible work visible, man, you have changed the dynamic of your business.
So here's how the memory trap connects to the scale framework. The A that I already mentioned is automate the trigger. That's part two of the escape because we're converting from memory-based triggers to action-based triggers. And also the L in scale is for leverage the data. That's part three. We want to build alerts when things fail. So we want to build this into our systems. And when you do both of those, the memory trap disappears.
because work happens whether or not someone remembers. Now I wanna come back to something that I also said in a previous episode where I told you that Post-it notes, using Post-it notes to capture friction points, okay, I told you to go do that and now in this episode I'm telling you that Post-it notes are a trap. So what's the difference? You see, when you're capturing a problem on a Post-it note, that's a one-time active awareness. Something...
You see something that's broken, you write it down, you put it on the wall. That's my recommendation. That's your observation. Okay. That's your process improvement, but relying on Post-it notes to execute reoccurring tasks. That's the trap. One is a tool for seeing and the other is to help you remember. Don't use Post-it notes to help you remember. So here's your action for this episode. Find one reoccurring task in your business.
that currently depends on someone remembering. Just one and convert it to a time trigger. I'm sorry, convert it from a time trigger to an action trigger. I want you to automate it. Set up an alert. Remember that human memory, the more that you can remove it from the equation, the better. And that's the first step out of the memory trap.
In our next episode, we're going to go deep on the final trap, which is the visibility trap. And this is the one that makes you feel like you are in charge when in fact you're flying blind. And I'll show you the question that reveals whether you have data that you need to, I'm sorry, whether you have the data that you need to make the decisions in your business or not. And if you have a business question, head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask.
I read every single submission and I will see you in our next episode.