Photo: Andrey_Popov (Shutterstock)
If you take a lot of medications, you probably have some systems in place to make sure you won’t miss one—like an organizer that divides pills according to the day and time they’re supposed to be taken or a series of reminders on your phone. But what about when you just have one set of pills, and you don’t need a whole organizational system, you just want to make sure you don’t lose track? Enter this simple hack I learned from a redditor.
This works for blister packs, those flat packages where each pill is in its own little bubble. You use a permanent marker to write the date over each pill. The redditor wrote on the clear fronts of the bubbles; I’ve also done this by writing on the foil side. Take a minute to label the pills when you first get the prescription, and after that, you’ll always have a visual reminder of whether you took your pill for the day.
Now, this trick only tells you whether you’ve already taken your pill for the day, so you’ll still need other ways of reminding yourself to actually take it. You may want to put the package somewhere you’ll see it often (like on your fridge, or propped up on a shelf somewhere at eye level) so you’ll be sure to see it every day. Or you might want to try piggybacking the medication onto another habit you already have, like brushing your teeth.
By the way, some pharmacies offer a service where they will repackage your medications into a blister pack, even if they normally come in a bottle. Is it worth the trouble just to avoid having to buy and fill a pill organizer? That’s up to you. But you may find the labeled blister packs a little bit more fun. As one redditor put it: “great, an advent calendar for my depression.”
