The biggest gamechanger in my personal productivity was finally building a small system to track the promises I made to other people.

Why small promises slip through the cracks

For years, I had a habit I wasn’t proud of. Someone would mention a problem in passing, and I’d say, “Oh, I’ll get this done for you.” I meant it when I said it. Sometimes I followed through. Often I didn’t. The words left my mouth and went nowhere.

If you’ve ever caught yourself doing the same thing, you’ll recognise the feeling. It isn’t that you don’t want to be reliable. It’s that at the moment you made the promise, you didn’t build anything around it. No note. No reminder. Nothing in your day that would later prompt you to deliver. Just the warm feeling of having offered help, and then a week of silence.

The integrity gap

There’s a quiet trap most people fall into here. We tend to think that being a person of integrity is mostly about character. About wanting to do the right thing. About caring enough to follow through.

In reality, character is rarely the issue. The issue is that good intentions will not survive a busy week without help. Research by the psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has shown for decades that people who pair a goal with a specific plan for when and where they will act on it are two to three times more likely to follow through than people who simply hold the intention in their head.

You can genuinely want to keep your word and still drop the ball on many small commitments because nothing in your day reminds you to deliver on them. Over time, that gap between who you want to be and what you actually do becomes its own quiet source of stress.

In order to close that gap you will need one small structural change.

The Errands and Promises list

Here is the system I use, and it’s almost too simple to write down.

In my phone’s reminder app, I created a single category called Errands and Promises. Anytime I tell someone I’ll do something for them, it goes in there straight away. Right then, while we’re still talking, or as soon as the conversation ends.

Each entry has three parts:

  • The name of the person
  • The thing I said I would do
  • A soft deadline, if one applies

That is the entire input side. It takes about ten seconds per promise. The reminder app already on your phone is enough. There is nothing new to download and nothing new to learn.

For more functionality, introduce the daily review

If you only capture promises and never look at the list, you’ll end up with a long catalogue of things you forgot and a low-level guilty feeling about all of them. The second half of the system, and honestly the half that matters most, is the daily review.

Once a day, every day, I open that list and read through it. It takes about two minutes. The question I’m asking myself is straightforward: who am I currently letting down?

Most days, the answer is nobody. But every so often I catch something I would otherwise have let slip for another week, and I get to be the person who actually delivers. Over months, those small wins compound. Friends start trusting your word. Colleagues stop having to chase you. You stop carrying the quiet background guilt of forgotten favours.

How this works if you’re a student

If you’re at university, your Errands and Promises list might include things like:

  • Sending lecture notes to the classmate who missed Tuesday
  • Following up with a tutor about a reference letter
  • Returning a textbook you borrowed
  • Helping your flatmate with the thing you said you’d help with
  • Sharing a job link with someone from your society

None of these are huge commitments. That’s exactly why they slip. You’re already juggling deadlines, readings, social plans, and probably some kind of part-time job. Without a dedicated place for promises, they sit in the same mental space as everything else, and they always lose.

How this works if you’re a working professional

Further into your career, the list looks different but the principle is identical:

  • Sending the report you mentioned in a meeting
  • Making the introduction you offered at a networking event
  • Following up with a client after a quick verbal yes
  • Replying to a colleague’s question that needed proper thought
  • Booking the call you said you would schedule

Most professional reputations are built on small follow-throughs, not big moves. The person known for always doing what they said they would do has an enormous quiet advantage, and often doesn’t realise why. The flip side is just as real: when leaders or colleagues consistently fail to follow through, it erodes the foundation of trust inside a team faster than almost anything else.

Common ways to get this wrong

A few patterns I’ve seen when people try this and it doesn’t quite stick:

Keeping it all in your head. The whole point is that your head is the wrong place for this. Don’t trust your memory with someone else’s expectations.

Mixing promises into your normal task list. Things you owe other people feel different from things you owe yourself. They deserve their own category so they actually get noticed.

Skipping the daily review. Without it, the list just becomes a graveyard. The review turns it into a working tool.

Only writing down the big promises. The small ones erode trust the fastest, because the person on the other side remembers them and quietly concludes you don’t care!

Start tonight

You don’t need to redesign your week to do this. Open the reminder or notes app on your phone, create one category called Errands and Promises, and add the three or four people you can already think of who are waiting on something from you.

Tomorrow morning, look at it again.

That’s the whole practice. It’s the most lopsided return on effort I’ve found in years of working on my own productivity, and I highly recommend it to nearly everyone I coach.

If you want help building a planning routine that actually sticks, Maximising Chronos runs productivity coaching in cohorts for professionals and students who want to take their time back. Check out our services.