The technology of reminding yourself

An important aspect of PKM is stimulating the right habits and reminding yourself to attend to a particular thing at the appropriate time. For example, you might want to remind yourself of some of the following recurring events such as:

• when to exercise

• when to pay the bills
• when to water your plants
• when you should study
• when you need to take medicine
• when a proposal, project deadline or assignment is due
• when an important anniversary is happening

A simple way of doing this is via google calendar available on calendar.google.com Website and if you don't yet have a gmail account, we strongly recommend that you set one up on google.com Main Website so that this feature works. Once you have setup your appointments - including the recurring appointments, remember to register your mobile number (google will send you a response code that you will need to enter into the google calendar interface). You will now be able to receive reminders by SMS to your cellphone sent when you require. The result of this approach that you don't need to spend your time worrying about what you have/have not done and it frees you to attend to a schedule that you create rather than schedules that are imposed on you. You can choose to receive alerts through a combination of emails, popups and sms messages and the the service is free at the current time. The result is you can focus on what you are doing without worrying about what you might have forgotten to do.

There are a number of useful public calendars available from Google Calendar including public holidays, astronomical calendars, phases of the moon, tides etc.