How to word a reminder to yourself: what studies found

You write a note for tomorrow: “Sort out tax stuff.” Tomorrow it appears, and you swipe it away. The words gave you nowhere to begin. If you write your own reminders, the wording is the part you control.

What the evidence says

Every study below tested messages, questions or programmes that came from someone else. None is described as a study of people with ADHD.

Detail from the person’s own situation helped. In a trial with 39 professional learners on an online course, a general reminder named the page they ought to be on. A personalised one added the last page they had reached. The probability of being on time was 14 percentage points higher after personalised reminders, with a credible interval of 3 to 25 ¹. Among 140,461 US primary school teachers, an exploratory analysis found that emails referencing classroom-specific statistics outperformed emails that did not by 2.26% on students’ maths progress ².

Asking had a small effect. A meta-analysis of 116 published tests found that asking people whether they intended or expected to do something had a small positive effect on behaviour. Effects were larger for behaviours that were easy to perform ³.

One phrase did not beat another. In a US trial of flu vaccination texts in about 10,000 adult patients, a message saying a vaccine “has been reserved for you” raised vaccination by 3.3 percentage points compared with no message. It did not differ significantly from a plainer message ⁴.

Gain or loss framing made no clear difference overall. A meta-analysis of ten trials in physically inactive adults found no statistically significant differences between gain-framed and loss-framed messages in promoting physical activity attitudes, intentions or behaviours ⁵.

Guilt had a small effect, and blame could backfire. A meta-analysis of 26 studies found a small effect of guilt appeals. Appeals that recommended a way to put things right had stronger effects, but not significantly so once other factors were controlled for. The authors wrote that explicit information about responsibility could backfire ⁶.

The best message depended on what people did last week. Among nearly 2 million US bank customers, the best-performing email campaign sent a simple reminder to those who had not saved in the last week and congratulated those who had ⁷.

What we don’t know

No study here tested a note that someone wrote to themselves.

Most effects were small. The best savings campaign raised the monthly likelihood of a deposit by 0.13 percentage points ⁷.

Guesses about what will work are unreliable. In a study of 61,293 gym members that compared 54 programmes, forecasts by impartial judges failed to predict which would be most effective ⁸.

Things to try

These carry findings about sent messages over to notes you write yourself. No study tested that step.

• Name where you stopped. “Report: you stopped at the budget table” in place of “Report”. This copies the page-number reminder ¹.
• Ask about a small step. “Open the tax form for five minutes?” Question effects were larger for easy behaviours ³.
• After a miss, write the next step. “Laundry: move to tonight?” in place of “Forgot laundry again”. This leans on the guilt-appeal findings, which were not firm ⁶.