For example, nearly everyone who goes to work has a routine of waking up in the morning, showering, putting on clothes, eating, and leaving for work. Very few people get dressed, start breakfast, and then realize that they forgot to shower.
I find that very difficult, and quite impossible to do them in any reliable order other than what's imposed by necessity. Each morning, I have to figure out again what I need to do. It's easy to remember to brush my teeth and shower, because I feel dirty until I do. I'll remember to eat if I'm hungry. It's easy to notice if I'm barefoot as I leave the house, but sometimes I end up in the car with slippers instead of shoes. Shaving and taking my medicine are very hard to remember because there are no cues, so I keep a razor and extra medicine at work or in my car.
People always think this can be solved easily by putting sticky notes up in various places, but they fail to understand the quantity of notes that would be necessary if someone tried to live that way. They would be so numerous as to be useless. They also fail to understand the difficulty of seeing something written on a sticky note that tells me to do something in another room, in which case I have to get to the other room without forgetting what I'm doing, AND still remember the rest of the list. It's so unreliable that the sticky note needs to be next to the item it talks about, in which case the item itself is a cue anyway. People also fail to understand that I have no way of being sure, when I'm leaving the house, whether I've read the sticky notes or not that day. I can't just keep going back into the house to make sure I read them.
My memories are badly timestamped. If I read a checklist on my wall today, that will add one more memory of me reading that checklist. If I then step outside and try to remember reading that checklist, I may summon up dozens of memories of doing so, but have no idea whether any of them were from today.
It may be worth your time to enforce a very strict routine over a period (the morning is a good example, as long as sleepiness is not making things extra difficult) for a couple of weeks and see if it starts to stick; this is something that can make a big difference, and it is worth knowing if it can work for you.
However, I agree that this is not likely to be a magic bullet in your case.
Have you tried something like a smartphone with an extensive checklist/schedule? It has the benefits of coming with you almost everywhere, and having alarms for particula...
This thread is for asking the rationalist community for practical advice. It's inspired by the stupid questions series, but with an explicit focus on instrumental rationality.
Questions ranging from easy ("this is probably trivial for half the people on this site") to hard ("maybe someone here has a good answer, but probably not") are welcome. However, please stick to problems that you actually face or anticipate facing soon, not hypotheticals.
As with the stupid questions thread, don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better, and please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
(See also the Boring Advice Repository)