h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you're in a job, or any situation where you have to do something at a future time, and it's crucial that you don't forget, here's a good tip. Keep a set of files, one for each month of the year, and sub-divide them by the number of days in each month. Let's say that today is June 1st, and you have to send someone a renewal notice on September 30th. Simply put a note in the relevant file for September 30th, and (this is the best part), forget about it. As long as you look at each day's file every day, it's infallible. It sounds so simple and so obvious, and it's the paper equivalent of an electronic personal organiser, but how many people actually bother with it? And it can't crash.
Little things like this will make you appear organised to those around you (partly because you are), and when people think that you're organised, they're much less inclined to take liberties with you, and much more inclined to do something you've asked them to do, on time, because they know that you're going to be there waiting, on the day the project is meant to be presented.

If I may be allowed to use a German word here...... they have these things, they're usually just numbered 1-31 though, and they work as described above. If I have to do something in 3 months time I just keep moving it. Anyway the word for such a thing is (if it survives moderation) Wiedervorlagemappe. Brilliant!

I was told this was a "Brought Forward" file in English, and did use the expression in the entry. My problem is more often than not that I don't have to do something on a specific day, but I have to check that something has happened on that day.

The idea of slipping a note into this dated file is best in that case, because - to use an example - say you expect a quote by a certain date, but it arrives a couple of days before. You'd go mad looking for that quote. So you file the enquiry where you asked for the quote under the supplier or project name, whatever your system, but you put a note to yourself in the file - just as you suggest. Then, when the note appears, you just check the file to make sure the quote has arrived. If it has, you throw the note away - if not - take action!

That's a very good example Trillian's. When I wrote that post I was thinking more of future actions you have to take rather than things you're expecting from others, and I can see how it might screw things up if you actually got something early, and forgot about it by the time you actually needed it. If that happened, I think I'd file the quote in the file for the day I was expecting it anyway, and if I wanted to use it or look at it beforehand, I'd make sure I put it back there each time I took it out.

First: sorry Trillian, must have missed the BF bit...

I don't actually file anything until the action is finished. Until then it is in my "pending" tray, which I check every day. If, for some reason I'm not there, other people in the office have (finally - yipppeeeee) learned to look there too.